Great Post Suzan.
A few years back Mr. Nussbaum seemed to be destined to become the architect who helped design penetrate through the left brained disciplines. But in the end, he turned out to be the public relation man for a few companies and individuals. I hate to say it, but in the last few yeas he has done more damage to design than good. Hope FastCoDesign blog will keep an eye the old-boys-club-promo-game. His polemic and inflammatory statements about design and designers continue to rattle the cage in a nonconstructive way.

You are absolutely right Susan, Emily Pilloton’s projects represent New Design; the right balance between a tangible product anchored in the design profession, and the intangible: The Design Mind; a process, a philosophy, an intelligence a belief.
Fortunately for new design, design thinkers and design in general, Emily is perfectly qualified to argue our case. In other words (more with the flavor of recent discussions): Design is too serious to be left to cynics and polemicists.

Nicolae Halmaghi

Comment by Nicolae Halmaghi — July 12, 2010, @ 6:18 pm

Susan,
This is a terribly simplistic framing of complex
issues and you know better.
Bruce

Comment by Bruce Nussbaum — July 12, 2010, @ 6:59 pm

Maybe this piece does oversimplify the issue a bit, but in her last statement Ms. Szenasy does ask readers to “read these articles together and form your reasoned conclusions.” That seems perfectly fair to me.

Comment by James — July 13, 2010, @ 8:44 am

I agree, Bruce. This quick-response media has turned us into idiots. The fact remains, though, that Emily’s work is a significant new direction and cannot be dismissed by inflammatory labeling. She’s too strong, her ideas are timely, and a whole generation is yearning to be part of the community service movement.

Comment by Susan Szenasy — July 13, 2010, @ 10:07 am

Really, is design so limited that there can only be one approach, one pundit, one recorder, one blog?

Yes, Bruce is old ; ) but he’s also wise and has done a terrific job, with others, of promoting Design in its many forms. He’s hardly a generational myopic. And, his points are mostly spot-on. Too often I’ve seen, in academia especially, designers rush in to solve problems that require more cultural context than they have time to gain—if they even realize it. We are no different than engineers, doctors, or the World Bank in this regard (though I truly hope we can do better than the World Bank). How many well-meaning design projects have you seen in design schools or local organizations where the designers have never actually met the very people they hope to serve? Most designers don’t even understand, and aren’t taught, the tools and processes of true stakeholder engagement. The world is awash in projects, like the doomed-from-the-start OLPC, that fall far short of their good intentions because they don’t actually meet the needs they profess to. Yet, they’re highlighted endlessly in the design press, and because of this, in the business and mainstream press who take their cues of what to cover by what the design press reports.

As romantic the notion of serving those in distant lands is, unless we have the funds to travel there several times to actually meet, prototype, and test our solutions (which is what holds-back most schools and smaller companies), we would be better off serving the many, deep, and shameful needs in our own communities. IDEO and a few others are fortunate in that they are often given the funds to do just this, but others only see the glossy, fawned-over solutions in the press and not the necessary parts of the process that make these solutions possible.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met with students and professionals who want to help those in need in Bangladesh and various African communities that haven’t given the slightest thought to those in need in their own communities: the homeless, the working poor, the physically or mentally challenged, local Native American tribes (Bruce rightly pointed this out), etc.—even after informing them of their misplaced focus. It’s simply not sexy—and this is greatly due to the design press.

This is where the press, like Metropolis, can make change. Instead of fawning over beautiful objects that don’t add to the good in the word, or sparking blog tempests in an Alessi teapot, why doesn’t Metropolis connect needs with need-solvers? Why not an international database online that those who can see and post needs so that those who want to satisfy needs can pick projects up, close to home, and do design right?

Why hasn’t Metropolis highlighted, continuously, the local work done by Project H and many other designers overly the seemingly more sexy international projects? John Belenberg and team’s Project M is lucky that they don’t have international projects or their work across the South would likely be unknown. Why isn’t there a regular column for these projects that highlight process as much as solutions and personalities? Aside from falsely creating a dichotomy where there was none, how is Metropolis planning on representing and supporting these ideas from now on—at least for the next decade?

Perhaps, the first design intervention NY “humanitarian” designers should undertake is the redesign of the local design press?

Comment by Nathan Shedroff — July 14, 2010, @ 5:17 pm

My apologies for misspelling Bielenberg’s name. It was last call for my flight and I didn’t have time to look up the correct spelling.

Comment by Nathan Shedroff — July 15, 2010, @ 2:09 am

Maybe, Mr. Shedroff, if you opened Metropolis once in a while and, dare I suggest, read it, you would find that our on-going coverage of design for the other 92 percent continues to be alive and well. And then, if you really paid attention to our publishing enterprise, you could look at the recent Metropolis Books, including Emily Pilloton’s Design Revolution; Bryan Bell & Katie Wakeford’s Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism; Cameron Sinclair’s Design Like You Give a Damn; or if you paid attention to our programs (well documented on this website) like a series of seminars related to local and community oriented design activism, you would not be so ready to attack us as detached form the important issues of our time. But I’m getting caught up in tangential hyperventilating here, which this medium seems to encourage.

In truth, what we all need to remember now is that Emily Pilloton and designers of her generation have a far more sophisticated, community oriented, collaborative approach to design than previous, often failed, efforts at humanitarian design. I did not attack Bruce’s age—I’m old too—but I took issue with his knee-jerk reaction to failed efforts at humanitarian design, and the fact that he did not check into Emily’s domestic activities and Project H activities all over the country to make a strong comparison between then and now.

Comment by sss — July 15, 2010, @ 1:51 pm

Bruce is at his best when he is in circumspect mode, not design promoter mode. Therefore, his provocation about “humanitarian design” was one of my favorites. i sense a lot of “how dare you question….”, which is a big naked tip-off to self-righteous indignation. if bruce was so wrong, then emily need not have dignified his piece by responding, but she did, and in quite a confessional way. one of the elements of the discussion here that isn’t ever really discussed is that these so-called do-gooders have created tax-exempt enterprises that A) require capital to self-sustain, B) need constant marketing and promotion to document their “legitimacy” and attract donors, C) until they cough up the real cost structures of their orgs, projects, etc then we are stuck in “OMG THEY ARE SO GREAT” world, which, i think, is exactly where they want us to be. it’s not cynical to say, it’s just the reality of their chosen economic and operating models. So much of this is “new” and in-progress, that it’s very hard to know what the real world success rate (or metrics) are. are they 100% successful? 90%? 50%? 10%? we won’t know the real numbers because they won’t tell us, can’t tell us. we have to wait for a UNICEF-like report well after the fact and major capital outlayed to learn that the PlayPump was a boondoggle, that the OLPC was, well, not exactly adopted. We are so desperate for feel-good validation of our talents in what i consider fairly easy markets to succeed in, that we do in fact, lose ourselves in the exoticism of the deprivation in foreign lands.

It is not hard to identify a region that is impoverished. It is not hard to write a check and give money to that region. It is not hard to design a new tent to temporarily house refugees (or, hell, i’ll just give you the two expensive north face tents that are collecting cobwebs in my storage unit, never used). Somehow you think that these other 92% problems are HARD design problems. they aren’t. they are no different than any other. they are not hard, in the same way that identifying that a gash on my knee requires a bandage isn’t hard. ok, go get a bandage. the bandage does not heal my wound. my internal and natural systems heal the wound. the bandage helps get me there faster, and staunches some bleeding. great. but if i can’t clot on my own, no bandage will save me. i’ll bleed out and die.

what is not being asked is what causes poverty (or any other social ill) in the first place? these designers are not asking those questions (at least it’s not explicit). for this market, of endlessly bandaging persistent (or systemic, as they say in their literature) ills, is genius. there’s little to no competition. they are indisputably validated by the precise lack of something better than what they are doing. and those things that *need* to be better is a thorough penetration of the “what causes ______ in the first place?” and that, i humbly believe, are socio-economic-political questions, public policy questions if you will. cancer will continue to mastasticize until you chemotherapy the root cause, and there is scant evidence that these assailed designers, well-intentioned as they are, are doing anything to address root causes. until then, an impoverished community will remain so if the policies they exist in, the intrinsic political realities, the presence or lack of presence of true markets and state philosophy geared towards elevating the disenfranchised….then design as a profession, well-intentioned or otherwise, will simply be in the business of producing bandages to persistent problems that will never go away. but maybe that’s good, from a endless-stream-of-work perspective. the only circumstance i can think of when you don’t aggressively intervene an ill is in a hospice, where the work is mainly palliative. therefore, in the absence of serious consideration of “design thinking, blah blah” at the policy and macroeconomic level, yes, i’ll say it - all this work is palliative at best.

so to answer bruce’s fair question, is it imperialism? the answer is yes, whether we like it or not. it is imperialism because shelter is not the *only* thing people need, or playgrounds, or eyeglasses (and yes, these are “things”) - people also need to know that their voices are being heard at the state level, that their homeland is there for its citizens (and not vice versa, both physiologically and psychologically). in the absence of that (and it’s even a problem here in the US, our homeland), what are we really solving that won’t be there next month, next year, in the next generation? it is imperialism because there is a not-so-subtle imposition of an ideological stance that “design can save the world”. it is not hard to dispute this claim. therefore, the claim really isn’t all that robust in the first place.

lastly - if one has a need to advertise, then they are selling you something that you may or may not need. and they have to sell because their legitimacy and long-term survivability is at stake. these case study designers do indeed advertise (and market, and promote, and we love them for it) and do it in a very sophisticated way, and as all advertising goes, message into some primal need or want we all have, so we end up buying. if we have indeed bought into this method, rationale, gestalt….what exactly are we buying? that’s the strange thing here - the only think i can think of is that i am buying the idea that they can do something for me or someone else that someone else or some other vocation cannot. emily is now a shop teacher? great. is what she teaches in shop fundamentally different than what the shop teacher she displaced taught? i doubt it. that it is novel that an industrial designer is teaching shop at a high school? probably. but even more novel would be the industrial designer who teaches civics and public policy at the high school level, since America abandoned that decades ago..so that emily’s high school generation will be interested in running for office one day to become real civic leaders, neither disenfranchised nor demagogue, that stay in the community and represent the community and gives them real political *power*, which is what they were utterly lacking in the first place. or to teach those same civic skills in a non-democratic or emerging democracy - these are “systems” to master afterall. teach them the ways to influence their way into the closed chamber of policy-making, those same individuals who decide or not to decide to invest in green tech vs. fossil fuels, for example.

what we’re really talking about here is that the victims that these humanitarian designers most wish to help have the least power in society. if design really wants to change the world, then design must figure out how to give these people real political power. until then, it’s some very expensive bandaids; and until these themes enter design’s general discourse, it’s a frustratingly *incomplete* discourse. these are not hammer and nail problems. they are political influence problems. and that is probably something very hard for metropolis, or businessweek, or fastcompany to write a story about. this, nathan, is what really needs to change. am i being totally heartless? no, i feel compassion for the less fortunate, but i feel *anger* at policymakers who get it wrong all the time. while designers is working on the compassion part of the puzzle, and of course they should, who in the design profession is working on the anger part? no one. i will concede that this is the harder of the two because designers have the same political influence problem as their target communities. ignore these questions at your peril. they persist, whether your recycled materials playground is a success or not.

remember - the non-profit and NGO sectors exists *purely* because of the failings in government and the free markets to provide stability and thrive-ability in society. those two systems need some attention, folks. if they were all running as they ought to - we’d have no need for charities, advocacy groups, and of course, “humanitarian” *anything*. think about it. we have the state. we have markets. that’s it.

Comment by Gong Szeto — July 15, 2010, @ 4:05 pm

This hornet’s nest couldn’t be more stirred…SSS, If Mr. Shedroff were to pick up Metropolis or its book by/about Ms. Pilloton and her exploits, he would no doubt read more of the same gratuitous veneration that brought this whole debate up in the first place. Mr. Nussbaum, like myself, asked this question only after witnessing a boatload of design awards for OLPC and the glorification of Project H since its inception 2 short years ago. We were bombarded with news and tweets and blogs about Emily washing her hair in the sink and picking up stray dogs on the road (No wonder Bruce had so much trouble keeping up with his research). By the time the roadshow pulled into Manhattan in May, I stepped aboard at the Metropolis sponsored campsite to regard the empowering objects in the Airstream such as the OLPC and Yves Behar’s single use, plastic, sweetened-water packaging for …children. This is how we choose to frame Design’s reaction to complex social, economic and environmental problems? A fresh faced media darling on a road trip? Are we so damn arrogant as to hand those kids a laptop!

You say Ms. Pilloton represents an entire generation of designers who possess a “far more sophisticated, community oriented, collaborative approach to design than previous, often failed, efforts”. I’ve met Ralf Hotchkiss and he has been collaboratively designing and making wheelchairs since the late 1970s - yes, those 70’s - decades before Metropolis books and Emily graced his studio with said sophistication. Ms. P has demonstrated no such level of commitment, community orientation or sophistication, especially not in her 4 weeks in Bertie County.

Comment by Theodore Thomas — July 16, 2010, @ 12:03 am

In response to your comments Theodore I commend the somewhat objective step back from the primary argument of defining humanitarian design as imperialist or not and instead asking the time old question of “what about the root of the problem?”

Like you I agree with Bruce’s core concern that there is a risk of some humanitarian design being imperialist and although he may have inadvertently aimed his argument at some of the wrong people, he is right to create such a post because it generates this exact situation, talk, debate and although not always initially evident, change.

However as, with regards to your views, I have come to accept after much dissemination It is NOT the role of designers to leap into the arena of top level social-political hierarchy and provide policy solutions for the lack of power in the hands of the poor or otherwise.

“What is not being asked is what causes poverty (or any other social ill) in the first place? These designers are not asking those questions (at least it’s not explicit).”

You are correct they are not asking these explicitly and that’s because that is not their intention with this work, not explicitly. They are however directly stimulating the culture in which these questions are asked. And that isn’t even their primary goal. By your thinking I should never give to charity, never march in the street against corporation’s greed, and never buy a reusable bag etc because it makes no difference. And that is where your whole argument becomes meaningless. It does make a difference. Their goal as is apparent is to help alleviate people’s problems NOW on a scale that is tangible and wanted and offers unique viable solutions that can be built upon. The work of humanitarian design exists purely because of the situation not in spite of it because people in communities need help tailored to them as well as policy and societal change and others have identified they can offer it in some way,

The questions you talk of are vital and I also get frustrated with the notable lack of change but they cannot and should not be answered by designers alone. In none of the ways you suggest are the practioners wrong on a moral or intellectual level for doing the work they do. If anything it is misguided to take your view that designers should become the ultimate decision makers of macro scale problems that affect millions because they are not the best person for the job, far from it.

These designers are using the skills and experience they have in a way that makes sense to them and offering solutions that otherwise just would not exist. You suggest it’s easy to do something when no one else is doing it. WRONG it’s hard exactly because no on else is doing it. It’s hard because people although perfectly entitled to be critical, do so in an unconstructive and self defeating manner.
Your apparent problem is not with designers. Essentially it’s with those who define policy and make the decisions that keep impoverished peoples as they are. However the argument that this makes all the designers work wasted is ignorant and irrational.
In the same way we cannot suddenly switch from our current culture of mass commercial production and thirst for material possessions to living in eco houses and being 100% sustainable, we cannot suddenly find solutions to major problems like extreme poverty, healthcare, drugs and gang culture. This doesn’t mean we cannot offer ‘bandages’ in the mean time and try to strive towards a better situation. It is important and vital and it should exist.

Yes a designer may be able to provide a unique perspective and offer informed decisions on the big issues at top level but so to can a plethora of other well educated and experienced people in many other disciplines.
Far too often within the current culture of design thinking and strategic design the designer over emphasises their abilities to understand all problems and act in environments completely separate from their education and experience.
We need to stop talking about designers’ ability and start talking about designs ability if used in the right way by the appropriate people. There are of course continual cases when designers have broadened the remit of their work, and brought their design education and skills to bear on problems vastly different and more macro in scale than traditional design practices. There are even examples of designers who continue to collaborate with those in power holding fields but these are not normal cases and for the good reason. It is not possible or even desirable for most designers to do so.
They do not have the skills, experience or correct personality to work in such manner.
The best argument that can be put forward is that some designers may have in a given case the ability to seek answers to the big scale problems. This in no way negates the need for designers who can understand and design for the grassroots problems while others seek to find solutions at the other end of the scale.

Comment by Matthew — August 18, 2010, @ 9:53 am