Humanitarian Design and the perpetuation of imperialism

The world is fucked up! Half of the 6.5 billion people on this planet don’t have continual access to the essentials to human life (food, water, shelter ect.). Children die every day of diseases that were eradicated from developed countries a century ago, and the statistics and stories just keep coming. These problems are so massive and seemingly unsolvable that it’s easy to feel discouraged as a designer as to how you can help solve these problems. I think part of the reason that we feel this way is that there is the expectation that the design community can come up with ONE solution that will work fantastically everywhere. ONE disaster relief shelter that will be the “be all end all” shelter, ONE water filtration system to quench the world’s thirsty, ONE co-op service that will work anywhere from the villages of Bangladesh to the urban slums of Brazil. The fact is that we are not all ONE people, we are a collection of different cultures living in different geographies with different histories, and we need different solutions to fit these needs.

Another issue that I feel is getting in the way of humanitarian design is the fact that most of these humanitarian design solutions for third world countries are coming from the developed world. It’s not that I feel that a westerner can never design something that truly works for someone in the third world but rather I believe that this practice perpetuates an imperialistic mentality about people of the third world. You can see this clearly in ad campaigns from international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) such as Save the Children. Ads that have pictures of a starving African child who’s mom has died of AIDS and needs you $10 donation in order to survive only perpetuate this imperialistic mentality of the person of the third world as helpless and unable to take care of themselves and who needs a Westerner to come save them with everything that we pride ourselves with in our developed land.

I believe that the best way to solve humanitarian crises is by harnessing the local community to help develop solutions to their problems. One of the best example of humanitarian design that I saw on the Cooper Hewitt’s Design for the Other 90% site was the Katrina Furniture Project. Students from the University of Texas and Art Center College of Art and Design came up with the idea to create community workshops that use the debris from hurricane Katrina to make furniture such as church pews to sell in an effort to help the victims of hurricane Katina get back up on their feet. This project is community specific and that’s why I think it is so successful. While flipping through that site I found that a lot of the better designs were developed by designers in or around the countries that were in need of these designs.

Obviously this can’t be applied to all situations because a village destroyed by an earthquake needs immediate help and the design process takes time so this approach applies more to chronic problems of poverty and despair, which there is plenty of. Maybe as designers we shouldn’t be designing one product to solve the world’s problems but rather we should be designing systems that would enable the people affected by these problems to “co-design” the solutions so that the imperialistic mentality associated with western handouts it eliminated.