“The majority of designers address their efforts towards 10% of the world population: the rich. The rest of the planet is totally ignored”. It was not Occupy Wall Street to start talking about the poor in terms of percentages. In design terms, this sentence by Paul Polak of the International Development Enterprise, clearly underlines the paradox of a discipline that was born to be democratic yet ended up being a synonym of luxury and exclusivity.
Working with the ColorEsperanza Association (for the cooperation between Italy, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, financed by the Cariplo Foundation), Italian designer and architect Claudio Larcher has just envisaged a new attempt to put things straight and to ‘use’ design once again for its original purposes. The matter at hand was the development – by a group of designers – of school furniture: all of which would necessarily have to be low cost, easy to manufacture using local materials and crafts techniques of the Dominican Republic, where many ‘escluelitas’ (small schools) have been built by the ONG OnéRespé in the last two years – since the Haiti earthquake – to welcome the many Haitian kids who have emigrated to the D.R. Thus no glamour for these desks, benches and small chairs that are all foldable, multi-purpose and often able to accommodate children of a wide range of age groups: only a great desire to finally put design at the service of who truly needs its helping hand.
Surely, this in an initiative that we applaude (and whose results will be presented in the exhibition Hispaniola: Design per solidarietà, at the Post Design Gallery in Milan from Jan 13th through to 26th) is not an isolated one. The number of designers who decide to invest – next to the bread and butter commercial collaborations – time and energies into the development of concepts conceived for people who truly still have needs (hence the 90% who certainly does not dream of a fancy piece of furniture!)
Their real challenge? The reality phase. Turning concepts into reality, tackling the manufacturing and the distribution side of things, working with enlightened companies or institutions. The definition of interesting and innovative concepts (like many of those presented in this exhibition) is, as a matter of fact, the simplest and most linear path towards the solution of this type of problems. Even those, like Alberto Meda (see: XXXX) who have been able to go very far in terms of distribution and non-profit commercialization of democratic concepts for those in needs admit that real difficulties start when the design phase is over.
For this reason, what strikes us the most in this project is the process that lies behind it: a jury of experts – ADI’s President Luisa Bocchietto, Abitare’s editor Mia Pizzi and architect Michele de Lucchi – will select 3 prototypes out of the 10 presented that will be actually manufactured starting from August 2012 in local wood workshops in the Dominican Republic, in order to guarantee the actual availability of high quality products for Domenican and Haitian kids.
Designs by:
Giulio Iacchetti, Matteo Ragni, garth™, Filippo Protasoni, Lorenz-Kaz, InodaSveje, Donata Parruccini, Hubb Ubbens & Elisabeth Vidal, Claudio Larcher/Modoloco design, Simone Simonelli.
