Material Innovations

Plastic bags have been called the “flower of Africa” because of their ubiquitous presence as discarded items throughout the landscape. Similar to other African countries, the litter created by plastic bags is considered one of Mali’s worst ecological problems, polluting waterways, harming animals and harboring disease. The annual flooding of the Niger River that flows through Mali benefits the surrounding agricultural region, but leaves behind stagnant water in all the plastic refuse – bags in particular – which creates breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes.

Plastic bags litter Nairobi, a scene also common in Mali and throughout Africa

In 2007, the Aga Khan Foundation began a social development project in Mopti, a port city on the Niger River, to recycle plastic bags into street paving blocks. Mopti, apparently, needed a major cleanup and economic revitalization. The recycling program engaged local residents of Mopti to collect discarded plastic bags and bring them to a workshop, where the plastic was melted down, mixed with sand to create a paste, and poured into a mold for a paving block. These “stones” were used to pave several of the city streets. France 24 reported that, a year later, the project had helped transform Mopti to a clean city where business was booming and tourism increasing. Watch their report on “Mopti’s ‘ecological’ pavestones”:

The downside to the Aga Khan recycling project, however, is evident in the above video: the process releases toxic fumes that endanger the workers, and the protective masks they wear seem inadequate. Enter: Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP) and engineers from Brown University. Earlier this year, they reported an attempt at designing a healthier and more sustainable method to recycle Mali’s plastic bags into paving blocks. They describe it as “a parabolic solar collector to collect the sun’s energy and melt these bags using that energy.”

MHOP's Transforming Trash prototype uses solar energy and controlled heat to melt plastic bags for recycling

The solar-powered plastic recycler looks like a well-intentioned design solution to Mali’s plastic problem, but it’s still a solution from afar and doesn’t address the heart of the problem – the production and consumption of plastic bags. Some African countries have banned the use of certain types of plastic bags (targeting especially the thinnest bags that can’t be reused), and Nigerian scientists are currently working to create biodegradable bags for widespread commercial production and use. Even more effective might be to address waste management efforts and changing consumer habits and behaviors.

Mali has developed some homegrown solutions to the pervasiveness of plastic, in the form of industrially produced household goods of recycled plastic:

Recycled plastic goods on a street in Bamako, Mali

Recycled plastic kettles used by many Malians for daily ablutions

Malian artisans also recycle plastic to make wares such as baskets, prayer mats, jewelry, toys, etc. According to the Made in Africa website, “above all, it is manual craftsmen who work with recycled materials. Leftovers from local industry are collected and used as raw materials in their respective production activities.” As in many other parts of the world, the daily industry of some Malians includes collecting and sorting trash, either exchanging it for cash at factories and workshops where it will be recycled, or repurposing it themselves to create utilitarian and aesthetic objects.

Malian baskets made of recycled plastic bags

Mali: Genius Loci Exported to the World

Presentation text (link to PDF):
Mali’s Materials & Exports

Small-scale gold mining in Suriname goes back as far as the early 1700s, when the first five ounces of gold dust were exported to the Netherlands. However, the industry did not really pick up as a viable means of making a living until over a century later, when developments to support the industry began to take root. Then in the 1970s and 80s, a veritable gold rush took place, as minimal regulations on mining allowed for necessary funds to support the guerrilla activity of political upheaval, and isolated rainforest communities needed a way to import food, supplies and equipment.

The gold industry—particularly small-scale mining, which is understood to be “characterized by a labor force that is not formally trained in mining and uses rudimentary techniques for prospecting, extracting, and processing of gold”—is good for the economy, and provides much-needed work opportunities for the Surinamese people. Some living in the Maroon communities and the large numbers of Brazilian immigrants benefit, at least monetarily speaking, from the entire mining service economy. This includes not just the miners themselves but also the “women who sell food and cigarettes in the mining area, the owners of small stores, cooks, carpenters, sex workers, and transport providers, among others.”  The industry supports the economies of several small forest villages that have few other options for creating income.

Despite certain economic advantages, gold mining is severely problematic for almost every other sector of life in Surinamese communities, as it has adverse physical, health, and environmental effects for all those connected to the mining industry and beyond.  Small-scale mining causes serious land degradation by creating swamps, open craters, and major pollution through the use of oil and toxic substances. Large amounts of standing water create fertile beds for disease-carrying mosquitoes, and a severely lacking public health system allows for frequent malaria transmission.

In addition, the mining system creates significant amounts of water pollution, forcing villagers to travel long distances to source clean drinking water. This also significantly reduces the availability of fish, which generally serve as the only means for protein. Furthermore, small-scale miners use a technique that involves mercury, meaning that about 10 to 20,000 kilograms of mercury are released into Suriname’s air and ecosystem on an annual basis. Because the majority of workers are young men, the sex industry is rampant in mining areas, leading to widespread sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS.

There are also socioeconomic issues that come along with the instability of the mining industry. With very little regulation and control in place, incomes are variable and unreliable, and rampant crime and violence lead to both chaos and insecurity.

The active players in this debacle are:

+The wider gold industry

+Surinamese economy

+The miners themselves

+Miners’ families + communities

+Indigenous peoples and Maroons that are not involved in mining

+Natural environment + ecosystems

So is the trade-off worth it?

While the financial benefits associated with mining disappear soon after mining activities have ceased, the negative environmental, health, and social implications remain long after miners have left the area.  How do we weigh the cost-benefits of a system that provides financial resources, but simultaneously manages to destroy and deplete so many paramount factors of life? Overall, it seems as though gold-mining in Suriname is not sustainably life-giving, unless the industry makes some radical changes in its behavior.

Bamboo Housing

Just wanted to share this great and inspiring image.  What more does one need?  More Pics here… Obviously part editorializing on the part of the photographers in how the objects were displayed for the photos, it is interesting to note the significance of the television in all the images.

photo: Huang Qingjun and Ma Hongjie

With a new sub-category of designer appearing daily it seems, an emerging field might be a designer who designs new fields of design – a design designer.  That said, it is an interesting exercise to compare the sentiments of Bjarke Ingels’ Yes is More, Tad Hirsch’s Learning from Activists: Lessons for Designers, and Poonam Bir Kasturi’s Designing Freedom. After watching his impressive TED Talk video, it is clear that Bjarke Ingels thinks big (and, has an airtight brand around bigness).

Bjarke Ingels (photo: Esben Brunn)

His firm is BIG (Bjarke Ingles Group), his intellect is big, his ideas are big, his presence is big, and after seeing a handful of media images of this impressive young man, his ego seems big as well.  Thankfully, though, not too big.  Ingels talks and walks in big strides.  His manifesto, Yes is More is no exception wherein he promotes an incredible confidence surrounding his optimistic win-win-win philosophy of uber-inclusive, non-partisan approach to architecture.

Practically a politician more than architect, Ingels insists on the incorporation of  important elements from ALL stakeholders of a project.  Since his firm’s commissions have grown to include huge scale urban developments, he has in fact become a politician – an eventuality necessitated by the political landscape of competing interests at the regional, and even international scale which is the canvas for his work.

Ingels speaks explicitly about the process of saying yes to one party as well as saying yes to the opposition (which is inherently contradictory to the interests of the first party) as a tool to get everyone’s competing interests working in synergy to propel, not derail a project.  His vision is strategic in nature and very long term.  He specifically references Aikido – a martial art that utilizes the opponent’s momentum for your favor – as a point of reference for his political strategy.

Ingels’ interest is in stark contrast to Ted Hirsch’s motivation behind Contestational Design which is decidedly tactical and partisan.  In his doctoral thesis, Hirsch identifies the defining characteristic of Contestational Design as, “a willingness to take sides in contentious social issues.” (p.121)

Tad Hirsch

Whereas the contemporary perspective on design encourages egalitarian or at least democratic sensibility, considering all stakeholders as valid in theory (even if not always in practice as we will later see with Poonam Bir Kasturi’s essay), Contestational Design principles rally behind confrontation bordering on provocation.  An MIT graduate, Hirsch proposes design “solutions” to engage the most sophisticated technology in waging civilized warfare against the ruling class.  The Contestional designers will face severe employment challenges if s/he thinks in terms of win-win-win.  In a war of information, or will, there is only one winner.  Incidentally, where Bjarke makes a lot of friends through his work, Hirsch makes, well, a lot of enemies – big ones, at that.  Here’s a link to an article reporting that the NY City Law Department subpoenaed Hirsch for his involvement with a large protest in 2004 during the Republican National Convention.

One criticism I have of this pursuit is that the rapid innovation of devices and schemes to enable and promote civil protest (the primary activity of contestation design) only serves as a free R&D service for the very powers CD aims to contest when those devices and schemes are confiscated.  On the other hand, one thing I appreciate about CD is that it is not a typical client-based, market-driven activity.  The designs are tools that solve communication problems under specific conditions.  And like a tool, CD is issue-neutral and therefore, at least in theory, available to anyone with a need to use it.  In this way, CD approaches the egalitarian utopia hinted at in Poonam Bir Kasturi’s essay.

Poonam Bir Kasturi

One persistent idea of late is that design is key to, responsible for, solely capable of (name your flavor) saving mankind from itself.  This is the foundation to Poonam Bir Kasturi’s essay Designing Freedom in which she challenges designers to save the craftspeople from obsolescence.  There’s a little Ingels in her writing when she speaks of empowering others who are quickly losing relevance. Yet, there’s a bit of Hirsch in her ideas as well when she speaks as a champion for the underdog that is oppressed by astronomically huge forces.

But one thing that disturbs me about the Bir Kasturi piece is the patronizing tone.  The term she uses is “uppers” to describe people of influence and includes designers in that bunch.  She is a designer, thus an upper by her own definition.  It is from this privileged position that she looks down on the craftspeople as incapable of learning, growing, prospering, or otherwise succeeding without a design solution saving them from a self-imposed irrelevance in the wake of this market-driven, global consumerism.

I appreciate her interest in teaching critical problem-solving and other design-thinking skills in the dynamic, responsive and rewarding atmosphere of a design school.  However, I take issue with her ‘us and them’ attitude toward the designers and craftspeople respectively.  As an upper herself, she’s more of the problem than she recognizes.  By viewing the craftspeople as helpless without her designer interventions, she perpetuates the perception of their insignificance.  One thing she might consider is that the empowered craftsperson is his own designer and thus makes the designer obsolete.

Theoretical: Here at FUBAR Designs we are constantly working on the latest and greatest design solutions for the twenty-first century.  Recently, we were asked to lead a design seminar in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to assist with rebuilding solutions.  A recent study found that the best design standards for some of the capitol’s building actually led to their collapse during the earthquake.  The structures we built so solidly that they actually amplified the shaking and collapsed instead of flowing with the earthquake.  This definitely sounded like a job for FUBAR.

We were asked to assemble an international team of designers to put heads together and create some solutions for the next generation of Hatians. Designers in Denmark, France, Australia, etc. were on standby.  It was therefore a shock when we decided to look externally AND internally for the best design solutions. One thing that is plentiful in Haiti is labor. Using a local team of recruits armed with smart phones we sent them into the rubble to photograph every structure that was still standing so we could assess the properties of what helped it survive and pass that onto the engineers. Others made quick posters from discarded cardboard to advertise to any skilled builders to a prescribed meeting time.  Our top marketer met with local politicians to get their support in creating a local team of people to source and supply materials.   All the jobs utilized the resources that were already on the ground to organize and collect data for the seminar.  They used easily transmittable modern technology and local know-how to collect on-the-ground data.  Another local person found a bus and started collecting displaced craftspeople of all trades and brought them to the seminar.  Once assembled we were able to blend the know-how of international experts with the cultural relitavism of people from the community to develop housing ideas that would work best for Haiti using local materials, skills, and artistry to develop a culturally engaging framework.

What is next for FUBAR Designs? Helping Democrats!

I’m having fun with names here  and the premise is a little thin on reality, but the point is that if design is about creating a solution for a problem then it has to include the people it is solving the problem for to be brought in on the conversation.  Too often we see big name celebrity designers fly in with solutions without ever experiencing the day-to-day lives of the people.  The designs end up being flashy in the computer but stupid on the ground.  I saw this first hand with the presentations of how to transform our local Memorial Colosseum, flash but no concept of what the local people wanted.  With all the modern technology giving access to people with local craft knowledge it is a crime to waste their talents.  A craftsperson is simply someone who is excellent in a very specific practice.  Why not invite them to the table as a skilled point-of-view AND as an outsider with a bias?  The future of craft is a chair at the table of big design conflicts, and bigger hot dogs.

In the light of this craft and design program, I begin to see some major relevance in these texts, the Volume interview with Bjarke Ingels and the Designing Freedom article by Poonam Bir Kasturi, to the processes which we deal with in our own isolated studios. Both texts seem to eagerly highlight the prospects of bringing together our isolated ways of thinking, and to begin to resolve the disconnect in our modern, industrialized, and ultra-global communities. Although they talk about vastly different topics, they seem to both agree on a common consensus of participation between not only those who might be involved with a project, but those that might be affected by it in any manner. The answer can never lie in one party selecting an answer for the rest, but with every party collaborating and sharing until the answer is found that fits the needs of all. This model seems to lie in the community structures of the past, where it was the ultra-locality that seemed to bind the processes of all work to the citizen that specialized in that process, allowing a tangible and identifiable humanity to be prevalent in all aspects of work.

local meets global

The craft evolution has followed the nature of industrialization and has taken a step away from the design which used to be a completely vital and equal component, due to our industrialization which has created a system where craft is no longer a necessary method for sustaining the community’s functional needs. Craft has been granted a freedom to evolve itself into a studio practice that is taught separate from the function in which its tradition lies, and to the parallel, design has lost all of its connections to the object that craft creates, and rather has put all of its momentum into the efficiency and production of readily available goods. These two evolutions have created a rift which seems to desperately need mending.

d c e r s a i f g t n

The push that we have begun to see, especially in these two texts, is a need to create a bridge between the global and the local, and to find ways to connect the humane with the industrial, a role that lies within the power of makers, crafters, designers and artists who are fortunately becoming more aware and active in solving the broken connections between the small and gentle scale of the delicate human nature, and the powerful, momentous and ever evolving processes of industry and technology. We can connect these, and we can certainly do it beautifully.

Bike Bike Bike

Mobility

Tad Hirsch: TRIPWIRE

This week I was most interested in the article by Tad Hirsch on contestational design.  Hirsch states that contestational designers are “openly partisan practitioners who take sides in pressing issues of the day.”  He also states that “While mainstream design emphasizes workplace productivity and consumer experience, activist innovation is generally concerned with personal empowerment, collective action and non-hierarchical organization models.”  He also makes the point that contestational designers don’t have clients or consumers, they have collaborators who are also committed to taking political action.  Which is why there is little monetary support for this type of political activist design.  It doesn’t necessarily support capital gains.

Positive
Minimal Capital
Quick Deployment

Negative
Short lived
Little testing

Positive/Negative
+/- Public Experiments
+/- Open IP

The first thing that came to mind as I was reading this article was the Obama campaign.  Here is a video of Scott Thomas, Design Director Obama Campaign, talking about what was going on behind the scenes.  He discusses the changes taking place in unbelievably short timelines and the need for incremental design improvements as part of the process to creating a successful campaign.

Moving from political to environmental subject matter is the idea of design activism.  Alastair Fuad-Luke defines this approach to design on his website : “I believe that as an educator in ‘Design for Sustainability (DfS)’, as distinct from ‘Design’, there is always an implicit notion that DfS is trying to embrace new ways of thinking about how design can catalyse, nurture, enable and activate positive societal changes towards more sustainable ways of living and working.”

There are a multitude of approaches to design being discussed right now.  It is difficult to delineate one from the next and while lines are blurred I find the easiest way to think about them is in terms of non-partisan or partisan design.

IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit

Non-Partisan Design Approaches: User Centered Design, Human-Centered Design, Participatory Design, Co-Design

Partisan Design Approaches: Catalyst Design, Design With Intent, Persuasion Design, Contestational Design

I find myself utilizing an approach from the partisan design category.  Over the past few years I’ve become more informed of the environmental implications of our actions and it is not something I can deny or easily dismiss.  I think it would be extremely difficult for me to compromise that to design something that I didn’t find morally or environmentally just.  I don’t have a problem with utilizing design to start a movement or to intentionally create something that limits someone’s environmental impact.

In contrast, non-partisan design takes a neutral stance.  According to an article in ChangeObserver written by FROG Design’s Rob Fabricant: “Using the UCD approach, designers are one step removed from the action. We influence behavior and social practice from a distance through the products and services that we create based on our research and understanding of behavior. We place users at the center and develop products and services to support them. With UCD, designers are encouraged not to impose their own values on the experience.”

There is a place for both, but I also think designers have an opportunity, if not a responsibility, to design products, systems, and services that account for and encourage sustainable behavior.