Humanitarian design = cultural imperialism

Developed economies have all done raw material-munching, pollution-belching industrial revolutions. But, in a Green mood, they now tell emerging economies to avoid not just the nasty side-effects of industrialisation, but industrialisation itself. In the South and East, Western designers prefer low-tech, environmentalist projects they deem ‘humanitarian’. Here, I argue instead that the developing world wants, deserves and is already practising the very best in technology and design.

As we all know, Hillary Clinton could be the next President of the United States. But if she wins, what would that mean for the world’s designers? A clue: in 2009 she proclaimed that Americans wanted China to grow and have high living standards, but not ‘make the same mistakes we made.’ (1)

Time to tell the truth. Unless we change the agenda, Western designers active in developing countries will remain slaves to the Clinton doctrine. Perhaps unconsciously, they want those countries not to make America’s ‘mistakes’. But what are these mistakes? They’re achievements that developing countries desperately need. They’re achievements to explain and uphold through graphics, support with product design, and implement in architecture: large-scale electricity generation and water supply, the assembly line, the car, the tractor, machine tools, refrigeration, antibiotics, air conditioning, gas-fired central heating and satellite communications.

Most Western designers don’t want these achievements for Africa or India; many don’t even make Clinton’s rhetorical commitment to growth and high living standards in China. Instead, through ‘humanitarian’ design, Western designers look like they will go on recommending, to developing countries, not the full-on technologies and designs we enjoy in the West, but environmentally correct, low-tech and local alternatives. Thus, in one of the poorest settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, where 400 households compete for one tap, the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) promotes concrete ‘platforms’ for shared toilet facilities and ‘more dignified’ water collection. (2) Owning your own loo? Forget it. After 21 years of self-enrichment by the African National Congress, ICSID colludes with that corrupt organisation to reconcile the poor to slightly less poverty.

The condescension continues. New York Times pundit Alice Rawsthorn raves about how Studio Swine, based in the UK and Japan, helps rubbish-collectors in São Paulo, Brazil, make stools from aluminum cans. (3) Orkidstudio, a design-orientated Scottish charity, uses bags filled with earth, recycled timber and rainwater to help an orphanage in Kenya. (4) My old friend-gone-Green, Jon Thackara, eulogises India’s 11th century schemes for capturing rainwater. (4) We hear nothing about modern furniture factories such as Nigeria’s giant Universal Furniture, or the pioneering membrane desalination methods that have come to the Maldives. (5) Apparently such developments are off the agenda forever.   

Western designers look like they will go on repeating that half a craft loaf is better than hunger. But humanitarian design gives developing countries much less than half a loaf. Its worthy projects distract from the ambitions that design ought to serve. These interventions won’t be humanitarian – they’ll simply spread elite distaste for economic growth from the West to the East and the South.

For humanitarian design, developing countries mainly represent consumer demand: demand that must be restrained. It is a power play that, affecting to be humble and egalitarian, in practice holds back the ‘developing’ that developing countries do. It sticks a Band-Aid over suffering to dismiss, or to kill with kindness, the kind of thoroughgoing, structural change that developing countries really need – and that, thankfully, many developing countries are already undertaking.

Of course, doing good will remain a proper part of every designer’s motives. But doing good shouldn’t be about ‘helping the natives’ in missionary style – so as to alleviate your Western guilt, or so as to find your true mission, self, or place in the world.

To do good, Western designers should stop telling developing countries that technology is not the way forward. Given the right political regime, it is exactly the way forward. One day the developing world will have the money, technologists and designers both to build grand plans for progress, and to fully maintain and upgrade the products of such plans.

In recent years, we should not forget, firms such as Embraer, Tata, Huawei, SAB Miller, Samsung and HTC have done well in the West. Perhaps that’s why Western interests want to narrow the scope for innovation in developing countries and to leave to one side the issue of labour productivity there. Mirroring all this, humanitarian design will remain silent about 3D-printed mass housing, and about plant control rooms, machine tools, CAD, agricultural machinery, freight transport. Yet design in these domains can raise productivity and help developing countries to compete on the world market. It can have benefits that are not as trumpeted as those of mobile phones in developing countries, but which are much greater. If design is not the handmaiden of and an inspiration to technology, its effect on developing countries will be negligible.

‘Intermediate’ and ‘appropriate’ technologies have also long had fans in the West. (7) And the derivative idea of ‘frugal’ innovation – the sort that makes a virtue out of stripped down, just-good-enough products and services – has now spread back from Indian campuses to Californian hospitals. (8) Yet even advocates of such approaches are forced to admit that, in developing countries, the practical adoption of these hair-shirt philosophies, let alone their impact, has been tiny. (9)

Good. Large-scale, capital-intensive projects should be the future for the developing world. They are the humanistic alternative to the bankrupt programme of Hillary Clinton and humanitarian design.

References

1. http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2009a/02/119433.htm
2. http://www.icsid.org/feature/current/articles1972.htm
3. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/arts/design/the-fab-mind-a-tokyo-show-highlights-design-activism.html?_r=0
4. http://www.gizmag.com/orkidstudio-rainwater-harvesting-orphanage-kenya/35106/
5. http://www.impactdesignhub.org/2015/01/14/interview-with-john-thackara/?utm_source=c77site
6. http://www.universalfurnitureng.com/about-us/ and http://www.wqpmag.com/success-maldives
7. http://practicalaction.org
8. http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/creativity-before-capital-health-systems-and-frugal-innovation.html
9. http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/download/12176/9085