on things just beneath the surface…
As awesome as my grad school program has been (and believe me, it’s been free-jet-pack awesome), I can’t help but think that we are missing something big. I am not a designer. I’ve tinkered with the theme for my blog and I do photography. But I feel I have at least an appreciation of, if not a good eye for, great design. And the more I listen to designers talk both about how they view the world and how they solve problems, a lot of them have started to bring some very interesting experience and thinking to the international development table. Whether they don’t realize it or just aren’t getting recognition for it yet, I think we are going to see some world changing ideas come from designers in the next 5-10 years. My grad program so far has mostly focused on economic and business solutions to poverty and suffering–how to finance projects, how organizations like the World Bank work, what are the potential fundraising problems with child sponsorship systems, etc.
When I hear designers like Jon Kolko talk about design and how it changes the world I feel we have come at the problem of global poverty from the wrong direction. So many of our solutions and programs are based around western economic paradigms of aid and relief. Designers sit down and look at things from a problem solving point of view. They com up with simple, elegant, and effective solutions to problems that stump economists and politicians. I feel in some ways where the computer programmer was the poster child of the 90s and 2000s, the designer is the Renaissance man of the 2010s. Men and women looking at the world and saying, ‘wait a minute, we can do this better if we just look at it from another angle.’ I don’t think designers can drill better wells than engineers, run better micro-finance programs than economists, or grow better crops than horticulturalists, but we absolutely need them at the table!
I hope that my informal design education has helped make me a creative thinker who will take the time to find parsimonious and elegant solutions as I look forward to a future in the non-profit development field. What do you think? Are there other fields of thought or other professions you think are having really interesting debates right now?
