design for survival

Design for Survival

With the number of ‘slums’ in developing and Third World countries rising to an astonishing amount, there has been focus on tackling the source and coming up with solutions.

In ‘Planet of Slums’, Mike Davis has a world wide political approach to the mater and presents a lot of well supported data as if to raise more awareness of the problem. He seems to make the problem a global one and ultimately asks questions of governments and political influences of the past and present. However, it’s somewhat obvious that the UN and world leading countries have a vast impact on the increase or decrease in urbanization and slums through their advances to problem solving and help strategies.

On the whole, Davis’ report is one that is most helpful when you don’t know what slums are and how they came about.

Meanwhile, some contemporary design takes the basic needs for survival for granted and focuses on making other aspect of modern life better or more efficient. This is the point that organisations like ‘design for the other 90%’ are raising through their campaigns and actions in developing and third world countries. Within their ideology they’ve split survival into six sections, Shelter, Health, Education, Water, Energy and Transport. Each one has a clear aim and attempts to achieve it in the most simplest and cost efficient way through projects supported by bigger product developing companies. Most of these projects seem quiet far fetched and sometimes miss the point like the ‘One Laptop per Child’ campaign, which ignores the use of scaffolding in an educational environment that is far behind compared to ones in the developed world.

As products, items like the portable light bag seem to be very sustainable but when you look at these campaigns as a whole the ones that work best are those that take a sustainable approach to the society they’re introduced to. Amongst other things design has the power to create culture whereby, instead of building shelter for the homeless people, you teach those people how to gather equipment and build houses independently. KickStart, a construction firm that work with other organisations to prevent poverty in Third World countries, make design solutions like the ‘latrine cover slabs’ for more affordable sanitation. The process is designed by KickSart and uses some of their products but it’s introduced in such a way that locals have overstepped the first hurdle of cost effective production and can sustain their development autonomously.

http://other90.cooperhewitt.org/

http://kickstart.org/home/

http://www.inhabitat.com/

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-mike-davis-part-1.html