Everyone Deserves Great Design

http://www.everyonedeservesgreatdesign.com/#now

by cpeterso • 12 years ago

58 41 12 years ago

Great share, thank you!

“By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You might think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated, but in fact, Melinda and I are struck by how many people think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.”

Quite an optimistic statement after the pessimism created because of all the NSA, wars ... news.

3stripe• 12 years ago

This is why I no longer follow 'the news'

jp555• 12 years ago

Do you find it jarring when you do see "the news" now that you're desensitized to it?

I find it weird that the do-anything-to-get-attention bias of "the news" so much more obvious now for me that it all seems like satire.

Mikeb85• 12 years ago

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are brilliant designers and inventors in poor countries. And there is the saying "Necessity is the mother of invention"... What we need to be doing is empowering people (education, investment), and they'll blaze their own trail.

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

make sure you watch the monkey video, I forgot how it even related to the original content but it was priceless.

Mizza• 12 years ago

Does anybody else find this rather disturbing?

Even from the outset, "We live in a new age where globalization & capitalism must harmonize with social good" - bold faced newspeak. Anybody who has ever actually done social work who couldn't help but to see this as a bleak vision of the future.

The page goes even further, listing examples of well-intentioned although ineffective, dubbed "useless", designs in a negative light, and then showing Coca-Cola of all things as as the first example of a positive product, designed for everybody.

Though most of the design sense and advice here is good from a product perspective, to propose that capitalism is the solution to the problems shown here, or rather vaguely hinted at, is to me a disturbing vision. Capitalism is in many cases the primary contributing factor to them, all this mentality proposes is to give with one hand and take away with the other - and then feel accomplished and morally cleansed by the process.

There is much more to building a better world than building consumer products. If this is the best we can do, I am saddened.

kitsune_• 12 years ago

No shit, I have days where I look at advertisement, graphic design and marketing and can't help but subscribe to this view of Bill Hicks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

DanBC3• 12 years ago

The commerci product coca cola has massive market reach.

So much so that live saving and very cheap oral rehydration salts were being put in the same cartons as coca cola as a method of delivery with specialliy designed boxes that fit between the bottles.

http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00028535.html

NAIROBI, 2 March 2012 (IRIN) - How is it that the world's most popular fizzy drink reaches even the farthest-flung corners of the planet, yet vast numbers of children in developing countries die for lack of one of the cheapest and most effective preparations known to medical science?

The original concept has expanded the range of items being delivered (water purification tablets; vitamin A supplements) and allowing local businesses to sell these items.

hgh• 12 years ago

Two points, one on the project you mention and one on the article..

I worked on the Colalife project in Zambia via Zoona, a mobile payments company, and it's worth understanding how distribution of the product actually evolved.

Coke has enormous distribution into the farthest reaches of rural Zambia because there is enormous demand for the product, which Coke has achieved by its excellent marketing and a smart distribution model.

The Colalife project did great, entrepreneurial work to identify an issue and get a new medical product on the market, but it quickly found that distribution didn't happen by putting the product in coke crates as intended. When demand for oral rehydration salts/zinc increased, traditional distribution mechanisms took over -- boxes of the product making their way on trucks, bicycles, etc. There are things we can learn from Coke's marketing to help design solutions to social issues, but that's not the same as the consumer product itself contributing.

The article makes a good point that caring != ability to create something that produces social impact, but seems to miss the most important part: engaging with and actually understanding your customers, regardless of who they are. Caring itself is not a problem, it's that people conflate those good intentions with understanding, and since they care that is enough to push forward with an idea.

The missing principle, which is as true for affluent as well as disadvantaged customers, is to really engage with, understand and get feedback from your target market.

jzwinck• 12 years ago

Absolutely. Coca-Cola (the drink, not necessarily the company) is a scourge and always has been. Giving access to Coke to everyone is the last thing we should want, but it is happening.

The One World Futbol the article seems to think is good costs $40 for two, and is supposed to serve the poor? How does that make sense? The truly poor make footballs (soccer balls) from garbage; will a $20 ball do anything really positive, or will it be used as a status symbol and perhaps stolen?

Another weird thing: the article praises the Casio F91-W wristwatch which is supposedly a favorite for making bomb timers. Sure it's ubiquitous but they could have picked something without such a troublesome reputation.

There is here an idea that people in the third world ought to have what people in the first world have. In some cases they might be better off without.

ac2u• 12 years ago

I think his point was that in some cases the idea is to let the product get out there and let the people themselves decide as consumers, rather than someone arrogantly deciding that they would "be better off without".

rm4454• 12 years ago

The football clearly hasn't been fully commercialised. A durable foam moulded ball is one of those ideas that's super-obvious but requires just the right material to actually be fun to kick. Surely once the right polymer and foam density have been found it can be churned out for pennies.

rm4454• 12 years ago

You'll find it disturbing if you fundamentally distrust capitalism. It's true many social workers tend that way.

We won't settle anything in this discussion: it's fundamental to the left-right divide. One side thinks that it's vital to allocate resources fairly, and this can be done efficiently if only people would be good enough. The other side thinks that market forces are the only way we know to allocate resources efficiently, and that deviating too far from this in the name of fairness will become self-defeating due to excessive waste. Extremists on both sides make it hard to have a sensible conversation.

seanmcdirmid• 12 years ago

Most people are, however, moderates, not extremists. For some reason, the Internet mostly acts to amplify extremism, and we get this you are either left or right mentality (us politics has also been polarized as of late).

muuh-gnu3• 12 years ago

One side thinks that it's vital to allocate resources fairly

It is actually capitalism that thinks that it is vital to allocate resources fairly. Communists, on the other hand, think that resources should be allocated _equally_ with no regard to fairness. "To each according to his need."

this can be done efficiently if only people would be good enough.

And until people get good enough, which in reality will never happen, communists think that the use of force to take from those who have and give to those who dont is perfectly justifiable.

The other side thinks that market forces are the only way

Nope. The other side thinks that central planing and big goverment are a source of abuse of power. A free market isnt a perfect solution, but it is the lesser of two evils. If nobody has massive power, nobody can abuse power massively. There inevitably will be some abuse in a free market, but not in the orders of magnitude of, say, North Korea, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and other central planning epic fails.

deviating too far from this in the name of fairness

It is not done in the name of fairness, but in the name of equality. If fiarness was the goal, communism would be the side trying to not interfere and to leave everybody alone. But it is not. Communism is the side advocating maximum interventionism, of requiring (and enforcing) sacrifices for a centrally planed "greater good" etc.

Extremists on both sides make it hard to have a sensible conversation.

In my view, the only way to solve it would be to create communist and capitalist zones, and make it legally impossible to change that economic basis of a zone. The "conversation" would then amount to fans of capitalism and communism moving to their preferred zone. Neither side would be trying to forcibly make the other side live under their economic religion.

The problem is that the left doesnt actually want to draw that border between takers and makers, because they _are_ takers trying to get total control of the makers in order to exploit their productivity.

As long as communists are able to get control of a whole state and then forcibly redistribute _other_ people's wealth, there will be a state of perpetual low-intensity warfare between the left and the right. Knowing that once you give communists a single finger, they will feel entitled to the whole hand and try to forcibly amputate it, is not in any way extremism, but knowlege of history paired with a sense of self-preservation.

What point does it make to have a conversation with people who are basically trying to legally mug you?

Pacabel• 12 years ago

The horrible design of the page itself made it damn near impossible for me to follow the message they were trying to express.

Its design is really all over the place. There's no consistency when it comes to the font sizes, capitalization, text colors, and paragraph width. The images and text are mixed in a disruptive manner. Some of the images are pointless and irrelevant, yet still take up a large chunk of the visible portion of the page.

After reading a chunk of text, it'd take far too much effort and time to search around to figure out where they were continuing. That proves to be very distracting.

I eventually gave up rather quickly. They should just offer their message as a plain article, without such a frenzied design taking away from whatever it is they're trying to say.

filmgirlcw• 12 years ago

This. The white type over the various busy backgrounds was so undressable, I couldn't take any of the other rumination a seriously.

bryans• 12 years ago

I'm confused by how the plastic chair receives such high praise for its design, affordability and ease of maintenance, but adding wheels to that same chair somehow makes it an example of a "useless" product with poor design.

For $78, the organization is able to produce and ship a wheelchair around the world. They are able to use or augment existing products, which drastically reduces the cost of development, tooling, and production. As far as I can tell, the next cheapest option would cost a minimum of $150, with an equally cheap production quality.

Is it the best quality product ever made? Not at all. But it's not meant to be. It's meant to effectively serve the most number of people with the smallest amount of capital. In that sense, this product meets all of its design and mission goals. To declare otherwise based on some arbitrary "prettiness" factor is pretentious, at best.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

This is totally misguided. The simple facts are that 'great design' is not the single factor in success or failure of any kind of product, and that not all things created through charities are failures.

Of course if you want to peddle the opposite then you can support your weak position by selecting examples from the real world underpinning it but these are just instances and not generalizations. You could just as easy argue the opposite using different examples (capitalism is the root of all evil and nonprofits are the way forward).

Neither of these positions is supported by all the data available, so like in many other cases the situation is more complex than what you can easily catch in a soundbite and a blogpost.

The monkey video embedded makes a completely different point than the one that the author wants to extract from it: that two monkeys doing the same work side-by-side expect equal pay. It has nothing to do with 'products' or 'design'.

I get the dig at the prosthetic arm (the writer is co-founder of http://madebybump.org/#global), but since that's a non-profit I have no idea why the capitalism angle is emphasized so much.

"""Have you ever wondered about how a homeless person on the side of the street and the leader of the free world consume the same fizzy soda drink just to have a fleeting moment of happiness?"""

If your happiness comes from drinking cola then you have other problems.

Maybe this is some kind of elaborate satire?

DanBC3• 12 years ago

The article criticises the cheap prosthetic hand.

Sure, it'd be great if better prosthetics were available at an affordable cost. They're not.

The competition is DIY prosthetics using old soda bottles and hot air.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yvev6shNvSg

fungi• 12 years ago

Talk of "social good" seems fairly shallow when you are failing accessibility pretty spectacularly. Obvious example being not having alt tags on images (and the few that they you do have are the file name).

Feels like another agency website... with above average hyperbole.

chewxy• 12 years ago

Discussion from the last time this was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624189

I wrote:

I wonder what OP thinks about things like the NeoNurture?
I find the site quite disingenuous - it really feels like a First World Problem kinda thing. Yes, the prosthetic arm is lame and a poor design, but compared to having no arm, it's much much better.
OP argues that design should be for everyone, and lays out 4 foundations of good design. He/She missed out the most important one: economics

bshimmin• 12 years ago

I was interested by the choice of the Casio watch as a "great product". While they are certainly iconic watches that have survived the test of time, the user-friendliness of the alarm functionality is extremely dubious to me - three completely unmarked buttons that do stuff while somewhat cryptic symbols appear on the display, all dependent on what order the buttons are pressed.

My wife used to have one of these watches and frequently would accidentally set an alarm for some random time (usually 4am) and have absolutely no idea how to stop this happening. (I don't know if it had a manual or whether she ever read it, but she certainly hasn't read her iPhone's manual and doesn't struggle to set alarms with that.)

sammermpc• 12 years ago

This is a primer in a kind of design language mumbo-mumbo. It's not clear what the conclusions even are, beyond a few pithy throw-away phrases...mysterious.

fidanov• 12 years ago

Not buying this. Mainly statements with very little research and almost no connection between them. Written so that it's sounds convincing for the people who want believe in it.

Bad design is most of the time a simple lack of research, or not enough research, of what are the actual needs and problems that people encounter.

ulisesrmzroche• 12 years ago

That headline and the 1st paragraph don't have enough contrast, and the little bold type with the red color has far too much. It makes it really hard to read.

klunger• 12 years ago

For everyone that was confused by the Coke bottle thing... I am pretty sure it was a hat-tip to Andy Warhol, who is probably someone the author studied in design school. The quote / idea is pretty well known in those circles. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/andywarhol597858....

dang• 12 years ago

A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624189.

a-nikolaev• 12 years ago

The article is a reminder to all well-intentioned people: When working on something, design it as if you are going to use it yourself. Abstracting your customer is not acceptable. Especially if they are people with disabilities, or if they live in less developed countries than yours. If you are making a pump for them, make a good pump. If you are making a football, make a good football. If people need simple but functional, sturdy and efficient devices, make exactly what they need, not a funny looking multipurpose artifact you would never use yourself.

Everyone Deserves Great Design

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