Design for the Other 90%

This exhibit at the National Geographic Hall in DC sounds fabulous (and free!).

Of the world’s 6.5 billion people, 5.8 billion, or ninety percent, often lack the means to purchase even the most basic goods. Design for the Other 90% explores a growing movement to design low-cost solutions for those not traditionally served by professional designers. Entrepreneurs, engineers, students, professors, and architects from around the globe are devising cost-effective ways to improve access to water, food, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation. This exhibition demonstrates how design can be a dynamic force in saving and transforming lives, at home and around the world.

I find this design space very fascinating.  Design for the hip and wealthy is cool and fun, but what about functional, low-cost, low-tech, appropriate design that can improve the lives of the world's poor?

I've always been a fan of Path, a global health organization in Seattle for their global health programs and technology around this principle (PATH once stood for Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, but they've long abandoned the root of their acronym, and simply are known as Path these days).  Path has developed the Uniject, which allows low-skilled, "lightly trained" health workers to give vaccinations with single-use, pre-filled injection needles (reducing user-error and disease transmission through re-usable syringes). They've also developed a sticker that indicator if vaccines have spoiled from temperature extremes or rough rides in its arduous journey from pharma-plant to rural village.  And they are looking at the food industry to learn lessons about improving the thermo-stability of vaccines so that the delicate cold chain requirements of vaccine transport can be overcome.  Path has other cool health design projects for the other 90%.  One of my favorites is the ground-breaking work Path is doing on developing a microbicide to give a women the ability to protect herself from HIV- (and other STD-) transmission without depending on her partner to use condoms or be monogamous (two dicey propositions in the reality of many women's lives).

There are other neat industrial design innovations for the other 90% - the handcrank radio, the $100 laptop, the insecticide-treated bednet, among others.  And mobile phone technology is being used for everything from banking to refugee family reunification.  Mobile phones have become low-cost and widely accessible to the poor, making this technology potentially limitless in connecting the poor not only in their family and social networks, but also for education and economic participation.  Amazing!