Useful?

Projects such as the Q Drum, Lifestraw and Big Boda are useful. They have been designed functionally to address specific needs but are they resolving a situation or merely reacting to it?
Frances Whitehead, in her piece Primary Plus, examines products used to contain toxic oil spills and questions whether these “sophisticated remediation strategies perpetuate unsustainable practices such as shipping crude oil across the oceans?”.1 Similarly I would question whether these projects fulfill a similar role by ameliorating the immediate situation without tackling the root issues.


In particular the Q Drum presents an elegant, simple solution to ease the transportation of water -it is round so it can roll. However, what I find particularly interesting about this project is its inbuilt assumption that nobody had thought of a rolling container and that it required a designer to bestow this gift of innovation.
Rolling containers obviously already exist (such as the Aquaroll pictured) so it is not the lack of a container design which is the problem but the lack of access to existing products and adding another unobtainable product to the roster doesn’t help anybody.





That is not to say that design cannot be of use unless it deals directly with large problems and that there can be no value in small scale intervention. Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE project, in his own words, “ does not present itself as a solution.” as it does nothing to get the homeless off the streets (instead actually prolonging life on the streets).2 This project, however was never intended to directly solve problems but instead to provoke public debate. Rakowitz hopes that “the failure of paraSITE as a design project may put the onus on designers to provide proposals for longer lasting structures” but I would argue that Rakowitz has already created a successful design project.3 As with the water drums the problem here is not the existence of a physical object solution but the underlying social-political-economic structure which creates the problem and this is what his project addresses.


N:1 Stephanie Smith and Victor Margolin. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art(Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005): 131.
N:2 Michael Rakowitz, “The paraSITE - an inflatable shelter for the homeless that runs off expelled HVAC air”, gizmag.com, http://www.gizmag.com/go/4455/3/ (accessed March 4th 2009).
N:3 Stephanie Smith and Victor Margolin. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art(Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005): 123.