The Design Imperialism Debate

As soon as I wrote my post about Emi­ly Pilloton’s Design Rev­o­lu­tion Road­show, my hus­band was quick to show me this arti­cle writ­ten by Bruce Nuss­baum over at Fast Com­pa­ny: Is Human­i­tar­i­an Design the New Impe­ri­al­ism?

This arti­cle has caused quite a stir in the design com­mu­ni­ty. At first glance, I found the arti­cle to be over­ly crit­i­cal and I didn’t like how Nuss­baum lumped Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton, Project H and every sin­gle human­i­tar­i­an design effort togeth­er and labeled it as one big flawed move­ment. Admit­ted­ly, I was also a lit­tle annoyed with my hus­band for giv­ing me such a buzz kill after I was all excit­ed about Design Rev­o­lu­tion and Project H’s work, but I decid­ed to save the link to the arti­cle for lat­er any­way.

Today I had time to revis­it the arti­cle and read it more thor­ough­ly. I also had the chance to look at sev­er­al respons­es from oth­er design­ers. This is when it became more inter­est­ing and post-wor­thy to me.

Accord­ing to Cameron Sin­clair, Nuss­baum has a thing for impe­ri­al­ism because Nuss­baum also won­dered if green was the “New Impe­ri­al­ism” in Decem­ber 2009. To be fair, Nuss­baum doesn’t out­right say that he thinks green or human­i­tar­i­an design is the “new impe­ri­al­ism” but sim­ply that some peo­ple per­ceive it as such. Still, he seems to enjoy mak­ing these big state­ments, and Sin­clair pokes fun at him for it, say­ing he seri­ous­ly won­ders “if Mr. Nuss­baum is real­ly an avid Star Wars junky and is try­ing to fig­ure out who the design ver­sion Pal­pa­tine is.”

Robert Fab­ri­cant at frog design argues that while Nuss­baum kicked off a worth­while debate, he picked the wrong tar­get. Fab­ri­cant goes on to defend Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton in his post, and he also looks at some larg­er ques­tions: Is the local mod­el the only way to mean­ing­ful­ly engage in social-impact ini­tia­tives, as Nuss­baum sug­gests? Are Amer­i­can design­ers who want to have an impact on glob­al issues in emerg­ing mar­kets kid­ding them­selves? And what about design­ers at larg­er firms like frog? Do we need to give up our jobs and move to a south­ern state to have an impact? He explains how frog design tries to avoid the pit­falls that Nuss­baum referred to in his orig­i­nal post.

Emi­ly Pil­lo­ton also respond­ed to Nussbaum’s post on behalf of Project H. She agrees with his over­all assess­ment of the prob­lems with some human­i­tar­i­an design projects. She admits that Project H has made the mis­take of being dis­con­nect­ed from the peo­ple and places for which they design. She says the biggest error Project H has made as an orga­ni­za­tion was their very first project, the Hip­po Roller re-design, which Nass­baum high­light­ed in his post. How­ev­er, she adds, “That Mr. Nuss­baum defined our organization’s work by its anom­aly is a gross mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion.”

Pil­lo­ton reveals how Project H has learned from these ear­ly mis­takes, and now the orga­ni­za­tion only takes on projects that are local (that is, where the design­er and partner/client are in the same loca­tion and call that place home). She even moved her orga­ni­za­tion from Cal­i­for­nia to Bertie Coun­ty, North Car­oli­na to embark on a long-term design/build pro­gram with­in the pub­lic school sys­tem.

I don’t think it was wrong for Nuss­baum to ques­tion the motives or prac­tices of human­i­tar­i­an design. In fact, I think it was good to point out these com­mon pit­falls. I just wish he would have includ­ed exam­ples of some human­i­tar­i­an design projects that are suc­cess­ful in col­lab­o­rat­ing with their local com­mu­ni­ties instead of mak­ing it seem like there are no such exam­ples. It would have put a pos­i­tive twist on his neg­a­tive article.If noth­ing else, his post forces some human­i­tar­i­an design­ers to take a sec­ond look at their work and gives oth­ers a chance to defend their design process. At least he got peo­ple talk­ing.