David Stairs

Dear Bruce,

Following your much-discussed July 7th “reasoned but misinformed volley” about design imperialism on the Fast Company blog, you were practically cut off at the knees for your viewpoint. The folks at Fast Company were probably happy about this, but it surprised me largely because I considered your piece not only uncontroversial, but mildly anachronistic. I’m criticizing myself here. Aside from the obvious intersections (age, gender, nationality), we are actually very much alike. Atavistic, I mean. Your critics are also very much alike, aside from the obvious intersections (age, gender, nationality). Terminally hip.

Susan Szenasy, for example, once criticized me for being “old” and “cynical.” In fact, the cynicism trope seems to be a popular one when attempting to refute unfashionable criticism. And Emily Pilloton has also chided me for getting my facts wrong where her work is concerned, a similar complaint of Valerie Casey’s when I critiqued her hegemonic “designspeak” in a piece last year. One could almost wish that “corrective facts” were the only means of critical dialogue. Then I could stop thinking altogether. No more clever comments. Nary an embarrassing gaucherie, not to mention a pithy insight.

Please don’t take offense at my calling you anachronistic either. It’s just that references to Peace Corps and Head Start experiences do date you in a way I can relate to. After all, I’m a former boy scout myself. My more immediate gripe is that it has taken you so long to come around to your current point of view about “humanitarian design” and that, only now, when it has finally become obscenely popular to do so, have you spoken out.

My comparable experience also came through a foreign appointment, a Fulbright to Africa. I have been criticized more times than you can shake a stick at for the same things you overheard Emily criticized for in China. But it’s a valid gripe and, as the world evolves and the economic playing-field levels, we’re bound to hear it more and more from our developing world colleagues. In fact, the “next BIG thing” will probably be a rush of innovation originating in studios in Delhi, Rio, and Capetown. All good.

When I returned from my last African residency I posted a piece to Design Observer that garnered a lot of response. Because my essay criticized an exhibit at the National Design Museum Ellen Lupton, a long time friend of the Cooper-Hewitt, called me a “smug expert.” Un-ironically, several of the projects featured in that exhibition’s catalog, including the Q Water Roller, the Life Straw, and the OLPC initiative, have fallen on critical hard times. Other similar endeavors, like the Play Pump and the Hippo Water Roller, are now considered marketing and infrastructure failures. This only reinforces what I’d written about the Western design community and its well-intentioned cheerleaders both at home and abroad.

I’ve purposely refrained from joining this discussion to date because, at the risk of offending everyone involved, I don’t hear anyone saying anything new. Your original point is well taken, a little late, but better than never. The self-appointed Design Divas’ predilection for the truth as they see it will always seem to trump good-old fashioned field experience, whether Peace Corps or Fulbright, but lack of hard experience does come back to haunt them. Maria Popova’s call to redesign our critical language was itself successfully gainsaid by one of her own commentators who suggested that we must first consider redesigning affluence. Do you seriously think anyone from the North and West will volunteer for that assignment?

Meanwhile, you’ve nailed the point that everyone else seems to be overlooking: dealing with corrupt and privileged local elites (those who make even imperialism look benign), whether domestic or international, will continue to be a tightrope walk. The human desire to “do good” is hard wired. Richard Dawkins has immortalized this fact. But everybody’s got turf to protect. So long as some of us live like kings while others live in squalor neo-colonialism and economic hegemonism will be alive and well in the neighborhood, in spite of our frequent lip service to “stakeholders.”

And you’re right about another thing: designers from the developed world need to be very careful about how they “intervene” elsewhere. Remember that Arvind Lodaya once called design in the non-Western world a “cultural WMD.” This has been true since at least the time of the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851. I tell my students that, when it comes to such exchanges, especially where another nation’s cultural heritage is concerned, we are all potential terrorists. It’s not a popular message, and I frequently get shot at, but such is the messenger’s fate.

By the way Maria, bottom billion in Swahili is “bilioni chini.”

Asante na usiku mwema (Thank you and good night),
David Stairs

Editor’s note: You can link to the ongoing discussion here.

David Stairs is the founding editor of Design-Altruism-Project

Olon Dotson

This is the second of two special features on the racial history of America’s industrial heartland.

INTRODUCTION: IN MEMORY OF JOHN THADIS DOTSON

Leake County Courthouse, Carthage, MS.

Only one storefront shows signs of activity on the square surrounding the Leake County Courthouse in Carthage, Mississippi. Once a thriving block of retail establishments, institutions and offices, all that remains is the stately courthouse which was erected in 19351, and a bridal shop. The balance of the buildings are vacant, boarded, or inactive. A country mile to the west, on State Highway 16, a Super Wal-Mart bustles with patrons, crushes its remaining competition, and serves as the center for the limited physical and social interaction among African Americans, Native Americans (Choctaws), and White Americans for the entire county.

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Olon Dotson

—With this posting we are pleased to publish a two-part investigation by African American architect Olon Dotson into the racialized nature of the cities of America’s decayed industrial heartland.
We feel this is an important, generally overlooked research, and are very pleased to present it here for the first time in print.
Editor

Despite the fact that the United States describes itself as the most developed and industrialized nation in the world, many of its citizens reside in conditions comparable to what can be found in the most distressed areas of so-called “Third World” or “Developing” countries. I have chosen the term “Fourth World” to describe the phenomena of “Third World” conditions in a so-called “First World” environment. As with the Kerner Commission Report of 1968,1 and the Millennium Breach Report of 1998 (Roach), it remains imperative that these concerns be formally identified, researched, and addressed in order for the United States to avoid ultimate collapse as a direct result of its inability to confront the challenges associated with its institutional abandonment and denial of same. Sustainability is currently at the forefront of discussion as part of a larger global imperative; however, the value of ‘green’ is inconsequential when continued sprawling development practices are dictated by historic discrimination and segregation patterns and societal ills.

East St Louis, IL.

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David Stairs

I was recently in Austria where I delivered a lecture in Graz during Graz Design Month.

The thing most striking about traveling in Central Europe is the sense of the past preserved. The cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire survived WWII better than their German counterparts, having been at the outer range of the RAF/Eighth Air Force sorties. Consequently, the old blends in with the new quite well. In fact, the Art Museum in Graz is a hybrid of combined buildings.

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We’ve heard from Yetta Aguado who, like Carolina Vallejo, is concerned about South America. Yetta’s project is related to “temporary collective housing (less than 10 persons) for homeless people. The design of the interior spaces and the equipments, in 3 different categories.”

If you read Spanish or Portugese, contest information can be found here: www.ideascontralaexclusionsocial.com

Victor Margolin

In recent years the once spontaneous exchange between buyers and sellers has become increasingly mechanized. This has occurred in a number of ways. As one example, the Internet became a prime source of goods and buyers learned to follow standardized protocols to select their merchandise and pay for it. Another form of mechanization is the automated telephone system, where the customers encounter a simulated human voice, either a man or a woman (both apparently Caucasian with a region neutral accent) that attempts to walk them through a series of questions unless they know they can subvert the process by shouting “Agent” into the phone, at which point the voice calmly responds that the supposed man or woman behind it understands that the customer wants to speak to a live person and forwards him or her to one. Finally, real human beings are being robotized by being forced to enact scripts in dealing with customers, scripts that involve trying to sell them something they didn’t ask for. This has happened to me on a number of occasions. Several years ago the checkers in my local supermarket started asking me, after they totaled up my purchases, if I wanted to buy an additional product, that was on sale. I found that I disliked the process because I felt I was being treated as a mark who might shell out additional cash if presented with a bargain, usually something I would never buy such as some kind of junk food. I experienced the impulse to get angry each time I bought groceries but, finding this disagreeable, I began to think of ways to communicate my displeasure at being offered a product I didn’t want without becoming apoplectic. Finally I hit on a solution. I had some small cards printed up with the statement, “Please don’t try to sell me anything,” on them. I began to hand them out whenever a store clerk tried to sell me a sale item. Sometimes the clerks were flustered but more often than not, they were glad to get the card as it provided some comic relief from their onerous obligation to shill for the corporate suits sitting in a far away boardroom plotting ways to wring more cash out of their customers.

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David Stairs

Upon meeting Kabaka Mutesa I, King of the Baganda, in 1878, Henry Morton Stanley was favorably impressed. In Through the Dark Continent, among the many journal observations regarding his visit to the shores of Lake Victoria, he had this to say about Bagandan dress:
The women and chiefs of Mutesa, who may furnish the best specimens of Waganda, are nearly all of a bronze or dark reddish brown, with peculiar smooth, soft skins… The native cloths—the national dress—which depended from the right shoulders of the larger number of those not immediately connected with the court were of a light brown also. It struck me, when I saw the brown skins, brown robes, and brown canoes, that brown must be the national color.1

Barkcloth merchants on Masaka Road in Nateete, Uganda

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David Stairs

I’ve been haunted for three years by an essay I posted on Design Observer in 2007. Having just spent a year in Africa, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt while passing through New York upon my return. The exhibit that drew my attention, and fire, was Design for the Other 90%. My piece, “Why Design Won’t Save the World”, was just contrary enough to the prevailing design rhetoric that it stirred up a hornet’s nest of response, some of it really negative. The basic complaint, often coming from famous people who ought to have known better, was that I was breaking ranks by criticizing the National Design Museum. Not surprisingly, people from the developing world stood by my critique of the neo-colonialist exhibit, almost to a person.

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David Gunn

Twenty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia still bears the scars of this time. Some of its effects are obvious – related to the decimated infrastructure, the depopulation of cities and displacement of peoples. But some of its effects are more complex.

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