Beginning at 11:30 a.m. EST today (5:30 p.m. Central European Time), TedxChange will be Webcast live from Berlin, Germany.

TEDxChange is a partnership between TED.com and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The theme of the two hour event is "The Big Picture" -- and the participants will be looking to "challenge traditional thinking around topics ranging from family planning and contraception to the environment to human-centered design."

Speakers include:

• Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference
• Jeff Chapin, designer and engineer for IDEO
• Melinda Gates, co-chair of the world’s largest private philanthropy
• Sven Giegold, German EP Member and environmental advocate
• Baaba Maal, Song writer and artist
• Theo Sowa, Head of African Women’s Development Fund

Design Impact's fellows are applying a design approach within community organizations in India

At Dowser, we were excited to recently reconnect with the leadership team of Design Impact at the end of their pilot year launching an innovative social enterprise across India. Per the name, Design Impact addresses social problems using the toolkits of design in a grassroots way. Ramsey Ford and Kate Hanisian, the co-directors of Design Impact, have been working with small businesses in India to develop sustainability-produced, fair trade products for international markets.

In November, Hanisian and Ford were joined in India by six international fellows with design backgrounds, who received funding from Design Impact to work with community-based organizations, fusing design and social enterprise. When Dowser spoke to Ford, he and Hanisian were in Thiruchuli, Tamil Nadu, where they were working to develop a fair trade soap that is now being sold in stores in the U.S., including Whole Foods. Ford shared some takeaways from their pilot year, as well as thoughts about their vision moving forward.

Dowser: What’s the update on the products you are developing?
Ford: We have launched one project—we’re selling fair trade glycerin soaps—the glycerin is made locally with biodiesel energy, made from a local nut, and we’re hoping to scale through a connection through Whole Foods. We worked with ODAM to put together a shipment of about 1600 soaps that arrived in the States in December last year. We’re starting in some Ohio stores, and then got into our first Whole Foods just a few weeks ago—and as a small producer, we start out in a store or two, and if we do well we’ll move up to regional or national. Sustainable production level would be about 1000 soaps a month—so that would work if we were in about thirty Whole Foods.

How are you determining whether the soaps qualify as ‘Fair Trade’?
One of the reasons the village wanted to do this was to support the biodiesel program, but another was to create good jobs. The product is not certified fair trade-you have to be in products for about 1.5 years before you apply. But we put into practice fair trade—the primary one is that wages are about four times what people might make as agricultural labors--$5 a day, roughly, as opposed to $1.50 per day. And the women who work there have rights, they have a say in how things go, and they have benefits. The women who are working there are happy to have the jobs, and ODAM is excited to have the project—it’s a profitable intervention and for them, it’s been a big learning experience, and they’re trying to look at other places where they can do similar work, and find  ways to use social enterprises to deal with local problems.

How has the first run of Design Impact’s fellowship program been going?
There are six fellows working on five projects—three Americans, one Indian-American, one Colombian, and one guy from Ireland. There are two women in the group their backgrounds vary from design strategy to traditional industrial design to brand design interface development, one has a background in natural resource management. On average they have about seven years of professional experience, two have about three, two have about twelve.

They bring a lot to the table. We had about 150 applications last year that we selected them out of. The organizations we work with in India really wanted professionals—not students—and the fellows have to be, because we don’t closely manage all the projects, we’re in touch but the fellows have to manage other people, build a strategy around a project and implement it. And few people have those skillsets naturally, or they need to develop them on the job over the course of years.

What is one project that is a good example of the work the fellows are doing?
Brian Gough, a brand development expert, is working at Manav Sadhna, a really well-known community based organization in Ahmedabad. They serve a number of low-income communities near the Gandhi Ashram with various projects from education to sanitation to craft employment. His program is called Earn N Learn, and it’s a way to get kids who are making small change on the streets--washing cars or shining shoes--to come into a school environment. So they come in and learn, and they also are engaged in paper crafts, which are sold in various fair trade markets in India and around the world.

What we’ve done by partnering with them is re-design the program and the paper-crafts. And Brian has done this starting from the students-up. Usually they would have one person  make a design and the kids would follow it—but Brian is involving the kids in the design process, allowing them to critique concepts, having them do drawings for what they are designing and asking them to vote on it, and even making a game out of it. He has the students do daily reflections about life and brings them into the process of designing new pieces. The result will be an overall brand that actually emphasizes the lives of these young people and what the project means to them. And we’ve got a long-term partnership with them so it can go a lot deeper, and it also teaches the students something about design in the process. Also, the program pays the kids a small wage so they are motivated to come to the school.

Is there any collaboration between the fellows?
One of the projects is with Quest in Bangalore; our fellow there is Ali Maiorano; she’s an interactive designer, and she's working with Quest on job preparedness for rural youth. The idea is to train the youths to be more employable so they have a better chance of getting a job when they go to the city. She’s been working collaboratively with Brian, and using interfaces to do remote teaching and she’s also been working on curriculum development. Ally’s office isn’t actually in the village where her students are; Quest is one of our projects where there is something of a space of separation between the designer and the people who benefit from the intervention. We wanted to try out this kind of a project in addition to projects where there is a more direct connection.

How has this project worked out?
So far, so good. As for now we are seeking out relationships with organizations that are community-linked. The value of our model is its embedded nature: it’s on-the-ground and has a long-term engagement. Moving forward, we’ll stick with these aspects of our model. Our projects work best when we can be a primary partner of an organization—and for what we’re trying to accomplish, smaller organizations are better. There’s an ideal point where an organization has a certain sized budget to actually implement a project—but if they get too large we kind of get lost in there. The organizations provide room and board for the fellows, as well as basic project costs and transportation costs. This year, we’re implementing a sliding scale based on the orientation of the organization—whether they’re a social enterprise or a traditional nonprofit—as well as the size of their budget and other things.

Have there been any cultural barriers?
Yes, a lot. How people set up meetings, how people look at contracts—there are cultural differences in these. In smaller business and nonprofits in India, those things can be less formal. The focus is building relationships first, and no one wants to sign anything at first. Consultancies here work on hourly estimations and generalizations of project costs. We train the fellows to be flexible and adapt to these situations, and when we do the search and interviews, we focus on interpersonal communication abilities—that’s really necessary to be successful. And they are doing really well—they learn the culture, they embrace it. We also have an issue with language. We visited Indian design universities and firms to get the word out about the fellowship, because in many cases the organizations prefer fellows who can speak the local languages. One of our fellows does speak a local language and it’s been very helpful to her. So we will look more for this in this round of fellows.

How have you and Kate been able to manage all these projects?
Sometimes we feel overworked. We’ve been on the road in India for three and a half months—we’ve visited the projects, we’ve been networking, going to conferences. But in general, we’re really excited. These new projects are kind of getting moving. The current fellows will keep on working on these projects—some even want to stay on—but they all leave the assignment, and there’s a month gap before the next fellows start in July. These current fellows will stay on as long-distance consultants on these projects for a few months, to hand over information and be mentors to the new fellows—we don’t want to lose ground in that transition. There’s a chance that one or two of the projects will get wrapped up and may not continue, but in general, most will continue. We believe that what we’re doing has merit and is an interesting way to approach problems through design.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Allan Chochinov, chair of the new MFA program in Products of Design, at SVA in New York

Once upon a time, to be a designer meant that you made things—chairs, for example—and, in some cases, that you were focused on the needs of the wealthy, who could afford stylish or well-made objects. In recent years, the field of design has undergone a revolution, spawning new, interdisciplinary territories where the tools of design are applied to streamline experiences, navigate problem areas in society, and promote sustainability in consumption of goods and materials. Allan Chochinov, Editor in Chief of Core77 and chair of the new MFA program in Products of Design, which will launch in fall 2012 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (and is accepting applications with a priority deadline of January 15^th), is exuberant about the possibilities of design as it forges new paths. Below, he shares with Dowser some of his personal views about design’s potential for mitigating social problems, and outlines how the program he’s chairing will enable students to become adept at applying design tools toward social good.

Dowser: What are some of your experiences as a design educator that you will apply to the new Products of Design program?
Chochinov: I teach in the MFA Designer Author program at SVA, which attracts a lot of graphic designers and people with an entrepreneurial spirit. I always do a big social impact project with them, and it invariably changes what they think the territory for design is. We recently did a project around humanitarian aid workers—a strategic toolkit for them—with input from people at the UN, strategists in Washington, and big philanthropy. And it was just unbelievable what, in six weeks, these designers were able to bring to the table. A couple of years ago I did a project around prosthetic arm design, and last year, one on girls and women. These have all been formative teaching experiences.

Designers have an interesting approach to social problems—they don’t target one ‘bad guy,’ like the government. How would you describe the approach?
Social problems are fundamentally systemic, so even our language for problem-solving is not helping. I’d argue that you don’t necessarily ‘solve’ problems—you negotiate problem spaces. Our language is actually limiting our abilities, often making us feel helpless and hopeless.

What does it mean, concretely, to ‘negotiate’ a problem space, versus solving it?
Designers take on projects that they’ve never done before. In any other discipline, that’s a ridiculous proposition; in design, it helps you to be fresh. It’s about an ability to speak to multiple stakeholders, multiple constituencies. But that means that a designer needs to be highly skilled in speaking the language of marketing and business while speaking to manufacturing and sustainability and labor practices and supply chain management. Designers need to be in that first meeting, instead of that last meeting—the one about making an object pretty and likable and, you know, consumable—and they can’t be in that first meeting unless they can earn the respect of the other people in that meeting. And other people in that meeting have been in that meeting a long time. They don’t particularly want iconoclasts.

So, a designer has to be fluent in multiple industry languages, in a sense.
You need to be not only empathetic, but also conversant. You need to understand stakeholders, what gets them up in the morning and what keeps them up at night. It’s not necessary to be a designer to do design work. You need to be a ‘design person’ though—somebody who understands the upside of saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no,’ and who is focused on scaling things—doing something once so that it can then be multiplied.

What is most challenging about trying to be conversant in different industries?
Design and business writer Roger Martin talks about the differences in business and design, and he says that the greatest complement a designer could hear is, ‘the world has never seen anything like this’—that’s a designer’s goal. But for a business person, there couldn’t be a worse statement to make. They want repeatability and predictability—knowability. And designers want novelty, and paradigm-breaking. So, innovation is this magic word that has given the two people a common ground. When I’m talking about negotiating problem spaces, I’m literally talking about negotiating—the actual talking part. And then negotiating it figuratively or metaphorically through designed artifacts—what I call the ‘products of design.’ That could be a logo, a campaign, a set of instructions, an object, a kit, a protest—like Occupy Wall Street. Did you see the Lego model at Occupy? Everyone went crazy for it.

A Lego model of Occupy Wall Street captivated passersby at Zuccotti Park this fall.

Yes, I saw it—it was really enthralling. It was a Lego model of Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park, with beautiful detail, set right in front of the park for a little while.
That’s the power of design. The Lego set had spark and humor, and spoke to people in a way that had nothing to do with rationality or fairness or politics—it was about delight. It’s like the library at Zuccotti Park made out of sideways plastic bins—when you walked by it, you smiled, and thought, ‘well, isn’t that smart.’ These are designed objects, as part of a built environment. And as artifacts they have enormous power, and they stick. Holding something in your hand is powerful. Stuff’s not going to go away. The critical question in design right now is about how we make stuff, and who shares stuff, and how stuff gets distributed.

How are these ideas incorporated into the new Products of Design program?
It’s a single-track program with three interweaving strands: Making, Structures, and Narratives. Everybody does everything. There are no electives, no grades—you come here to do great work, we’re not going to spend a lot of time measuring you. There’s a lot of work that happens outside the school: the Design Research class is taught at IDEO, the Material Futures class is taught at Material Connection, the Designing for Sustainability and Resilience class is taught on green roofs, at farmer’s markets, outside.

And the program is interdisciplinary, in its coursework and its faculty?
I really believe we have to expand what ‘design artifact’ means, in how we teach it. Dividing things into graphic design, exhibition design, product design, interaction design—I don’t know if it’s helping. Of course, a lot of these are specialties and require time to master—that’s one of the big challenges when you have a multidisciplinary program; you want to provide more than a taste of everything, but you only have so much time. And I want the students to have a life—and not just come to New York City and do homework for two years. New York City is a tough place to go to school—it’s an expensive city—but what I want to offer to our students is a network. Students will be meeting people so that, when they leave the program, they will have a network to reach out to.  Networks allow you to learn things quickly, and perhaps that’s the best tool of them all.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Students in Brooklyn storyboard for the website they are designing

We all remember times when school felt completely useless and abstract – for me, it was in chemistry class, a subject I thought would never apply to my life or career. In this tough employment climate, debate about how to educate  with dwindling resources, and what is relevant for students to learn, has raised to a fever-pitch.

Many are critiquing the standard liberal education at universities: is it unnecessary, some are asking? Shouldn't we be focused on teaching critical job skills? On the flip side, others criticize schools for becoming too narrowly-focused on hard maths and sciences. Laura Seargeant Richardson, Principal Designer at the global innovation firm frog design, has called this the “creativity crisis,” and suggests that design work and “play” time should be more deeply incorporated into basic curriculum. “Eighty-five percent of today's companies searching for creative talent can't find it. In a recent IBM survey, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one leadership competency of the future,” writes Richardson.

Project: Interaction is a promising program teaching New York City students to use design in tangible applications to change their communities. It hopes to merge creative time in schools with the development of practical job skills. The idea is to have students take on a specific project, like web design, and through completing it, become better and more confident problem-solvers. Two graduates of the School of Visual Arts’ Interaction Design MFA program, Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch, created Project:Interaction after they were inspired by a talk in which a designer urged them to teach interaction design to others in order to strengthen the profession. The two students wondered how they could bring design education to high school students.

Over the course of one year, Koch and Dukes interviewed educators, students, educational consultants, and entrepreneurs in order to get an idea of how their concept could become reality. They successfully pitched the curriculum to three schools, all of which accepted it, and chose one in which to prototype the project. Now they are teaching the design curriculum in an after-school program at an all-girls public school in Brooklyn, NY.

The after-school program, Project GROW, focuses on offering meaningful activities for young girls. They are working with a small group of students to design the website for the program, providing a rare opportunity for young people to actually have an impact on their school environment, rather than simply receiving education or extracurricular activity as a service provided to them.

Sticky-notes help students organize their thoughts and ideas

“It’s a two-hour-long class, and we are happy to have to so much time. It’s a small group, nine or ten students – the perfect-sized group to work on this kind of a project because everyone can have a job. The students had no web design skills; we are starting from scratch. They had basic web knowledge, but there is a lot of learning going on. They don’t always know why we make certain decisions for the site, like having log-in and registration. We’re hoping to have the site up by the end of January,” said Dukes and Koch.

Dukes and Koch keep a blog of their project, where they outline their teaching methods, including the surprises and challenges that help them refine their strategy as they go.

Entrepreneurs and designers know that problem-solving is a complex skillset that requires critical thinking and teamwork. It is refreshing to see how Project:Interaction is engaging young learners in gaining these necessary, practical skills.

Here Moggridge shares some front-line observations about changes in the field that led to the birth of socially-responsible design.

Dowser: How can we distinguish socially-responsible design from just 'design'?
Moggridge: To me it’s really about the expanding context of design. If you look historically, back at really everything that happened in the last millennia, design is thought of as relatively craft-oriented. It’s about doing things. So you find designers in a discipline, learning how to actually do the actual designing, but not necessarily work out what to design. So this question of what should we do has somewhat been separated from how to do it. And the craft and the skill of design tend to be the ‘how to do it’ part, and the ‘what to do’ came from somebody else – a leader or a boss.

Why is socially-responsible design becoming popular at this particular time?
I think there were two major changes that started to expand the context for the way designers think they need to operate. First was the increase in digital technology, which started to make the tools very much more sophisticated, so that you could do things with computers that you never dreamt to do before. The skills started to be much more fluid, easy, and accessible for people. And the second is the Internet, which connected everything together. Suddenly you find this connectivity that gets into everybody’s head – that’s like Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedia Britannica, but it’s also the whole world rather than your country. What happened then is that the context in which people think about design started to expand. And this only has happened in this last ten years.

So, the Internet and digital technology presented new challenges for designers, which required new forms of thinking.
My background’s in industrial design. Until recently I would think of myself as designing things. But with this expanding context due to these two things, I’m now thinking of health and well-being. I’m thinking of people in a much more holistic way – because I can actually put the thing in the context of the whole person. And that’s both the design opportunity and the design challenge. The digital technology means that it is a design issue as opposed to just being a behavioral issue. And then if you look at the architectural scale, the same sort of expansion of context happens, but it’s now in terms of, instead of the architect just designing building, they’re thinking about designing the social relationships of people who use a building. So it becomes social innovation. And then if you think about that on a more global scale, you’ll find that it’s the ‘design with the other ninety percent,’ as opposed to design with yourself.

What shifted in order for this kind of thinking to emerge?
I think it’s really the Internet, and connectivity. People started to realize that globalization was a fact. Over the last century, designers were feeling a bit threatened by globalization. They were thinking, oh, dear, my work’s doing to China. Or, all the manufacturing’s leaving the country, so I’m no longer connected to the means of production. And then you find that people start to realize that there are potentially positive sides, as well, and they say, okay, not only can we do new things that are global, but also we are sort of forced to take notice of the world in a more holistic way. Instead of thinking, oh, I’m just worried about myself, my town, my village my country, now you’re thinking about the planet. You’re thinking about trying to help people all over the world. And the young people in particular get passionate about trying to make a difference.

Is social design an aspect of post-industrialism, in a sense, since there are fewer opportunities to make things?
I don’t think the opportunities to make things go away. It’s additive, more than a replacement. The making gets to happen in a different place, probably often with different people, but the opportunity is there. There’s still people who are in love with designing things and they want to do that their whole lives, and they can – they can make a beautiful lamp, or chair. But then there are other people who think, it would be better if I could change the world. If I could make changes, or make social innovation, make something that’s sustainable, something that benefits people in a broader, more holistic way.

When did you first become aware of the possibilities of socially-responsible design?
I was in Silicon Valley for over thirty years, so I saw these changes from the inside. There were phases in Silicon Valley where we could see that the startups were moving away from new product development. When I first arrived in Silicon Valley [in 1979] most of the Valley was still just doing chips. Then they moved from chips to products – just at the right time for me, because I was a product guy. For the next ten years or so, it was mostly, a new startup company does a new laptop, a new product, a new whatever. And then it became clear that systems would be more important than individual products, because of the connectivity. So you started seeing people like the Cisco’s of the world, designing communication devices – like the Cisco telephone we us here, in this office – and getting the IP Internet protocol telephone to work. And then thinking of systemic issues like sustainability, or complicated problems like the ecology of a city, all of those things became design possibilities – but need, as well.

What’s one product area where you’ve watched design go through these transformations?
If you think of a telephone, for example. In the traditional world of telephone, you still had the telephone in the wall, and you would grab this thing, stick it by your ear, and wind this handle. And then you’d speak to another human being. And the human being – the operator – would be the one to connect you to the person you wanted to talk to. So the designer didn’t think of the service as being a design problem or opportunity because it was actually training the operator that mattered most. And the operator had to know how to be polite, how to deal with awkward people, as well as the mechanisms of making the connection. But as soon as that becomes automated, digitally, and you go to an automatic exchange, then it’s obviously a design problem – because you’re never going to be in contact with another human being until you reach the person you’re calling

That’s interesting, because at its core, design is human-centered.
Well, you have to flip it on its head in order to recover from that, really. If everything’s so technology-based, then you’re losing touch with the human.

How did the conversation at IDEO turn toward socially-responsible design, and the launching of the IDEO.org fellowship program?
People within IDEO got more and more fascinated by the possibilities of this kind of social innovation work. Initially we started to do it pro-bono, and we tried to get funding from foundations. The original book that was put out about process, the Human-Centered Design Toolkit, which is available as a PDF, was funded by [the Gates Foundation]. We then realized that it was going to be really hard to get that kind of funding as a for-profit firm. After I left [IDEO], they came up with the idea of making a non-profit arm.

The “Design with the Other 90%” exhibit currently at the United Nations showcases how designers are helping solve problems of urban living. To what extent can socially-responsible design deal effectively with global sustainability issues?
Nobody believed that Wikipedia would be more significant than Encyclopedia Britannica. So, this whole shift toward crowdsourcing, toward democratization of idea-generation, is something that’s universal. And that’s caused, again, by the connectivity. The fact that it’s here means it’s here to stay in every arena, really. You could take the principles of that kind of movement- collaboration, hybridization, participation - and apply them across any context. You could certainly apply them to problems in this country. That’s what we’re hoping that the open-source network site we’ve launched along with the exhibition will help with. It’s just a network where people can upload their own examples [of socially-responsible design].

What are some challenges around socially-responsible design?
Objective measures [of impact] are difficult; they tend to emerge as stories. But overall, I think this is a good example of how the younger generation is going to change the world by caring.

Across the world, socially-responsible design practitioners have started taking the concept of wicked problems, and flipping it on its head. “If we want to be agents of change, we need to start with a positive approach: look for what works, and build the model on that,” explained Lara Penin, who co-founded the DESIS Lab, a network of design schools focused on social innovation. “We have to see things as living laboratories, learn from them, and translate them into everyday language,” said Penin.

Penin studied industrial design in Italy and began applying design-thinking to social change in Europe, as part of a team of researchers who set out to document ways that people were using local resources and ideas to make their communities more livable and ecological. The team learned that a top-down approach to behavioral change would not breed success. “People want beauty and pleasure,” said Penin. “We need to come up with more attractive ideas and solutions to promote behavioral change.” Instead of telling people, “don’t do this: don’t drive a car,” the group realized that people should be rewarded for their own initiative in solving problems.

This fall, graduate students in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons, in New York City, worked with Penin and her co-director, Eduardo Staszowski, to create Amplify, an exhibit currently on display at Brooklyn’s Arts at Renaissance, which demonstrates existing and potential design solutions to local issues related to everyday experience. The project’s aim was to re-think service design in terms of sustainability. Duane Bray, Sarah Soffer and Tom Eich from the design firm Ideo facilitated the Amplify workshop.

The project was based in the neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, areas known as bastions of hipster culture – and often cited as an example of gentrification among Polish, Latino, and Hasidic communities. But instead of focusing exclusively on gentrification’s negative aspects, the Amplify team took the ample social and cultural movement in that area, combined with the presence of more traditional communities, as an environment ripe for social innovation.

Research for Amplify took place over the summer, with interviews conducted among a diverse spectrum of neighborhood residents and business owners. From there, the team identified four areas of concern: the food economy, the sharing economy, environmental well-being, and alternative  transportation. Then, the project went into an intensive phase. MFA students worked in small teams to do further research about the identified topics, in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Then they got cooking, turning those ideas into prototypes.

Meet their proposed design solutions:

• The Brooklyn Stoop: a moveable stoop that channels Brooklynites’ passion for stoop-side chats, encourages people to converse with their neighbors, and promotes the sharing of ideas and space
• Park It: a garden cart-on-wheels that allows communities to grow things together, and takes advantage of the public nature of sidewalks and streets
• Slowscape: a system of signage and re-worked highways that promotes nonverbal spatial negotiations between drivers, to the effect of making drivers slow down, also known as “traffic calming”
• Alternative Food Economy Ecosystem: an assortment of potential entry points for communities that are not yet participating in Brooklyn’s flourishing local food movement, such as “From B’Burg With Love,” an artisanal food production scheme that solicits traditional recipes in order to motivate people to join local CSA programs (plus, a fun game that explains easy ways to join or start your own CSA)

In each project, the students considered what exists, what could be, and what should be. They also tried to refrain from becoming competitive about their projects. As the intensive week got underway, the organizers saw that some students were beginning to feel ownership over ideas. To foster collaboration, they shifted people around randomly. As a result, the students seemed like one big family, united around the idea that the design-process of research, prototyping, and iteration held potential for tackling supposedly unsolvable “wicked” problems.

After the projects had been assembled and were put on display, there was a collective feedback process, where the designers considered the potential application of their ideas. The students received the feedback with seriousness but held onto the optimism that helped them construct their projects in the first place. It was clear that the students had worked extremely hard, throughout the process, and the result was inspiring ideas that have potential to seek funding and become actual community-based solutions.

An informal market in Durban after a design intervention by iTRUMP

Imagine that you and your family have just moved to an informal settlement on the outskirts of a major city – Buenos Aires, or Jakarta – with nothing but the clothes on your backs. You are wage laborers from the countryside, and all that awaits you in the city is a community of people with similar backgrounds who can take you into their network. Houses in such settlements are typically built of the lowest-grade material. And energy and sewage infrastructures in informal settlements are typically D.I.Y. and thus unreliable.

There are currently one billion people living in informal settlements around the world. By the year 2030, that number is predicted to double. A movement under the umbrella of “socially-responsible design” has set out to prove that people living in settlements have as much right to live in well-designed cities as do the rest of us.

The United Nations is hosting the second installment in the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design’s series on socially-conscious design, Design With the Other 90%: CITIES. Whereas the previous installment of the exhibit series, held at the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in 2007, was called Design For the Other 90%, this edition is switching out “for” and instead saying “with.” The implication of “design with” is clear: collaboration and horizontal learning, rather than paternalism, form the cornerstone of social design.

One of the main ideas behind the Design With exhibit at is that knowledge exchange between formal and informal designers is crucial in making urban development sustainable and intelligent.

Cynthia Smith, the series curator and an industrial designer by training, was overwhelmed by the impact of the first exhibit. Socially-responsible design was picking up speed worldwide, but it wasn’t becoming part of public discourse or design education; the exhibit filled-in this hole.

The array of projects on display at Design With depict a world in which cities are becoming cleaner and better organized, while generating new opportunities for their burgeoning populations. Smith traveled to three continents while researching projects for the second installment, focusing on global cities and innovative solutions to problems in the informal sector. The projects that most caught her attention were done in a way she describes as a “hybrid” of formal and informal aspects of the city.

Working collaboratively and across disciplines is crucial for designers, Smith explained. Furthermore, she added that working alongside people who are from a very different socioeconomic background than yours requires empathy. And as many of the projects exhibited at the UN demonstrate, social design work often involves a kind of scrappy resourcefulness that takes advantage of local knowledge and materials, rather than viewing poor communities in terms of what they lack.

**

Durban is known to be the most ethnically diverse city in South Africa. Following the end of the Apartheid regime, the local government in Durban began looking for ways to improve public spaces within the inner-city that were dominated by the informal market, which, in South Africa, is a large part of the economy.

The city government formed a department called iTRUMP to take on the renewal of a sprawling market area and transportation hub called Warwick Junction. Each day, about 460,000 commuters and 5,000 traders pass through Warwick Junction. Neglect of non-white neighborhoods by the Apartheid government had allowed the Junction to become crime-ridden and unclean. Meat vendors were cooking cattle heads over open flames on rickety structures, leaving grease runoff all around, and providing ample opportunity for polluting the city’s water system as well as exposing the meat to bacteria.

In 2008, the co-founders of iTRUMP resigned from their role in local government, frustrated by a political agenda that viewed shopping malls as a viable form of development in light of the upcoming World Cup. They formed a local nonprofit called Asiye eTalufeni and continued their work at Warwick Junction, applying a bottom-up approach to the renewal in order to learn the design needs of people who commuted or traded in the Junction. They asked people directly what they needed and generated ideas based on that data.

The improved Warwick Junction boasts neat concrete cooking cubicles and steel tables for the cattle head vendors. The market’s design was also remade with widened pedestrian routes, storage facilities, and new kiosks for traders.

At the Design With exhibit, one representative from Asiye eTalufeni, Tasmi Quazi, looked at the display of before-and-after photos of Warwick Junction and reflected on the challenges her multidisciplinary team of researchers and architects had met during the initiative.

“Working with the design illiterate poor hinges on social facilitation,” she explained. “You have to suck up your designer ego and work with people. You have to forget pure design because they will hybridize what you give them.”

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In the exhibit book for Design With the Other 90%, South African urban planner Edgar Pieterse writes about the unique role that socially-conscious design can play in taking on challenges that ongoing urbanization presents.

Poor city-dwellers, he writes, are constantly finding ways to make their environments aesthetically and functionally better. The projects showcased in the Design With exhibit demonstrate that “innovation arises when activists and entrepreneurs respond to very practical needs in ways that allow people to bring their own creativity, cultural ownership, and sweat to the endeavor.”

Viewing the show at the UN, it is clear that each one of the projects on display in the exhibit is entirely specific to the context in which it occurs. There is no blueprint for solving urban problems worldwide, because every city has a distinct cultural history and its problems stem from that history.

It follows that problems have to be tackled by the people who are living in them, because these are the people who have in-depth knowledge about the situation. But designers add other kinds of knowledge, skills, and access to the mix. The result of such a collaborative approach is unending opportunity for generating sustainable solutions that empower poor, marginalized people to work toward a better tomorrow.

Panthea Lee, co-founder of ReBoot, conducts a group interview in Afghanistan, photo courtesy of Jan Chipchase

When most people think of design, often the first images that come to mind are of suspension bridges, urban landscapes, or well-formed living room furniture pieces.

But “design” has become a broad-sweeping movement to use a process of ethnographic research and collaborative iteration to create innovative solutions to social problems. Large design firms like IDEO are becoming known for their efforts to extend the reach of design to social services, and meanwhile, smaller organizations are popping up that exclusively apply design-thinking to the social sector.

Reboot is a startup company that emerged out of its founders’ desire to build a better model for delivering social services to underserved populations around the world. Their unique approach is bolstered by the kind of optimism that any young startup needs. It comes from a belief in the power of listening to a population’s needs before determining how to provide a service for them.

Dowser: So what, in a nutshell, does design for social services look like?
Panthea Lee, co-founder and principal: [Reboot is] in a relatively new market, trying to bring service design to the public sector – to nonprofits. It’s not Design with a capital D. I’m not a classically-trained designer. We have subject area experts on our team and we’re using a process we’ve seen work before. Urban planners and human rights activists, they can design social services.

What were you doing before Reboot?
I was at an innovation group within UNICEF. We were tasked with trying to use new technologies to improve UNICEF’s programs and operations. They were focused on mobile phones – how do you deliver services like healthcare via mobile phones? Before that, I was working as a journalist, and traveling a lot in the developing world. I started getting upset and frustrated – at a lot of these structural deficiencies and systemic poverty in these places. These systems don’t work. Why don’t they work? So, I started looking into the history of international development, and aid, and colonialism – there are real, structural flaws.

How did those experiences feed into Reboot’s approach to designing service delivery?
Something exciting about right now is that people have greater power to connect with one another. There is greater power in citizens’ hands right now, as a result of changes in technology over the past couple of decades. I think the challenge is – you have one group who wants technology as the solution, as a silver bullet. One of the hardest parts about what we do is trying to talk people away from technology as a default. There’s a lot of talk around ICT4D – information and communications technology for development. Technology becomes central to programming. We’re trying to talk people away from that.

What’s lacking when organizations focus on technology solutions?
Understanding the context they’re working in, understanding the people they’re working for. People see all these exciting examples of how technology has been used, so they think they need it. Something that has been challenging is getting people to slow down first. It’s hard to tell [clients], we don’t necessarily know what the solution might be, we’re going to go through a process of discovery, of research, then we’re going to iterate, iterate, iterate. Because it’s not going to be right the first time. You’re solving big, complex problems.

How has Reboot used this approach on the ground?
We  have two ongoing projects in Pakistan right now. There’s a bank there  that, in the wake of the floods last year, started helping the  government and the World Bank doing cash deposits. The group they were  handing out these cards to were people who had never been banked before.  They were handing out $230, I think, to help people rebuild their  homes. All of a sudden these people suddenly had an account created in  their name. The bank penetration in Pakistan is around 11 per cent. It’s really low. People get robbed on pay-day because they’re bringing home cash. There are a lot of ways the bank thought they could better serve this market. They asked us, How can we do that? One Executive Vice President said, ‘I want to serve the bottom of the pyramid. But I don’t know who these people are.’ So we went in saying, you need a better understanding of who these people are, first."

And how did you tackle that knowledge gap?
We spent a couple of weeks there doing design research. We were trying to develop different segmentations. ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ – is that your $1-a-day farmer? Is that your $3-a-day entrepreneur? How is it different serving women? We were developing segmentation so [the banks] could do sophisticated banking, and marketing, for these people who are illiterate, who don’t trust banks, [who] are scared of putting their money into an ATM machine. Then we put forward design recommendations for how to change their service delivery model so to service these populations.

How did the bank receive your recommendations?
We went back to Karachi and did three days of workshopping. Initially when we got the contract, they believed in the approach, and they said, ‘Send us the report at the end and don’t bother coming back.’ And we said, ‘No, we’re coming back and we’re doing a workshop.’ They just wanted to know, What are the top five things we need to do, and we’ll do them. But it’s more impacting to present it in person. They were surprised at where we got our insights –  we used information from organizations already working in that area, focusing on health, insurance, development, education.

What’s in store for Reboot’s future?
Eventually we’ll start a nonprofit wing. For now we are a social enterprise because we believe there should be a market for what we do. It helps to evaluate our approach. Relying on grants can be a problematic business model. We’re working on a program that provides services as a version of human rights – as the tangible moment of human rights delivery. The effects of a policy change can take a long time to trickle-down, so we’re taking on that process. We’ve also been working in Egypt, [since nine days after Mubarak left.] There’s all this media attention there on youth activists who used Facebook and Twitter – but these activists don’t have political carrying capacity or established credibility. We’re looking at less sexy groups that can implement substantive reform, through investments, like the labor movement. Change is not just about technology.

Kari Litzmann founded Rubina Design after studying a women’s sewing workshop in Pakistan where she saw the limits of the nonprofit charity model but also observed the potential benefits of supporting women entrepreneurs. While supporting herself through freelance design work, Litzmann is working on developing her first line of products, attractive print materials targeted at “working women who care about the world,” to be made by rural artisans in India.

Dowser: You say on your website that it was during your trip to Pakistan that you formed the idea for Rubina Design. What specifically influenced you?
Litzmann: I was doing my master’s at Pratt, focusing on how organizations can strategically use design to find creative solutions to problems. For my thesis, I did three case studies looking at the intersections of design and business. I went to Pakistan to do an in-depth examination of a women’s sewing workshop in Peshawar, a culturally conservative region. The workshop was run on a charity basis by a local church. There was one participant, named Rubina, who wanted to start her own business, since her husband didn’t work and they had two kids to raise. But there were huge obstacles: women couldn’t even be present at the male-dominated town market, and also the nonprofit environment was not conducive to entrepreneurship.

So what were the first steps to bringing your idea to life?
I design print materials as a freelancer, so I knew I could build on that skill, and support myself doing that while I developed my business plan. I knew how to write the plan because the program at Pratt was modeled after a MBA program so we focused on marketing, product development, and so on. Also, just telling people about my idea made it real, because it created accountability; people began asking how far along I was in my project.

How did you choose India as your producer base?
There’s such a vibrant artisan culture there, and the textiles are simply beautiful. I’ve established a relationship with an NGO in Gujarat by doing pro-bono work for them. It’s an amazing organization; they’ve started a design school and they help traditional textile artisans to access international markets.

Isn’t it hard to start a business when your producers are halfway across the world?
My main partner now is a large-scale retailer called FabIndia who for more than 50 years now has established a streamlined supply chain that incorporates more than 22,000 rural artisans. Despite their size, they have been able to stick to their mission of working with rural artisans. This plus their proven success producing for a large upper, middle-class Indian market will be key as we approach larger retailers in US with the first Rubina artisan line.

You were originally interested in supporting women, but will all of the artisans who produce for your line be women?
Many rural artisans in India are women, though not all. Ultimately I’d like to support women because, I learned while working for Women’s World Banking, women are more likely to save money and use it for their kids’ needs, like education. But women aren’t incorporated enough into income-generation because of cultural barriers.

You’re supporting yourself while you do this, and it will be a while before you’re making any profit. How do you see that process moving?
I’m phasing myself into being the full-time director of Rubina. In September, I’m going to be paired with volunteer, highly-skilled professionals through Catchafire. That should get the first year off to a good start. From there, I’d like to bring the business model back to my home, Texas. There are enormous immigrant communities there that are simply impoverished, lacking basic services, who could benefit from access to markets.

Do you have any role models or sources of inspiration?
The founder of Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz, said that the market serves as a 'listening device,' by providing feedback. This is why the market is such a powerful device for helping others; it allows them to help themselves. Rather than giving things away, we can create a model where everyone is giving and getting, both at once.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Dowser: How is design different, or related to, development approaches to social change?
Ford: Design Impact (DI) works with established grassroots organizations that are doing local empowerment and local education. They often look at what they are doing from a development perspective. In working with them, we provide a design consultancy service; so the two things [design and development] for me go hand in hand.

What makes a design-centered process different from development is putting design thinking earlier on in the process of business strategies. We are focused on how to create new services that solve problems, and create jobs at same time. We emphasize trusting and believing in the power of the design process to really solve problems in a unique and interesting way.

What exactly is the ‘design process’?
Design philosophy puts value on the idea that, in traditional business and product development, designers are connected both to technology development and consumers. There is a lot of power placed in that position. We have to consider: what is the technology, how does it function? Also, we ask, how will it be used, how will users look at it, how is this financially viable? A design practitioner should be uniquely positioned to understand enough about each of those questions, to find the right people and put those answers together. To do this, we work with technical people, engineers, research scientists, anthropologists and market researchers.

What does DI do that other similar social impact design groups don’t do?
DI is uniquely positioned in that we are the sole provider of fully-funded, international fellowships for designers. Other nonprofit design groups either apply designers in a volunteer capacity, or have them working from a distance. This prohibits designers from working on the ground, in a grassroots fashion.

Our design fellowship program is launching within a year. We are currently networking with other fellowship organizations to learn the process, so to not reinvent the wheel. Next week, we’re headed back to India to spend time networking and developing relationships with partner organizations for our fellows to work with.

What qualifies someone to become a fellow, and what does it entail?
Ideally, the fellows will come from a design background, but we consider this to be very broad. We are looking for professionals with research, design, engineering, or marketing backgrounds so as to create diversity within a project. The fellows will partner with organizations to determine the project needs. It’s a yearlong program. The fellows will receive pre-travel leadership training, and then they will spend six months on-site. We really believe that a long-term immersion process benefits all parties involved. After leaving the site, the fellows will become mentors through long-distance relationships for six more months. This lends sustainability to the project.

What products have you developed so far?
We have developed two products so far, both in India. The first is a charcoal briquette, and the second is a hand-made glycerin soap that will be sold internationally on the fair trade market. The design process for the briquette went like this: one of the NGOs we’re working with in the U.S. did some pre-trip research for us before we left to identify user locations and market densities, user needs, and information on how to make briquettes economically. They also looked at scenarios for distribution.

How do you plan to sell or distribute the briquettes?
The city where the briquettes are produced is only 50 km away from the user location. For distribution, we have linked up with women’s microfinance groups, which serve both as potential users, and also they can take the briquettes as an opportunity to make cash by selling them in their communities for a profit. We also have a local partner who helped with financial analysis for the distribution of the briquettes. They identified about 500 families in a Tamil Nadu, a city of 2 million, who will use the briquette on a frequent basis (five days a week). We’re thinking we’ll be ready to go with full distribution in February or March of 2011. The charcoal briquette retails at 5.5 rupees, and each seller stands to make one rupee per sell.

And what about the soaps?
The soaps will be sold internationally on the fair trade market. The reason for that has to do with the market for soap in India: the price points are very low, so hard to make a profit, without producing at a mass scale. The fair trade market is a place where the producers can get the premium price they need to justify the soap project. So far, we’ve networked on the U.S. side with Whole Foods and 10,000 Villages. One of our U.S. partner organizations, Kaleidoscope, did some market audits and consumer interviews for us pro-bono. The craft/fair trade market looks promising for these soaps, but there are no guarantees on that. Product and liability insurance is complicated. We have some experience doing that with previous products, and now we’re relying on our network of consultants to help us through some of those technical details.

What is the role of design education in your work?
We think that education is an important aspect of doing this work. It’s educating designers about the opportunities to do socially-oriented design, and how doing this kind of design works, and why to do it. We also target people who are not familiar with design, to show them why it can be useful in certain situations. We are trying to open up more doors for designers to do work. It also serves as a strategy to provide some funding for the non-profit, a diversified income scheme.

We hope in the long-term that our educational programs provide a way for us to have a broader influence, since many of our projects are specific to certain areas. This is a way we can be a part of a global conversation.

We’ve done everything from teaching courses at universities, to giving workshops, to corporate presentations. We’ve also taught high-school dropouts in Delhi about the design process.

How did that come about?
We met people from the India Habitat Center (HIC) through our host organization ODAM. They run a program in New Delhi for high school dropouts that focuses on cultural enrichment and technical education. They were interested in working with DI to provide a weeklong workshop that would teach the basics of design appreciation and graphic design. We worked with two groups of twenty students for four days. They developed flyers, using free design software that promoted safe and clean environments in their neighborhoods.

Interview was edited and condensed.

Photo: Design Impact