Design for the Other 90%

It is amazing how many entrepreneurs are willing to make some of financial sacrifice to better the rest of the world. Instead of applying their knowledge and energy to design better and more chic high technology devices for the upper percentile of socio-economical group (which will ultimately bring fame and money), some choose to work for the other end of the spectrum.

Whether they work for the fame or acknowledgement in the field, the organizations and companies that are introduced in “Design for the Other 90%” (http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/) are rather philanthropic. They consider helping the less fortunate people their top priority. It is also their motivation and driving force to get up every morning and continue with their research. They deserve recognition and support for their hard work more than what they are getting.

Even though designs like “one laptop per child”, “LifeStraw” and “Solar Aid” are developed for use in less developed countries, also known as “the other 90%”, those technologies and devices are not used by the whole of “the other 90%” yet. Only a small number of people out of the 90% are fortunate enough to have the devices distributed to them.

Then, what these organizations and companies are doing is not technically for the whole 90%. The intention of designing items that are crucial for the people in specified locations is definitely applause-worthy. However the implementation of the design needs to be more wide-spread to be wholly “the other 90%” effective.
What could be the other possible designs that will address issues that are not fulfilled by smaller companies is government scale support and propagandas so that more people understand the importance of designing for the other 90%.

There are bigger corporate companies who take the initiative to help the people but that is not enough. We need to start looking from a different perspective and start analyzing why there is such discrepancy between people becoming extremely obese and dying from it to dying from malnutrition.

One way to design to help solving this problem is to stop wars. Wars create more people to suffer from malnutrition, lose their shelters and get infected by disease.

In the long run it may also be effective to stop causing people to be in needy situations than trying to design objects that aid them. It is not quite within the designers’ reach to be involved in politics and make executive decisions on whether or not to conduct more wars. However idealistically speaking, if there are no more physical wars that force innocent people to lose their homes and the effort to plan the strategies were used to resolve the core issues that “the other 90%” face, the world would be a little more beautiful than it is now.