Charity begins at home

Hell, helping a brother out of a scrape can't be a bad thing. But, like, as I'm sure anybody who's stuck around long enough to read these posts will have considered themselves - are we generally talking altruism or just a way to feel better about ourselves? (Another form of Inconsiderate-Lifestyle Offsetting.) OK, sure, I understand designing for what a designer might consider to be a problem is in a lot of respects different from donating money to Oxfam, but what exactly is it that a designer offers?

I guess there's no use trying to avoid using this pathetic reference (but my apologies anyway): So if you give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, or you teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime, the understanding is that you can rightly assume a teaching role on account of your possessing a skill (for example fishing) that 'a man' does not. And would benefit from learning.

Now maybe it's about time for me to put down the keyboard and ask myself, "Is it just me? Am I just easily offended?" but there are very few occasions where I've felt comfortable with the idea of one-way cross-cultural education, initiated by the educators. The thing is, whenever I as much as think about the crises we perceive the human race to be facing, I just can't help but feel patronising. Or preachy, or something. And that's before I've even considered designing an award-winning intervention.

Although, sure, the phrase itself is effective and to the point. (And the practical side can't be much worse than designing for the 10%, right? And dang, there do seem to be a lot of inspiring projects out there.) There's always this perpetuation of the distinction between roles that we/I don't seem to be able to move away from: the in group/out group. Designer/user. (Author/reader, blah blah/blah blah.) And even when people explain that 'we' have a lot to learn from 'them', it's always consciously in contrary to the assumed order, but never far enough away from those ideals.

What's the real difference between any two cultures in these situations? I cringe to type it, but maybe the difference between ourself and our underprivileged friends is purely financial. And from such a conclusion maybe teaching a man to fish, to contribute to his growing economy seems attractive. But from where I'm looking, money's a pretty strange thing. (Financial markets, currency rates - if the consequences of the whole game weren't so potentially damaging, I'd probably take Charlie Brooker's approach and describe it as a fantasy world.) On the flipside, whether a community are 'better off' the way they are (as opposed to having an outsider's assumptions of quality of life, etc., imposed onto them), or should avoid making the same mistakes Western cities and economies have seemingly made in their development, is probably not for an outsider to determine.

I'm so undecided on this it hurts. I watched the TED Talk with Negroponte (the founder of OLPC) and the project made a little more sense afterwards (especially with his emphasis on it being an education project, not a laptop project - although, sure that brings up all sorts of new complexities). I find this whole 'one chill-dude pays, another chill-dude doesn't' set-up interesting. I guess it's kinda like the dole. Either way, with each chill-dude receiving the same product from the deal, if not ground breaking, it's certainly an interesting, if only moderate, variation to conventional models of charity. I wouldn't fully disagree that aesthetically the laptop itself could be deemed patronising, but at least as opposed to being aimed at adults of a different cultural background that the designer's made sweeping assumptions about, it is actually for children. And ultimately, probably the most attractive element of the project is that it's for children from the designers' own country and socio-economic background, too.

Maybe a step towards designing for

Sure, for it's age-group specific design, it's not fully 'inclusive', but I find this approach to design for similar groups in different countries, essentially including the designer's own, pretty interesting.

Michael