Assignment title: Information
Swinburne Library
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Author: Polak, Paul
Chapter Title: Design for the other ninety percent
Editor: Smith, Cynthia E
Book title: Design for the other 90%
Place published: New York
Publisher: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum,
Smithsonian Organization
Year: 2007
Pages: 19-25
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Swinburne University of Technology | CRICOS Provider 00111D | swinburne.edu.auNinety-five percent of the world's designers focus all of
their efforts on developing products and services
exclusively for the richest ten percent of the world's
customers . Nothing less than a revolution in design is
needed to reach the other ninety percent.
Transport enginee rs work hard to create elegant shapes for
modern cars while the majority of people in the world can
only dream about buying a used bicycle. As deSigners make
products ever more stylish, efficient, and durable, their
products' prices go up, but people with money are both able
and willing to pay. In contrast, the poor in developing countries-who outnumber their rich counterparts by twenty to
one-have only pennies to spend on hundreds of critical
necessities. They are ready and willing to make any reasonable compromise in quality for the sake of affordability, but
again and again, nothing is available in the marketplace
that meets their needs.
The fact that the work of most modern designers has
almost no impact on most of the people in the world is not
lost on those entering the field. Bernard Amadei, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder,
tells me that engineering students all over the United
States are flocking to take advantage of opportunities
made available by organizations like Engineers Without
Borders to work on problems such as designing and building affordable rural water-supply systems in poor countries. If students can make meaningful contributions in
designing specifically for
6. A micro-sprinkler in use on poor customers, why do
a small-plot farm in Nepal. designers continue to
Ignore thiS area? Is It because It ISmuch more dlfflcul[ PAUL POLAK
than designing products for rich customers? I s It because
they perceive that [here IS no money w be made? I do
not agree.
HOW COMPLICATED IS IT TO DESIGN FOR THE PDORP
You do not need a degree in engineering or architecture to
learn how to talk and listen to poor people as customers. I
have been doing it for more than twenty years. The things
they need are so simple and so obvious, it is relatively easy
to come up with new income-generating products that
they are happy to pay for. But they have to be affordable.
Twenty-three years ago, in Somalia, International
Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization,
I founded, undertook its first prOject by helping refugee
blacksmiths build and sellsoo donkey carts to their fellow
refugees. However, in Somalia, there are a lot of thorns in
the dirt roads they traveled on, and nowhere a donkey-cart
owner could buy tools to fix flat tires. So I went to Nairobi,
Kenya, and bought tube patch kits and lug wrenches.
I bought quite a number of good-quality, British-made
wrenches that carried a virtual lifetime guarantee for $12
each, as well as a few $6 Chinese-made models that would
be lucky to last six months. I offered both types of lug
wrenches for sale to donkey-cart owners at cost plus
transportation.
To my amazement, the Chinese lug w renches sold like
hotcakes while I failed to sell a single British model. How
could this be? After talking to a lot ofdon key-cart owners, I
finally realized an operator could generate enough income
in one month to buy ten British-made lug wrenches, but if
19he did not have the money to buy a lug wrench today to fix a
flat tire, hewould earn nothing and might end up losing his
donkey cart. So he bought the w rench he could afford today
to stay in business and earn more money for tomorrow. I
have heard the same story repeated over and over by the
poor people I've talked to. For the 2.7 billion people in the
world who earn less than $2 a day, affordability rules.
THE RUTHLESS PURSUIT OF AFFOROABILlTY
Vince Lombardi, the famous coach of the Green Bay
Packers, often said to his football players, "Winning isn't
everything; it's the only thing."With one word change, the
same sentiment applies to the process of designing
products to serve poor customers: Affordability isn't
everything; it's the only thing.
I have to confess that I am a born cheapskate, so the
notion of putting affordability first comes naturally to me.
When I need an umbrella, instead of buying a $38 designer
model in the department store, I opt for a functional black
one bought for $1 at the local Dollarama, where everything
costs a dollar or less. I know the $38 model would last a lot
longer, but I also know that I would probably forget it
somewhere within a month. If that $1 umbrella keeps my
head dry for just one rain shower or, better still, for a
couple of months before I lose it, I've saved myself $37.
The rural poor think in much the same way, with one
critical difference-they will kee~ that $1 umbrella in good
working order for seven years, at the end of w hich it will
have many patches on it and three or four improvised
splints on the handle, yet still be usable. But there is
another big difference. To earn a single dollar, an unskilled
laborer in the United States only needs to work about ten
minutes, while his counterpart in Bangladesh or
Zimbabwe must work for two full days. To learn how to
come up w ith affordable products for poor customers in
developing countries, Western deSigners would do well to
start with a brainstorming exercise to come up with a
serviceable ten-cent umbrella.
HOW MANY ANTS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE AHDRSEP
Put you rself in the shoes of Peter Mukula, a poor farmer w ho
lives along a dusty road twenty-five kilometers from
Livingstone, in southern Zambia. If he could afford to buy a
packhorse, he cou ld make an extra $600 a year hauling
vegetables to the Livingstone market. But there is no way he
can beg for, borrow, or steal the $soo it wou ld take to buy
one. Can you think of a practical solution to Peter's
dilemma?
Let me throw out a crazy idea: What if Peter could buy
a quarter horse? Not a purebred quarter horse, but a horse
that is a quarter the size of a regular packhorse. Let's
assume that you could buy one of these miniature horses
for $lS0 and that it could pack sixty kilograms. Would that
work? Peter would earn less money each trip, but he could
gradually use his profits to buy more miniature horses.
Once he owned four of them, they would be hauling the
same 240 kilos as a full-sized packhorse
But even if a horse a quarter of the size of a packhorse
were available, $lS0 is still far more than what he could
afford out of his $300 yearly income. To make it affordable,
Peter would need a miniature horse that is more like onetwelfth of a horse, w hich could carry twenty kilos and cost
less than $so. Peter would probably have to carry another
twenty kilos on his back to help make up the difference.
After five years, he might be able to expand to a string of
twelve pygmy horses. Only then could he earn the $600 a
year that the packhorse he dreams of would provide.
Here is an even crazier idea: Suppose we could invent a
way to harness the remarkable strength-to-weight ratio of
the common forest ant. An engineering class in Germany
designed tiny weights that could be attached to an ant's
back and determined that forest ants can carry as much as
thirty times their own weight. (A human can only carry
about double.) How many ants would it take to carry the
same load as a packhorse? An ant weighs about ten
milligrams; if it can carry twenty times its weight, it can
pack 200 milligrams. It would take one and a quarter
million ants to carry Peter's 240 kilos. A million and a
quarter ants would come pretty cheap, but designing the
harness would be quite a challenge.
I have taken you through this imaginary design
scenario to illustrate the central task of design for poor
customers-coming up with breakthroughs in both
miniaturization and affordability. The next step in the holy
trinity of affordable design is to make the new product
infinitely expandable.
FROM FOREST ANTSTO THE ASWAN DAM
If you th ink the process of breaking a horse into twelve afFordable pieces is complicated, try wrapping your mind
around the problem of breaking the Aswan Dam in Egypt
down into millions of ant-sized pieces representing the
small farms that could be nourished by the water stored in
Lake Nasser. Big dams like Aswan are built to provide answers to the twin global problems of flooding and water
scarcity. But when it comes to delivering irrigation water,
extremely poor, one-acre farmers are usually left on the
outside looking in.
THE NAWSA MADSYSTEM
You may be wondering where the term Nawsa Mad comes
from; it is Aswan Dam spelled backwards. It addresses
perennial flooding and drought w ith exactly the same
strategy use€! by the Aswan Dam, but shrunk down to onefour-millionth of its size so that it fits onto a two-acre farm
and into a small farmer's pocketbook. Put another way, it
is the ant to the Aswan Dam's horse.
Like most things in my life, I stumbled into the Nawsa
Mad concept backwards. In May 2003, I was interviewing
farmers in Maharastra, India, who were using low-cost
drip systems to make the water in their open wells stretch
a lot Further than the flood irrigation they had been using.
20But the sixty-foot-deep, twenty-five-foot-wide wells that
were the only source of irrigation water during the dry
season cost 100,000 rupees (about $2,000) to build.
Because they were so expensive, only twenty-five to forty
percent of the farmers in Maharastra owned a welL The
rest earned a paltry income from rain-fed farming and
survived by finding work outside the farm. However,
rainwater ran off their fields in sheets during the summer
monsoon season.
Could we find a cheap, simple way to trap some of this
monsoon rainwater and store it to irrigate crops during the
dry season, from March to May, when vegetable and fruit
prices were at their peak? To create a miniaturized, onfarm version of the Aswan Dam, we had to find ways to: 1)
collect monsoon rainwater on individual farms; 2) settle
out the silt and mud in the water; 3) store it for nine
months with no evaporation; 4) deliver it from storage to
crops without wasting a drop; and, most important, 5)
develop the whole system to be affordable enough for a
poor farm family living on $300 a year, profitable enough
to pay for itself in the first year, and infinitely expandable
using the profits it generated.
Solutions for 1, 2, and 4 were easy. There are already all
kinds of rainwater-harvesting systems in place that
collect, settle, and store rainwater, and the low-cost dripirrigation system designed by IDE could provide the means
to deliver it efficiently to crops. The critical missing link
was an enclosed, zero-evaporation water-storage system
for individual farms that was cheap enough to pay for itself
in the first growing season. We estimated that a farmer
could reasonably be expected to clear $50 from dripirrigated, high-value crops grown in the dry season using
10,000 liters of stored water. So we set a retail price target
of $40 for the 1O,000-liter enclosed storage tank. This was
a daunting target since the cost of a 10,000-liter ferrocement tank in India starts at $250. But we had already
made progress toward finding an affordable solution.
People allover India were using open pits lined with
plastic to store water for short periods. This was not a
solution for us because most of the water would evaporate
over six months in such a hot and dry climate. But the
lined pits gave me the idea of placing a fatter version of an
enclosed water bag into a pit. Jack Keller, an IDE Board
member and internationally renowned water expert,
closed the circle by pointing out that the optimal surfaceto-volume ratio would be provided by a cylinder. So we
came up with the idea of a ten-meter-long, double-walled
plastic sausage in an earth trench (fig. 1). By u,;ing the
earth for structural support, we reached our price objective
of $40 for a 1O,000-liter storage tank.
The fact is, of the 1.2 billion people in the world who
earn less than $1 a day, some 900 million are small farmers
who earn most of their living from what they can grow on
their two-acre farms, split into four or five plots. Very few
of them have access to irrigation water from big dams.
Most of them live in climates with distinct monsoon and
dry seasons, where affordable on-farm waterstorage and
drip irrigation systems could enable them to produce
income-generating, high-value crops in the dry season.
AS3 DRIP IRRIGATIDN SYSTEM
Almond growers in California invest millions of dollars in
state-of-the-art drip-irrigation systems because they improve crop yield and quality as well as provide a miserly way
to deliver water to the roots of plants. My colleagues and I
at I DE have come up with something at the other end of the
afford ability scale-a kitchen garden dri p kit that sells for
$3 in India (fig. 2).
Larger low-cost drip systems now sell for $160 an acre
in India-one-fifth the cost of conventional systems. The
direct application of the bUilding blocks of affordable
design made this dramatic drop in price possible, and lowcost drip is rapidly establishing a massive new market for
effiCient, productive irrigation on small plots in India and
other countries in Asia and Africa.
There is no need to maintain high pressure in the short
plastiC pipes that deliver water to quarter-acre plots_
Cutting the pressure by eighty percent allowed us to cut
the wall thickness of the pipes, thereby lowering the cost
of material by eighty percent. The farmers themselves
taught us how to make the walls even thinner and to
provide a choice of wall thicknesses so they could pick a
system that would last however long they wanted. We
replaced expensive sand trap filters that prevent clogging
with more simple and affordable filters, and we changed
expensive high-tech emitters at drip points with simple
plastiC tubes that did not clog easily. We traded capital for
labor by making drip lines moveable from one row of
plants to the next. Finally, a farmer could start with a 20
square-meter system for $3 and expand it systematically
to five acres by reinvesting his profits, highlighting the
principles of affordability, miniaturization, and
expandability I outlined earlier.
Mohan Nitin inherited his family's two-acre farm in
Maharastra, an open well, and a five-horsepower diesel
pump. But the well could only produce a quarter acre of
flood-irrigated vegetables in the dry season, when prices
are high. Mohan and his wife, his mother, and his two
daughters, aged eight and eleven, were able to survive
only by finding occasional work on neighboring farms.
Two weeks before my visit, Mohan's family invested
$160 in an IDE Drip System for one and a quarter acres_
This was only about one seventh of what he would have
had to pay for a high-tech drip system of the same size;
nevertheless, his mother had to sell family jewelry to pay
for it. She beamed as she told me this because she now believes her family's poverty will end. Mohan and his family
have planted sweet limes intercropped with eggplant as
well as a variety of vegetables, and plan to add intercropped pomegranate. He believes he can earn more than
$1,000 in the dry season alone, compared to the $150 or so
he was earn ing before.
211. Trench-supported lOjooo-liter
water storage bag undergoing testing in India.
2. A $3 drip Irrigation kit.
3. A drip-irrigated plot located outside Harare, Zimbabwe.
The dramatic drop in price for drip irrigation has now
made it profitable for small farmers to start using drip on
lower-value crops like cotton and sugarcane, and some of
them are even irrigating alfalfa for their milk buffalos (fig.
3). I believe that low-cost drip systems like those
developed by I DE will, over the next ten years, take over
the majority of the world market for drip irrigation .
PEDALING TO PROSPERITY
This may sound like a large claim, but the enormous market
potential for affordable technologies like IDE Drip has already been demonstrated in a powerful way. The proof lies
in the phenomenal impact of the treadle pump, a simple,
step-action pump that resembles a Stairmaster and can lift
water from up to seven meters below ground (fig. 4). While
IDE did not invent the treadle pump, we have reengineered
it to be affordable for our rural, dollar-a-day customers. (On
average, IDE'S treadle pumps currently retail for about $40
in Asia and $90 in Africa.) Since IDE first began marketing
treadle pumps in Bangladesh some twenty years ago, more
than 1.23 million units have been purchased and installed
by small farmers at an unsubsidized, fair-market price.
Using these pumps, many farmers have been able to double
their net annual incomes, ensuring a better life and longterm prosperity for their families.
A$100 HOUSE
What dollar-a-day people in rural areas desperately need is
a starter kit for a 200-square-foot house that they could
borrow money on or sell if they had to, and which they could
build for no more than $100. Homes in the United States
and Europe are getting so expensive, it is becoming harder
and harder for people to own one; remarkably, most of the
800 million or so people in the world who earn less than $1
a day and live in rural areas actually own the home they live
in. But if they tried to sell it, they would get no money for it,
and if they took it to a local banker as collateral for a loan,
tRey would get nowhere. This is because many of these
homes are made of sticks and wattle, with a thatched roof
and du ng floor, and have no value in the local market. Thei r
owners have no opportunity to build something with real
value at a price they can afford (fig. 5).
224. Bamboo tfeadle pump in use in
Maharashtra State, India.
But in every village, there are a few famil ies who have
a hou se built out of brick or cement block and a tile roof,
and these houses have both sales and collateral value.
They accomplish this not by building it a little bit at a time,
because that is all the money they have to spend, and
construction loans simply are not available. I have seen far
too many designs from Western architects for refugee
shelters and rural dwellings that look elegant to the
Western eye and start at $900, which is totally out of the
refugees' and poor rural families' price range.
The no-value, stick-and-thatch home has a major flaw:
it lacks a stable foundation and durable skeleton . All we
need to start a salable, bankable 20-square-meter home is
eight strong beams and a solid roof that does not leak.
Initially, this durable structural skeleton can be filled in
with local materials, for example, sticks covered with mud
for the walls and thatch for the roof. Then, as there is
money, the stick walls can be replaced with cement block
or brick, twenty-five bricks a,t ,a time,
Access to affordable irrigation, seeds, ways to grow
high-value crops, and profitable markets will speed up the
home-building process . If, from the very beginning, the
house is specifically designed to accept added modules,
like a LEGO set, the family who lives in it can eventually
own a house as big as they ca'n afford, When the bankable
house is completed, the family has a source of collateral so
they can borrow money they need for inputs, implements,
and livestock capable of increasing the income they earn
from farming.
BUILDING MEMORIES
The fact that you do not need a degree in engi neering or
architecture to design life-changing products and services
for poor people was amply demonstrated by Anne
Willoughby, founder of Willoughby Design, a fi rm in
Kansas City, Missouri, at the Aspen Design Summit in June
2006. "Your house is burning down," she said to the
women in the audience after a two-day design studio forpoor customers, "your family is safe, and you only
have time to carry one thing out of your house. What
would you save?"
The response from ninety percent of the audience was
photo albums or other important family mementos. But
most of the women in poor villages have no pictures of
family members or of important events such as weddings
and births. So she and two other Summit participants put
their heads together and came up wJth the idea of creating
a small army of village photo entrepreneurs. Women in
villages would be given an opportunity to borrow funds to
cover the costs of a starter camera, two memory chips,
and a bicycle. They would go to neighboring villages, take
family pictures, send a chip to town to be developed, and
charge twenty cents a picture, or ten cents over their
prod uction cost.
Willoughby and her team had a vision of thousands of
photo entrepreneurs making a living by providing family
memories. They could also be trained to provide other
important services, like seeds, drip kits, and training, so
that poor women could grow profitable kitchen gardens in
one region or provide health information and services in
another.
THE PRINCIPLES OF DESIGNING CHEAP
My dream is to establish a platform for ten thousand of the
world's best designers to come up with practical solutions
to the real-life problems of the poor people of the world by
following a few basic principles and practices.
Miniaturization, the ruthless pursuit of affordability, and
infinite expandability are the three building blocks necessary to design cheap. Now here is some music to go with
the lyrics.
Thinking of poor people as customers, instead of
recipients of charity, radically changes the design process.
The process of affordable design starts by learning
everything there is to learn about poor people as
customers and what they are able and willing to pay for
something that meets their needs. When in doubt, I resort
to the "don't bother" trilogy:
If you haven't had good conversations with your eyes
open with at least twenty-five poor people before you
start designing, don't bother.
If what you design won't at least pay for itself in the
first year, don't bother.
If you don't think you can sell at least a million units at
an unsubsidized price to poor customers after the
design process is over, don't bother.
E.F. Schumacher was right on target by writing beautifully about smallness', even though he did not focus enough
on affordability and marketability. A modern combine does
not even have room to turn around on a typical quarter-acre
plot of a small farmer, much less harvest it. Seventy-five
percent of all farms in Bangladesh and India are smaller
than five acres, and in China, half an acre. Since most of
these small farms are further divided into several quarter
24
acre plots, this is the gauge agai nst wh ich any new tech nology for small farmers must be evaluated.
For those trying to survive on a one-acre farm, a pinch of
seed is much better than a bagful. For a long time, economists have talked about the "divisibility" of technology. You
cannot take a tractor and cut it up into little pieces, 50 economists give it the rather curious but descriptive label of
"lumpy input." [He needs to cite his sources for this.] But a
twenty-kilo bag of carrot seeds can be easily divided into
packets just the right size to plant two rows in a kitchen
garden. DOing the same thing with mechanical technologies like irrigation, tilling, and harvesting devices is probably the most important challenge in designing cheap. A
center-pivot sprinkler system is very efficient, costs a ton of
money, and is designed to fit a 160-acre field. An Israeli dripirrigation system (the first practical surface drip-irrigation
system was developed in 1959 by Simcha Blass in Israel) is
very efficient, costs a ton of money, and is designed to fit
fields larger than five acres. How do we design a drip irrigation system that is just about as efficient as the Israeli system, costs less than $25, and fits perfectly into a quarter
acre plot (fig. 6)?IDE has made great strides in solving these
design problems, but there are thousands more like them
that have yet to be addressed.
Affordability is the most important consideration in
providing small farmers with access to income-generating
technologies. Here are some guidelines I have created for
designing cheap:
PUT TOOLS ON ARADICAL WEIGHT-LOSS DIET. You can cut the
cost if you can find a way of cutting the weight. A good
example of this is the one given earlier of the small
drip-irrigation system where we cut the weight and the
price of pipe by cutting system pressure by eighty percent. Doing this allowed us to also cut the wall thickness and weight of the plastic by eighty percent, with a
corresponding drop in price.
MAKE REDUNDANCY REDUNDANT. Start out by asking potential
customers how long they need the tool to last and how
much they are willing to pay to make it last longer, and
eliminate the redundancies that Western designers
and engineers often take for granted.
MOVE FORWARD BY DESIGNING BACKWARD. Often, the most
effective way of optimizing affordability is by going
back through the history which leads to the modern
form of the technology.
UPDATE THE OLD PACKAGE WITH CUTTING-EDGE MATERIALS.
Revise outmoded designs with any new materials that
may have become available, as long as affordability is
not compromised.
MAKE IT INFINITELY EXPANDABLE. If a farmer can only afford a
drip system that irrigates a sixteenth of an acre, design
it so he can use the income it generates to seamlessly
double or triple its size the next year.5. Atypical zero-value,
zero-collateral home on a small
farm in Zambia .
Here are some basic steps that I have found can cut t he
price of almost any expensive technology by at least half:
Analyze w hat the technology does.
Set specific cost targets.
Identify key contributors to cost for the existing
prod u<;t.
Design around each of the key contributors to cost by
finding acceptable tradeoffs.
For the poor, the key affordability tradeoffs are: capital
for labor, and quality for arrordability
Make your changes based on field test experience.
If you want to move you r technology to a new area,
adapt it through field tests.
THAT'S WHERETHE MONEY WILL BE
I keep asking why ninety percent of the world's deSigners
work exclusively on products for the richest ten percent of
the world's customers. Willie Sutton, the infamous bank
robber, was once asked w hy he robbed ):Janks. "Because
that's w here the money is," he replied. I suspect my
question about the world's designers has exactly the same
answer.
Don't get me w rong. I really have no problem with
people who make money by design ing products for the
rich. Entrepre neurial briliiance deserves to be rewarded .
What astonishes me is that a huge, unexploited market,
which includes billions of poor customers, continues to be
ignored by deSigners and the companies they work for. In
this, however, they are followi ng a well-e stablished
tradition.
Today, you co uld ask the executives of Netafim, the
worl.d's biggest drip-irrigation company, why more than
ninety-five percent of its products go to the richest five
percen t of the world's farmers, and they would probably
reply, "Because th at's where the money is." But think about
th is: If a hund red million small farmers in the world each
bought aquarter-acre drip system for $so-a total
investmenton their part of $S billion-it would amount to
more than ten times the current annual global sales of dripirrigation equipment.The se millions of small farme rs could
put ten million add itional hectares under drip irrigation and
increase current global acreage under dri pi rrigation by a
factor offive.
It is laudable that a small but growi ng grou p of designers is begi nning to develop affordable products because
they want to improve th,e lives of the world's poor. But there
is only one truly sustainable engi ne for driving the process
of designing cheap~
Because that's where the money will be.
2SSELECTED REFERENCES
Architecture for Humanity, ed. Design Like You
Give aDamn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises.
New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.
Bornstein, David. How to Change the World: Social
Entrepreneurs and the PowerofNew Ideas. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Easterly, William. The White Man's Burden:
Why the West's EffortsJ;o Aid the Rest Have Done So Much III and
So Little Good. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.
Farmer, Paul. Pathologies ofPower. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005.
Leonard, David K., and Scott Straus. Africa'sStalled
Development: International Causes and Cures. Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003.
Levine, Ruth, et al. Millions Saved: Proven Successes
in Global Health. Washington, DC: Center for Global
Development, 2004.
Papanek, Victor. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and
Social Change. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984.
Prahalad, C. K. The Fortune at the Bottom ofthe Pyramid:
Eradicating Poverty through Profits. Upper Saddle River, Nl:
Wharton School Publishing, 2005.
Sachs,leffrey D. The End ofPoverty: Economic
Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Schumacher, E. F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if
People Mattered, rev. ed. New York: Harper &. Row
Publishers, 1989.
Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Steffen, Alex, ed. Worldchanging: AUser's Guide for the 21st
Century. NewYork: Harry N. Abrams, 2006.
Wint, Guy, ed. Asia: AHandbook. London:
Anthony Blond, 1966.
Yunus, Muhammed. Banker to the Poor:
Micro-Lendingand the Battle against World Poverty. New York:
PublicAffairs, 1999.
SELECTED ORGANIZATIONS
For further information about many ofthe organizations
included in Design for the Other 90%, please visit
www.cooperhewitt.orgas well as the followi ng Web sites:
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): soxls.amd.com
American Assistance for Cambodia:
www.cambodiaschools.com
Architectural Association, London: www.aaschool.ac.uk
BaSIC Initiative: www.basicinitiative.org
Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, Jaipur:
www.jaipurfoot.org
CITvbuild Consortium of Schools: www.citybuild.org
Center for Connected Health (Partners Telemedicine):
www.connected-health.org
Construction Management 8( Consulting Services
(COMAC), Ltd.: www.comadtd.com
Continuum: www.dcontinuum.com
Design that Matters: www.designthatmatters.org
First Miles Solutions: www.firstmilesolutions.com
fuse project: www.fuseproject.com
Global Village Shelters, LLC: www.gvshelters.com
Godisa Technologies: www.godisa.org
Green Project: www.thegreenproject.org
House of Dance 8( Feathers:
www.houseofdanceandfeathers.org
International Development Enterprises (IDE): www.ide.org
Kennedy 8( Volich Architecture, Ltd.: www.kvarch.net
KickStart International: www.kickstart.org
LifeStraw: www.lifestraw.com
M3 Design: www.m3designinc.com
Mad Housers, Inc.: www.madhousers.org
Meridian Design, Inc.: www.uvaquastar.com
MIT D-Lab: http://web.mit.edu/d-lab/
One Laptop per Child: www.laptop.org
PermaNet: www.permanet.com
Portable Light Project: www.caup.umich.edu/portablelight
Potters for Peace: www.pottersforpeace.org
Project Locus: www.projectlocus.org
Public Architecture: www.publicarchitecture.org
QDrum (Pty) Ltd.: www.qdrum.co.za
Ratanakiri: www.ratanakiri.com
SELco-India: www.selco-india.com
Side by Side International: www.side-by-side-intl.org
Squid Labs: www.squid-labs.com
Star Sight: www.starsightproject.com
University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban
Planning: www.saud.ku.edu
WorldBike: www.worldbike.org
YouOrleans: www.artcenter.edu/designmatters
For further information about other organizations which
offered information, insights, and support for the exhibition, please visit the following Web sites:
AlGA Aspen Design Summit: www.aiga.org
Architecture for Humanity:
www.architectureforhumanity.org
CARE: www.care.org
Design Corps: www.designcorps.org
Doctors Without Borders:
www.doctorswithoutborders.org
Industrial Designers of America: www.idsa.org
International Fund for Agricultural Development:
www.ifad.org
National Endowment for the Arts: www.nea.org
National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty:
www.nlchp.org
New Orleans Wiki:
www.thinknola.com/wikilNew_Orleans_Wiki
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights: www.unhchr.ch
Oxfam America: www.oxfamamerica.org
Rolex Awards for Enterprise: www.rolexawards.com
UNICEF: www.unicef.org
UNIFEM: www.unifem.org
United Nations: www.un.org
Urban Institute: www.urban.org
U.S. Census Bureau: www.census.gov
World Bank: www.worldbank.org
World Energy Council: www.worldenergy.org
World Health Organization: www.who.int
World Revolution: www.worldrevolution.org
World Wildlife Fund: www.worldwildlife.org
139 cdQDrum (pty) Ltd.: Hans Hendrikse, Pieter Hendrikse
University of Kansas, School of Architecture: Rob Corser,
Dan Etheridge, Nils Gore ChriStopher Huchon
Oliver Rothschild
Yannick Gaillac
Art Center College of Design: Mariana Amatullo, ]ae Chae,
Erica Clark,john Emshwiller, Janet Ferrero, Nik
Hafermaas, Paul Hauge, Ayumi Ito, Atley Kasky,
Matthew Potter, Elisa Ruffino
Harvard Business School, Social Enterprise Initiative:
Andrea E. McGrath
Design Corps: Bryan Bell
Architecture for Humanity: KateStohr
Oxfam America, Mississippi: Deborah Bey
AlGA: Dorothy Dunn
Aspen Design Summit
St. Bernard Parish Tourist Commission:
Elizabeth McDougall
National Endowment for the Arts: Jeff Speck
Laura A. Berenson
Design for the Majority: Leslie Speer
Industrial Designers Society of America
University of Illinois: Robert L. Thompson
Medical Care Development International:
Ronald Marrocco
CITybuild Consortium of Schools: Sarah Gamble
Coastal Women for Change: Sharon Hanshaw
For more information on the Museum and
the exhibition, visit Cooper-Hewitt's Web site,
www.cooperhewitt.org.
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
,
We are grateful to the organizations and individuals listed
belowfortheir permission to reproduce images in this
book. Every effort has been made to trace and contactthe
copyright holders ofthe images reproduced. Any errors or
omissions shall be corrected in subsequent editions.
Numbers refer to figure numbers unless otherwise stated.
COVER: © 2005 Vestergaard Frandsen
BACK COVER: © Stanford Richins
CONTENTS PAGE: © 2006 Ed Lucero
BLOEMINK: 2. © Architecture for Humanity. 3: © Bhagwan
Mahavir Viklang Sahayata Samiti. 4: © 2005 Palle Peter
Skov. 5: © 2004 M3 Design. 6: © United Villages, Inc. 7:
© 2002-2005 Design that Matters, Inc.
SMITH, CYNTHIA: 1: © 2005 Salma Abdulrahman. 2: © 2005
Vestergaard Frandsen. 3: © 2005 KickStart
International. 4: © 2006 Art Center College of Design.
5: © 2006 Nils Gore. 6: © 2006 Patrick Rhodes. T ©
2002 International Development Enterprises (IDE). 8:
© 2006 Ed Lucero
POLAK: 1-6: © , 2002, 2003, 2004
International Development Enterprises (IDE)
SMITH, AMY: 1-4,5: © 2005 Bill Dolan. 4, 6-8:
© 2006 Amy Smith
FISH ER: 1, 2, 5, 6: © Allison Jones Photography. 3,4,7,8: ©
2004,2006 KickStart International
NEGROPONTE/BEHAR: 1, 3-5: © 2006 Mark Serr. 2:
© 2006 fuse project
HAN DE: 1-4: © 1999, 2001, 2006 SELco-India
HENDRIKSE: 1-5: © 1993, 2006 P.]. Hendrikse
PALLERONI (INFORMAL COMMUNITY SOLAR KITCHENS):
1-6: © 2002, 2004 BaSiC Initiative
HELLER: 1; © WWF-CanonlWilliams Amirtharaj ChriSty. 2:
© wWF-Canon/Folke WULF
KENNEDY: 1, 2, 5: © KVA MATX. 3: © Stanford Richins. 4:
© Stacy Schaefer, University of California, Chico
PALLERONI (KATRINA FURNITURE PROJECT): 1-3, 5-7:
© 2006 BaSiC Initiative. 4: Cynthia Smith, © 2006
Smithsonian Institution
PETERSON: 1-5: © 2006 Elena Dorfman, Photographer;
Mende Design, Image Design and Compositing;john
Peterson, Art Direction. 6, 7: © 2006 Public Architecture
NYIRENDA-ZABULA: 1-3: Matt Flynn,
© 2006 Smithsonian Institution
BAH ABBA: 1-6: © 2000 Tomas Bertelsen
P. 84: (left) © Aleia McCord; (right) © M3 Design
P. 85: © Meridian DeSign, Inc.
P. 86; © 2003 International Development Enterprises (IDE)
P. 87: © 2006 Ed Lucero
P. 88: © 2005 International Development Enterprises (IDE)
P. 89: (left) © 2001 Daniele Lantagne; (right) © IDE Nepal
P. 90: © 2006 Public Architecture
P. 91: © KickStart International
141