Humanitarian Design
“To those much is given, much is expected,” this is a mantra that has been shared by a dear friend of mine. This is what drives her close-nit, hard-working family. A child of doctors, pursuing the medical field herself, my friend is my inspiration for the good, life-changers in this world. This encompasses what I feel as the obligation of those who are capable. Regardless of what career you may have, what field you are in, I believe that every person, when they feel that profound need to give, they will fulfill it in anyway, in whatever capacity they can, big or small. This gratifying act can be done by charities, or volunteer work, or donating art, etc. The issue of how designers can contribute to this wasteful, trash-accumulating, resource-depreciating world has been a pertinent on-going discussion.
Dr. Bruce Becker of Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital, gave a lecture about emergency aid to disaster and refugee relief. As designers, how does this pertain to us? In regards to humanitarian aid, we can concern ourselves by designing effective ways of making the most basic and important resources (food, water, shelter) available to everyone, regardless of location or demographic.
The most vital needs of a human are food and water, correct? To add to this, shelter is usually immediately to follow. In several places in many countries, these simple needs that can easily be taken for granted are scarce in supply and availability, needing to ration food, settle for dirty water or share poor housing conditions with hundreds of others.
Food has been, and may always be, the hardest issues. Food can be replenished, but it takes time to grow plants or raise stock. There are thousands of organizations that raise money or take donations to distribute food to needing areas. Back to the Berlin Wall and even now during the current War on Terrorism, the idea of literally dropping food from the air is a means to provide aid. Due to the large scope and the relating issues that designing for this aspect entails, it may be the most challenging to an industrial designer. However, that is to say that solutions or smaller solutions cannot be found that lead to a greater improvement. Even things like Solar Cookers, may be an immediate solution to generating energy, but it serves as a vehicle for making food more quickly consumable by the user.
The simpler of these needs may be water, in the sense that water is readily available in many parts of the world. The hardest part, of course, is to be able to filter it into potable forms. The average North American home hardly ever has to consider the importance of clean drinking water, we just turn on the faucet and tap water pours freely through. Even the water from our hose wouldn’t pose a threat of a deathly disease. Only in rare occasions, like Hurricane Katrina, do we see the stark magnitude of having a clean water supply. Water sources were contaminated and people were dying from water-borne disease. This is no new thing, look back to the ages of the plague, whether in Europe or the Americas, the quickest spreading places were around public water sources.
At home, I have my Brita Filter. Someone somewhere designed it as an alternative to buying bottled water, whose standards of suitable drinking water are higher than tap. I actually hardly use it. I’m perfectly fine with drinking tap, from my city’s lead-free-guaranteed water utility. For more rural and underdeveloped areas, like the vast regions of Africa, there are products invented to mitigate these water problems like LifeStraw and Q Drum. Lifestraw is a portable on-person contraption that will filter any kind of water into drinking water. This brings the control to the individual user level and provides freedom of any water source. The Q Drum, while not a system of filtering, is a mechanism that allows for the transportability of a high volume of water. It is essentially a giant plastic hallow wheel, pulled by a rope. It is extremely effective for dragging heavy amounts of water over long distances by adults and children. There is nothing frivolous or excessive here; it is a real problem-solving concept that contends all other useless and overly ornate products out there. This is living proof that design can still come down to be simple and true, and completely functional.
“To those much is given, much is expected,” this is a mantra that has been shared by a dear friend of mine. This is what drives her close-nit, hard-working family. A child of doctors, pursuing the medical field herself, my friend is my inspiration for the good, life-changers in this world. This encompasses what I feel as the obligation of those who are capable. Regardless of what career you may have, what field you are in, I believe that every person, when they feel that profound need to give, they will fulfill it in anyway, in whatever capacity they can, big or small. This gratifying act can be done by charities, or volunteer work, or donating art, etc. The issue of how designers can contribute to this wasteful, trash-accumulating, resource-depreciating world has been a pertinent on-going discussion.
Dr. Bruce Becker of Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital, gave a lecture about emergency aid to disaster and refugee relief. As designers, how does this pertain to us? In regards to humanitarian aid, we can concern ourselves by designing effective ways of making the most basic and important resources (food, water, shelter) available to everyone, regardless of location or demographic.
The most vital needs of a human are food and water, correct? To add to this, shelter is usually immediately to follow. In several places in many countries, these simple needs that can easily be taken for granted are scarce in supply and availability, needing to ration food, settle for dirty water or share poor housing conditions with hundreds of others.
Food has been, and may always be, the hardest issues. Food can be replenished, but it takes time to grow plants or raise stock. There are thousands of organizations that raise money or take donations to distribute food to needing areas. Back to the Berlin Wall and even now during the current War on Terrorism, the idea of literally dropping food from the air is a means to provide aid. Due to the large scope and the relating issues that designing for this aspect entails, it may be the most challenging to an industrial designer. However, that is to say that solutions or smaller solutions cannot be found that lead to a greater improvement. Even things like Solar Cookers, may be an immediate solution to generating energy, but it serves as a vehicle for making food more quickly consumable by the user.
The simpler of these needs may be water, in the sense that water is readily available in many parts of the world. The hardest part, of course, is to be able to filter it into potable forms. The average North American home hardly ever has to consider the importance of clean drinking water, we just turn on the faucet and tap water pours freely through. Even the water from our hose wouldn’t pose a threat of a deathly disease. Only in rare occasions, like Hurricane Katrina, do we see the stark magnitude of having a clean water supply. Water sources were contaminated and people were dying from water-borne disease. This is no new thing, look back to the ages of the plague, whether in Europe or the Americas, the quickest spreading places were around public water sources.
At home, I have my Brita Filter. Someone somewhere designed it as an alternative to buying bottled water, whose standards of suitable drinking water are higher than tap. I actually hardly use it. I’m perfectly fine with drinking tap, from my city’s lead-free-guaranteed water utility. For more rural and underdeveloped areas, like the vast regions of Africa, there are products invented to mitigate these water problems like LifeStraw and Q Drum. Lifestraw is a portable on-person contraption that will filter any kind of water into drinking water. This brings the control to the individual user level and provides freedom of any water source. The Q Drum, while not a system of filtering, is a mechanism that allows for the transportability of a high volume of water. It is essentially a giant plastic hallow wheel, pulled by a rope. It is extremely effective for dragging heavy amounts of water over long distances by adults and children. There is nothing frivolous or excessive here; it is a real problem-solving concept that contends all other useless and overly ornate products out there. This is living proof that design can still come down to be simple and true, and completely functional.
The concept of shelter, another thing taken for granted, may only cross one’s mind when that comfort is threatened or questioned, like when a college student sees a homeless person on the street. In this situation the idea and contrast of a “home” is starkly exposed. I am in the Reactive Matter studio here at RISD, where we are creating a dwelling utilizing smart materials. Some of my colleagues found this a great opportunity to address the horrible conditions of refugee camps and explore solutions of easily deployable units that provided shelter as well as filtered-water facilities. I am very glad that even as young students of Industrial Design, there are those who are aware of the dire situations in the world and take advantage of this time in school to bring attention to these pertinent issues and seek to help in alleviating them.
As young designers, regardless of what we plan on designing, there is already an innate need for us to solve problems. This is us by nature and it is character where we refine ourselves by reaching further than the average solution to design products, systems, and environments that seek to help people and our planet. We should all strive, not to be remembered by a famous product, but to leave the biggest impact globally on making positive changes.
http://www.vestergaard-frandsen.com/lifestraw.htm
http://qdrum.co.za/backup/
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