by Worldchanging New York local blogger Amy Shaw: This summer the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum is featuring an ambitious and refreshingly different kind of design exhibition: Design for the Other 90%. The show features ingenious yet low-cost functional objects that, according to the museum, highlight “the growing trend among designers to develop solutions that address basic needs for the vast majority of the world’s population not traditionally serviced by professional designers.” Well arranged in the museum’s magnificent garden, Design for the Other 90% treats the viewer to one good idea after another, in the form of solar-powered portable LED lights, devices that store rainwater for irrigation, and insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria (shown at the bottom). Many of these products are already in use in dozens of countries around the world, including the United States. I found a few products especially useful, economical, and well built. The LifeStraw, shown here, is a portable water-purification tool that one drinks through to turn any still water into drinkable water. The Q Drum, designed to make it easier for people in drought-prone areas to carry water over distances, is a wide donut-shaped container with a rope strung through so that the… (more)
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Design at 1:04 PM)