Shuktara Lal
New York
THE exhibition, “Design for the Other 90%”, at the Smithsonian is as problematic
as it is enlightening. Organised by Cynthia E Smith, it features the
work done by designers to serve the world’s population afflicted with poverty
and deprivation. But located as it is on plush lawns the gap between the
haves and the have-nots could not be more stark and disturbing.
There are six sections – water, shelter, health, education, energy and transportation – each showcasing inexpensive and functional objects that can aid
poverty-stricken societies.
The exhibition gives an opportunity to see
the remarkable insight of designers who created
these artifacts. We are able to walk around,
and look inside village shelters that have been
successfully propped up in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Grenada, the US and South Asia.
Built out of biodegradable laminated material,
these structures provide victims of natural disasters
with temporary emergency shelters that
can last up to 18 months. In the US, they have
been particularly effective in New Orleans, in
the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Other highlights
of the exhibition include the StarSight, which
offers solar-powered street lighting and Internet
connectivity through a wireless set-up and the
ceramic water filter (incorporated in India, Iraq,
Mexico, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, among other
countries) that relies on the filtration properties
of ceramic, coupled with the anti-bacterial properties
of colloidal silver which cuts down
instances of diarrhoea.
Of the six sections, those devoted to energy
and education are the most impressive. Apart
from the StarSight, solar dishes constructed
from bicycle parts and vanity mirrors, were on
display. These dishes reduce cooking costs
and, because they encourage communal preparation of meals, they reinstate a sense of
community feeling in the hearts of the displaced
rural migrants who use it.
In education the objective of one team of designers is to provide half the world’s population with Internet access in the next 10 years by designing low-priced computers. Another goal is to create a “one laptop per child” environment, along with a portable microfilm library which would curtail problems issuing from the transportation and maintenance of books. While much of the exhibition centres around the work done by designers to assist deprived populations in Africa and Asia, a few of the exhibits, such as the global village shelters, focus on cost-effective solutions for distressed communities within the US itself. One of the models offers a glimpse into the “Mad Housers”, which was a project started by architecture students of Georgia Tech in 1987 to build shelters for the homeless in Atlanta. Similarly, another exhibit recreates a Day Labor Station that exemplifies temporary shelters erected by laborers and used by waiting day labourers for meetings, classes and sanitation purposes. New Orleans forms the focal point of designs made to rehabilitate the poorer or displaced inhabitants of the US. The Katrina Furniture Project is one such enterprise. Workshops are organised in neighbourhoods in New Orleans where residents congregate to use the debris that arose from the hurricane to make church pews, tables and stools.
They proceed to sell these articles, restoring pews that were destroyed in more than 90 churches by Hurricane Katrina. A group of students, alumni and instructors from the Art Center College of Design have given the Katrina Furniture Project the brand name of You Orleans. In a similar vein, “Project Locus” was spearheaded to reconstruct a backyard museum called the “House of Dance and Feathers” to commemorate the Big Nine Social Aid and Pleasure Club – the oldest such club in the Ninth Ward and among Mardi Gras Indian communities in the state – after the hurricane uprooted its original home. Project Locus aimed to re-instill a sense of history and identity in the devastated sections of New Orleans. The most serious drawback of the exhibition is, ironically, its location at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, smack in the middle of New York’s posh Upper East Side. To make matters worse, just a few feet away from the exhibition area is a line of tables and chairs with umbrellas mounted on the tables, beneath which are seated visitors to the museum.
There is something terribly disconcerting about walking through an exhibition that greets us with a huge placard that foregrounds the gravity of the fact that 90 per cent of the world’s population struggles to exist, and, being aware that a section of the remaining 10 per cent is sitting a few yards away beneath umbrellas that shield them from the sun, or on sheets spread across the grass, talking on their cell phones and playing with their kids. It could very well have been a glorious day at Central Park. Adding to this irritating spectacle is the often banal nature of the exhibition’s literature, which has been printed on a series of placards. A line on one of the placards reads: “Almost half the world’s population, or 2.8 billion people, live on less than $2 per day”. The section representing transport includes the following observation: “While motorised vehicles are more efficient, they are too costly for the poorest communities”. For the average American, this is, perhaps, very enlightening.
For the average Indian, this is self-evident, if not redundant. It is here that the exhibition runs into problems. If it was operating under the notion that the average American truly is ignorant about the world that lies outside the US, its organisers should have paid more attention to its layout and been more sensitive to the politics inherent in where it was being shown. The organisers should have used the space provided by the lawn more efficiently, so as to draw in every individual entering its confines, because there is something not quite right about the involuntary juxtaposition between what the exhibition depicts and what the rest of the Smithsonian lawns display. A second way in which these flaws could have been rectified would have been to concentrate more on designs conceptualised to benefit poor or distressed communities within the US. While there are models that address work done in this regard in the country, they tend to merge with the majority of objects in the exhibition that cater to populations elsewhere in the world. If the exhibition had drawn more on rehabilitative designs executed in the US, visitors could have, perhaps, felt a closer connection with what they saw, and could have extended this connection so as to understand the excruciating grievances faced by the vast majority of people across the world. However, in its present form, the exhibition – relegated as it is to one side of the lawn, and fostering an impression of the visitors being far removed from what they see – only serves to deepen the enormous gap that lies between the “Other 90%” and the visitors at the Smithsonian.
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