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fashion design n the business of design n housewares
Overcoming Barriers
QuarterLY of the industriaL designers soCietY of aMeriCa winter 2011
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QUARTERLY OF THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS SOCIETY OF AMERICA winter 2011
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The quarterly publication of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), Innovation provides in-depth coverage of design issues and long-term trends while communicating the value of design to business and society at large.
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Cover photo: iStockphoto
Innovation is the quarterly journal of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the professional organization serving the needs of US industrial designers. Reproduction in whole or in part—in any form—without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. The opinions expressed in the bylined articles are those of the writers and not neces-sarily those of IDSA. IDSA reserves the right to decline any advertisement that is contrary to the mission, goals and guiding principles of the Society. The appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement by IDSA. All design and photo credits are listed as provided by the submitter. Innovation is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks. The use of IDSA and FIDSA after a name is a registered collective membership mark. Innovation (ISSN No. 0731-2334 and USPS No. 0016-067) is published quarterly by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)/Innovation, 45195 Business Ct., Suite 250, Dulles, VA 20166. Periodical postage at Sterling, VA 20164 and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to IDSA/Innovation, 45195 Business Ct., Suite 250, Dulles, VA 20166, USA. ©2011 Industrial Designers Society of America. Vol. 30, No. 4, 2011; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82-640971; ISSN No. 0731-2334; USPS 0016-067.
fashion design n the business of design n housewares
Overcoming Barriers
QuarterLY of the industriaL designers soCietY of aMeriCa winter 2011
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Advertisers’ Index
55 2012 Catalyst Awards 54 2012 IDEA c2 Cesaroni Design25 ICFF 1 LaFrance Corp.c4 NewDealDesign c3 PTI 56 SEGD 9 solidThinking 5 Stratyasys 7 Studio Backs
overcoming barriers
26 My Design, Your Design by Ramsey Ford and Kate Hanisian, guest editors
29 These Are Gamechanging Days for Design by Tom De Blasis
34 Social Design Entrepreneurship by De Andrea Nichols
38 Designing Empowerment by Akshay Sharma, IDSA
45 From IDEA to Startup by Ryan Eder, IDSA
48 Crafting Economic Opportunity: Design for Fair Trade Artisans
by Ann-Marie Conrado, IDSA
features
16 Think Like a Fashion Designer by Valerie Jacobs
20 VBL Meet MSBL by Mathieu Turpault, IDSA
in every issue
4 From the Executive Editor by Alistair Hamilton, IDSA
6 The Business of Design by Gary Eisenkraft
8 Commentary by Kathryn Holshouser, IDSA
10 Book Review by Mark Dziersk, FIDSA
12 A Look Back by Carroll Gantz, FIDSA
57 Showcase: Housewares
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OVERCOMING BARRIERS
I N N O V A T I O N w I N T e r 2 0 1 1 29
it was August 2005 and I was at IDSA’s
national conference in Washington, DC, lis-
tening to an inspiring keynote address by
William McDonough, when Hurricane Katrina hit
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. How can I help,
was my thought? I’m not an emergency responder.
I’m not an architect. I’m not a civil engineer. I’m not
an urban planner. I’m an industrial designer. How
can I respond, not just as a volunteer and another
pair of hands but as a designer using my talents
and skills as a problem solver?
tHese are gamecHanging days FOR design
by tom de [email protected] n
www.globalgiving.org/projects/gamechanger-bucket/
Tom De Blasis is a global design director for Nike. His latest creation is called the Gamechanger Bucket, a health and hap-
piness kit that brings access to both clean water and sports to disaster areas and communities in need all over the world.
All
phot
os C
hris
McP
hers
on
w w w . I N N O V A T I O N j O u r N A l . O r g30
I looked around and the only design professionals I could find who were doing anything in response to Katrina was Architecture for Humanity, who had recently published the book Design Like You Give a Damn. But the group needed architects, not industrial designers, so in the end I didn’t do anything other than donate some clothes, watch CNN, and feel frustrated and helpless.
As the years went by, the question for me became, how can I do social and humanitarian design and still make a living? Where are the firms and companies that will pay designers a competitive wage to do this work? Do I have to completely redefine and scale back my aspirations, my career and my lifestyle?
The need to make money and the reality of debt are facts that are undeniable for most of us and ones that often can prevent many of us from doing the work that our heart really calls us to do. To paraphrase Architecture for Humanity, how can I give a damn?
That was what I was thinking in January 2010 when a massive earthquake rocked Haiti and leveled much of Port-au-Prince. Again, like with Katrina the question arose of how can I help and use my skills as a designer? Then for the first time I was given an opportunity to engage and use my
talents when John Hoke, IDSA, the vice president of design for Nike Inc., sent an email asking for designers with an architecture background to volunteer to help Haiti recover. I wasn’t an architect, but I showed up to the meeting anyway hoping I could be of use. It was at this moment that I began to find my answers to the how.
designers know HowLike many gatherings of creative people, this meeting quick-ly turned into a brainstorming session. I listened to all of the solutions being discussed, and after a long while I spoke up and said that we didn’t know what problems we were trying to solve. No one at the table had ever been to Haiti, and no one knew anything about the situation on the ground other than what was in media reports. I felt that we were making massive assumptions and would be air-dropping these solu-tions from 30,000 feet with no context.
That first meeting had 40 people, the second had four. This is how I found myself booking a flight to Port-au-Prince with three other designers to see for ourselves what the situation was on the ground, meet with NGOs and talk to the people about their needs. Nike has no real business in Haiti, and I had no strategic reason to be taking the trip. I
I N N O V A T I O N w I N T e r 2 0 1 1 31
water and sport. So after our visit we not only returned with great connections and insights but were able to conceptu-alize over a dozen real and necessary solutions that Nike could bring to the myriad of problems the Haitians faced. As we presented these ideas to senior leaders at Nike, their support was strong and their advice was to keep going. But how? None of us had any experience leading an effort like this or implementing concepts like these. And, we still had no official budget.
One of our concept ideas was dubbed the Health and Happiness Kit (later known as the Gamechanger Bucket). It is a five-gallon bucket that provides health in the form of a water filter and happiness in the form of a ball. It was a concept I created on the ground in Haiti with Jon Rose, the founder of Waves for Water, in response to the tremendous need we saw for clean water, community and healing. Rose’s mission is to bring clean water to every person who needs it (in Haiti and around the world). Nike’s mission is to bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world. Together we would be able to make a large difference in a community very quickly and relatively inexpensively. Each water filter will clean enough water for 100 people and last for more than five years, and the kit will cost only 75 cents per person.
remember wondering, how am I going to get my boss to approve the expenses?
So with the conviction that this was the right thing to do and the decision that it would be better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, I soon found myself driving through the rubble-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince looking to learn how Nike could use design thinking to engage in a meaningful and appropriate response to a disaster of this magnitude.
Many things quickly became apparent during this visit. One was the utter destruction of the fabric of the com-munity, as 1.3 million people were displaced and forced to live in tent cities among strangers. Another problem was the untenable and unsustainable way that people got their daily water: either through large water tanks trucked into the camps or by walking miles to a river for water that is filled with disease and bacteria (and soon was to be filled with cholera). I also saw the fierce love Haitians have for football (soccer), the importance it has in the community and the fact that the balls they own were either falling apart or handmade from things like a stuffed sock.
One of the things designers do best is connect the dots between seemingly unrelated items like community,
w w w . I N N O V A T I O N j O u r N A l . O r g32
its own challenges and obstacles. The saying in Haiti is that if you get one thing accomplished in a day, you had a good day. We drove to Leogane, assembled the 30 kits, did two distributions at two separate villages and got back before the river flooded from the thunderstorm. That’s five things accomplished in one day. That day was a very good day in Haiti.
I returned to Oregon with the mission to convey the impact and emotions of what we had just experienced. With the power of our video I was able to quickly secure a substantial investment from Nike and use its global reach as a platform to attract much more funding from small individual contributions through the website GlobalGiving. Sometimes the seemingly hardest step becomes the easiest if you’ve taken the right approach. Without prototyping and documenting the Gamechanger Bucket, I seriously doubt we would have been able to attract the support we did.
design action, or Just do itRose and I agreed that the next step was to prototype the Gamechanger Bucket by doing a pilot distribution on the ground in Leogane, Haiti, the epicenter of the earthquake and a town that hadn’t received much aid because it was in the countryside outside of Port-au-Prince and difficult to get to. I knew going into this pilot distribution that to have a real impact, we’d have to eventually distribute thousands of these Gamechanger Buckets and attract tens of thousands of dollars of investment. To do this we’d have to inspire people and give them confidence in our solution; therefore, we decided that it was critical to bring a photographer and videographer with us to capture the emotion and essence of the experience.
After booking another flight to Haiti, Rose and I hand-carried enough water filters and soccer balls to make up 30 Gamechanger Buckets. Working in a disaster zone brings
I N N O V A T I O N w I N T e r 2 0 1 1 33
With funding to distribute 1,000 Gamechanger Buckets, we were off and running—or so I thought. We coordinated logistics and planned the distribution for January 2011, around the one-year remembrance of the earthquake. Then we encountered our largest obstacle to date when our shipment of the 1,000 soccer balls was held up at customs in Port-au-Prince. It took the next four months and ultimately three teams on the ground in Port-au-Prince to secure the release of our ship-ment. Within weeks of this I was back in Haiti, and we launched the project with a large-scale distribution that gave 100,000 Haitians access to clean water.
During the four months our shipment was held up at the
Port-au-Prince airport, I learned much more about the global water crisis and the related stats. More than 1 billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water, and 50 percent of the hospital beds in developing countries are full of patients who have water-borne illnesses. I’ve always believed that the Gamechanger Bucket had need and application in underserved communities all over the world, and so now I am working on scaling the project and doing distributions in places like India and Brazil in the upcoming months.
moving forwardSo what have I learned? I’ve learned you can do social design projects at the same time as doing commercial ones, especially if you’re lucky enough to work for a company that gives a damn. Nike’s commitment to a better world made the investments in Haiti and this project possible.
I’ve also learned that as designers we already know how to do social design and respond to humanitarian crises and global disasters. We only need to put into practice the fundamentals of the design process (research, concept,
prototype, invest, inspire, launch and scale), and apply these skills in social design just as we do in commercial design. We already know the answers to how; we only need to chart our own paths and just do it.
The world is full of problems much like the ocean is full of plankton, and this can seem overwhelming and paralyzing. Remember, though, the words of Thoreau, “There is no such thing as an inconsequential act, only consequential inaction. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be.”
So ask yourself this: What are we doing? How are we spending our energy and talents
as designers? What do we want our legacy to be? How do we want to experience the profession of design, and who do we want to experience our designs? I believe that we can use our talents to become game-changing problem solvers and in the process work to create a better world. n
