Everyone Deserves Great Design

Everyone Deserves Great Design
everyonedeservesgreatdesign.com

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.

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.

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?