Hand Over Your Tools
Posted on December 19, 2013 | posted by:
When Bruce Nussbaum wrote about humanitarian design as the new design imperialism, like others in the class, I began to question if we as designers living in privileged situations should act at all? I had a conversation with a classmate who had witnessed the failures of a particular humanitarian design project while living in an African country. We discussed whether or not it is ever truly helpful for a designer to act in situations where they are alien to the true lived experience of a place and community. I posed if perhaps with the time, community involvement, and financial resources necessary, one could complete a meaningful and helpful humanitarian project without posing an imperialist, bare-bones rendition of an appropriation from a different context.
Even if the proper research, framing, and prototypes were completed and utilized for the final iteration, still my classmate was not satisfied with the idea that humanitarian designers would be able to provide meaningful help by entering the community and using their design powers to solve problems. Their stance on the issue was solidified around the true needs of the community being to gain people who will become permanent productive members of that community. They posed that these communities really need teachers, doctors, and nurses who have had access to a high-quality education and can contribute the benefit of that education and experience to the local hospitals, clinics, and classrooms.
I agree that the true needs of the community are an improvement in education and the capacity of medical care, but I believe that design is still a discipline that applies to every community. I believe in design as a tool to solve problems and I doubt that those problems are limited to Europe and America. In “Is Humanitarian Design, Design Imperialism?” Nussbaum wrote, “should we take a moment now that the movement is gathering speed to ask whether or not American and European designers are collaborating with the right partners, learning from the best local people, and being as sensitive as they might to the colonial legacies of the countries they want to do good in?” I took a long pause to think about this question. In more than one case, Nussbaum experienced non-Western lecture audiences reacting negatively to Western humanitarian design presentations. Even though the humanitarian designers had the very best intentions, the communities that the designers’ efforts target may not have interest in receiving the intervention.
After reading about these cases of backlash against the thoughtful work of humanitarian designers, I thought back to an experience in my architecture education. My professor said, “Never go to a client meeting with any finished drawings, just sketches. They will think you’ve already finished and made decisions without their input and people don’t like to be left out of decisions.” Even if as designers, we work within the community to solve a problem, the success of the project can be based on ownership. In India, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project by MIT Media Lab, Pentagram, Continuum, and fuseproject was not successful. “The Indian establishment locked OLPC out precisely because it perceived the effort as inappropriate technological colonialism that cut out those responsible for education in the country —policymakers, teachers, curriculum builders, parents.” The OLPC project could have been a wonderful educational tool. However, the national establishments of India and China, the two of the main stakeholders for the project, felt that the project had the potential to be a form of colonialism. We cannot blame the countries for rejecting the project, because after all it is their own communities and jobs that designers are negating through powerful design interventions. Perhaps as designers, we can return to the root of design thinking to solve the problem of humanitarian design being perceived as design imperialism.[1]
The root of design thinking is that design is a tool to solve problems. Design is not necessarily a tool to make objects to solve problems. I see this as one of the most powerful revelations in the Transdisciplinary Design program. Coming from a traditional design background, I initially missed building and thinking about material and spatial or tactile experiences or how I could design for someone else. As I learned tools to broker the existing capabilities within a community and how their capacities can be leveraged into systemic action, I realized that humanitarian design doesn’t need objects or thoroughly pondered plans. Yes, a humanitarian architect can design a better shelter for an impoverished family, but perhaps there are more dire needs within the family for education. By bringing our design tools and enthusiasm to communities and sharing our knowledge about design and its capacity to leverage the tacit knowledge of an entire community of people, we can leave more than a legacy of built or manufactured form. Perhaps the community will do nothing with the new information, but certainly if they do anything at all with the tools it will be more meaningful to their community than the intervention we designed for them at our air-conditioned desk on the 12th floor.
[1] Nussbaum, Bruce. “Is Humanitarian Design the New Design Imperialism?”. Fast Company. 6 July 2010. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1661859/is-humanitarian-design-the-new-imperialism
[2] No Hammers Sign. http://www.marinesigns.com/offshore/OffSignList.php?cat=ps