Changed by Design

We were delighted to see Emily Pilloton, founder of Project H Design and author of Design Revolution, appear as a guest on the Colbert Report last night. The highlight of the interview was the rousing response from Pilloton’s call for a new measure of success according to “the triple bottom line: Planet, People and Profit”.

Pilloton chose excellent visual aids to show Colbert how design can improve lives. Selected from her book, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, Colbert walked to the interview table wearing Spider Boots, donned a pair of Adaptive Eyewear, and marveled at Pilloton’s ability to move 200 pounds of water with the ease of a “very, very suspicious flight attendant” using the beloved Hippo Water Roller.

The full episode is below. Sorry for the off-color freeze frame! We didn’t choose it, we promise.
Or to watch just the exact 6 minutes of Pilloton’s interview, view this clip directly on Hulu.

Here is Josh Silver’s 5-minute presentation of the optometrist-free glasses at TEDGlobal 2009 in July. In it, he explains that he is 30,000 on the way to putting glasses in the hands of one billion people by 2020. As with many humanitarian designs, the foremost obstacle he faces is bringing down the $19 cost of each pair. He is an atomic physicist by day, which just goes to show anyone can be a humanitarian designer.

We’re excited to see that Microsoft has chosen to focus its 2009 Imagine Cup theme around the Millennium Development Goals. The Imagine Cup challenges students around the world to solve world challenges in nine technology categories:

Design // Short Film // Photography

Robotics // IT Challenge // Mash Up

Software // Embedded // Game

This year’s worldwide finals will be held in Cairo, Egypt in July. Last year’s winners, chosen from over 200,000 contestants, seemed mostly to focus on technogadgets to raise awareness of personal consumption patterns in the developed world, so we’re glad to see Microsoft encouraging all this brainpower to consider the bottom-of-pyramid developing world population. Winning 2008 teams will receive business and technology training as part of the Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator program, to be held in Mountain View, CA in early April this year.

CbD will be watching the Design Invitational category most closely; entries to Round 1 are due March 1.

You may remember the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs: when threatened by the big bad wolf, each chose to build a shelter to shield himself from the wolf’s huffing and puffing. The house of straw and the house of sticks fell away, but the house of bricks stood strong.

These days, the global “big bad wolf” is earthquakes. Unfortunately, most homes built on fault lines continue to be rebuilt with the same materials and the same construction techniques that crumbled with some seismic huffing and puffing.

Build Change, a nonprofit from San Francisco (quite familiar with earthquakes), is working to change that. The amazing thing is, they impact the developing world without providing funding or materials – only consultation and training. Founder Dr. Elisabeth Hausler (pictured at left) realized after one earthquake with 20,000 casualties: “it’s not the earthquake that kills people, it’s the building collapsing.”

Build Change works with international agencies and local experts to help each region identify best practices that meet its needs, source locally available materials, and test low-cost construction methods. Once they have developed a model, Build Change conducts training and distributes construction manuals so the region can permanently change how it constructs buildings. From project to project, Build Change collects and disseminates a repository of earthquake-resistant building techniques.

The Indonesian island of Sumatra has suffered three of the world’s top 10 largest earthquakes since 1900, and all three of those earthquakes have occurred in the past five years. For perspective, SF’s two famous earthquakes don’t even make the list. Build Change works in Northern (Aceh) and Western Sumatra, and is seeking support to rebuild the area damaged by the May 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan province of China.

Build Change’s methods remind us of another adage which should be remembered in all developing world projects.

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. — Author unknown