Design is in

The Ironing Board Mirror

Enabled by Design is a site that’s “all about people powered products”. Enabled by Design is a community concerned with finding ways to transform equipment for people with disabilities, by making it more useful, aesthetically pleasing, and funky. Why should the image of assistive equipment be boring and drab?

Enabled by Design was started by Denise Stephens, a 30 year-old who suffered from multiple sclerosis. "It's about removing the stigmatising image of assistive equipment and encouraging designers to adopt the concept of inclusive design," she explains. "I feel very much that the disabled community are put in a box. Things are designed and produced, and then you get the disabled community saying: 'We can't use it.' They try to retrofit the equipment to people. Why not take that into consideration during the design process?"  It is also an attempt to turn on its head, "the uninspiring one-size-fits-all approach to assistive equipment.

When Denise was in her early twenties, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. This condition would alter the whole course of her life, as she says, “You almost feel like an alien in your own life.” You can’t do the things you once did. With multiple sclerosis, came periodic relapses, extreme pain, constant visits to the hospital and fatigue. She could no longer hold a full-time, or even a part-time job, though she struggled to for a long time. 

She was given assistive equipment, which she says was great as it helped her do things around the house and function normally. However, every time friends came over she would hide the equipment, and she realized this wasn’t right. Her growing concern was that people with disabilities were missing out on good design aesthetics. She felt that the designs for the disabled look 50 years outdated, and unchanged. The equipment could be fun and inspiring, besides being practical. She started Enabled by Design with the help of a friend, Dominic Campbell, who later became a partner. 

Enabled by Design has three section, Loves and Hates, where you can rate products, Ideas Factory, where you can say how you would like to improve things, and Product Reviews. Some things featured on the site, such as the Etac Relieve Angled Carving Knife are amazing simple innovations, where slight changes in the product can result in major improvements in a person’s life. Similar are the Electric Heat Pads which are like hot water bottles that wrap around painful joints. The Ironing Board Mirror is space saving, and useful to anyone. The Lifestyle Bath makes bathing much easier for the disabled, or the elderly. The website encourages a sort of ‘open-source’ design, where users can rate the designs, and post suggestions and ideas.

Enabled by Design is a winner at the Social Innovation Camp 2008. As the founder Denise says: "I would love it to be the case where inclusive design becomes the basic design for all products that are manufactured, because that would completely mainstream disability."

By Armeen Kapadia

Eco-friendly bags made of juice cartons

Someone is finally putting those millions of juice cartons, which we all happily chuck in the bin, to good use. These juice cartons are being recycled to make an attractive, lively set of bags. Juice cartons are quite non-biodegradable, and end up in landfills, or littering the streets, or are burnt creating more pollution.

The Eco-friendly Juice Bags are not only eco-friendly, but they are also helping poor communities, as they are made by a woman’s cooperative in the Philippines, where the women are the main bread-winners in their families. This cooperative is formed of more than 500 women of Pasig City, Philippines, and was started in 1999. The cooperative provides a livelihood to 200 families, creating income to pay for education and healthcare. Their main objective is to recycle cartons, plastics and the rest into bags and accessories. Working with local community leaders, the cooperative convinced people to separate their waste, and sell recyclable matter to the cooperative. The local council provided pushcarts and weighing scales and established an Ecology Center. This ultimately led to Pasig City being awarded first place as the cleanest and greenest township. 

Of all the recyclable materials, the colourful juice cartons attracted the women’s attention. After collection, they are sanitized, and made into bags. The bags have a wide range of shapes and sizes. There is the ‘shopper’ a large divided bag that can accommodate A4 size files. There is the ‘woven handbag’ made from interwoven lengths of juice carton. There are insulated bottle bags with zip-up lids. 

The Recycled Juice Bags look great, function great, and utilize waste. Design at its best, even without the designer. 

By Armeen Kapadia

Dumper, designed by Sam Johnson

“We talk about design and sustainability.” This is how ten.blog describes its intention. Ten is a group of designers who have got together for the last three years to create products based on responsible design. The designers are Tomoko Azumi, Stephen Bretland, Carl Clerkin, Gitta Gschwendtner, Chris Jackson, Sam Johnson, Michael Marriott, Hector Serrano, Onkar Singh Kular and Nina Tolstrup. Last year’s collection wood is a series of practical, affordable, and sustainable objects for the home. 

One of the designers, Chris Jackson, was frustrated with the general low level of social awareness in the design industry. In 2005 he took a year off to research sustainable and ethical design. He came up with a project called ‘Ten’, where he grouped together ten London-based designers, and then asked them to source materials for new products within a 10 km radius of their homes, and within a budget of ten pounds each. 

Jackson feels this was a great chance for designers to get back to their most basic skill, ingenuity. More than aesthetics, the design of an object was dictated by its function, resulting in some pretty interesting outcomes. Constraints and limited resources produce fantastic pieces of design, often created by users and non-designers. 

Ethical living is one of the main issues Ten addresses. As Jackson explains, we now live in a use-and-throw society, people don’t think of repairing every day objects, but just replace them without a thought. It is this issue that these designers strive to resolve, which is apparent on each of their sites. They create, re-use products, and re-invent products. Their strong focus on functionality does not mean that aesthetic considerations suffer, in fact, far from it. Their products have instant likeability, and many have that ‘wow’ factor, besides being sustainable, affordable and usable. 

Some of the products I really liked were this wedge racer, designed by Gitta Gschwendtner, which also doubles up as a door-wedge, and can be enjoyed by adults and children.  

The extreme flexibility of Nina Tolstrup’s designs makes them ideal multi-purpose prodcuts. The 1 X 1 Trestles are pieces of wood that can form a range of interior objects, including lamps, a chair, a ruler, and hooks, all made in the same 1 x 1 wood sections. The 2-hanger utilizes the parts that generally go waste in manufacture, to create another unique product. The on/off alarm is the easiest thing to switch on and off, just tilt it one way or the other.

Do check out each designer’s site, as they all feature really some unique and intriguing products. 

By Armeen Kapadia

The refuse from discarded electronic products, e-waste, end up in landfills or incinerators. In today’s ‘use and throw’ philosophy, the amount of e-waste is constantly increasing to alarming levels. It’s easier to buy a new computer, than upgrade your old one, or so most people think. Alex Lin, at age 13, started a progamme in his community to reduce e-waste by refurbishing discarded computers and providing them to families unable to afford electronic equipment. 

Alex, from Westerly, Rhode Island, USA, formed Westerly Innovations Network (WIN)  in 2002. He explains in the video how improper waste encompasses a lot of things, like burning, burying, and exporting. In the average computer monitor, there is 4 to 8 pounds of lead, there is also mercury, cadmium, and the plastic cases themselves, all causing severe health defects. Earlier, all the residents of Westerly were dumping their e-waste in the landfill. With a few phone calls, and some effort, they set up a receptacle at a certain point, where people could dump their computers, protecting the crops, water and environment. 

The WIN team then meets once in a week in Alex’s basement to refurbish the computers. Alex feels that recycling is much more efficient than buying new pieces. They get donations from corporations and banks, and sometimes have to replace hard drives, RAMs etc. After refurbishing, the computers are usually given to people in Westerly who don’t have computers. They also sent computers to Sri Lanka after the tsunami, where they were used in an education centre. 

Later the WIN team also made a presentation to the State Legislation, and because of their efforts today improper disposal of e-waste in Rhode Island is illegal. You can see Alex’s speech at the Youth Brower Awards, 2007. Today the WIN team works with people in Sri Lanka, Cameroon and Mexico. They effectively created a system that deals with several problems, those of e-waste, environmental damage, and increased access to computers for poorer sections of society. As Alex says, this is a small step in changing the way the country, and even the world deals with waste. 

By Armeen Kapadia

Mahmoud Mujahed at work

One of the main difficulties faced by disabled people is while using public transport. The transportation system and often people too, are not sensitive to the problems faced by them. A disabled Palestinian man, fed up with having to wait for taxis, built his own electric car. 

Mahmoud Mujahed, 64, has had severe knee injuries, and can only walk with the help of crutches. His disability forced him to give up work. Unable to afford taxis, he built his own electric car. It took him two weeks to build the car, which works on a 12 volt battery, and the help of a computer system. It can reach speeds of up to 80 miles an hour, and has 20 horsepower. Mujahed says, "Because I don’t work, I don’t have money to pay for transport. I thought I would make a car with three wheels.” The first car he built was too slow, but a friend, Abdul Sultan, suggested he make the car in this style, and it worked. “This is different to any other car and I don't think anybody has done anything like that before. Firstly we can say it's environmentally friendly because it operates on batteries". 

Necessity is the mother of invention. Faced with difficulties, people are known to do the seemingly impossible, or very difficult, to overcome their problems. The human creative power knows no limits, as Mahmoud Mujahed proves. It probably goes back to the early days of humankind, when people created the first tools to help them in their work. From making the first spade, to building a car, it is this unique ability of humans that separates us from the animal kingdom. Although some animals have highly evolved problem solving and tool-making capabilities, in humans this ability has developed to a very great degree. 

Mahmoud Mujahed hopes the Palestinian government, or an organization, will help take this invention to many others like him, as it can benefit millions of people worldwide.  

By Armeen Kapadia

PlayPump in action

Children have abundant energy. And it seems like someone is literally tapping into it. The PlayPump system is a genius idea. While children use the merry-go-around, clean water is pumped from underground to a water-tank. Even better, the surface of the water-tank is leased as billboards for advertisements and social messages.

Just to be very sure of the problem it is solving, here are some of the facts:

1. More than one billion people do not have access to clean water
2. On an average, 6,000 people die everyday because of water-related diseases
3. Around 40 billion hours of time is spent fetching water, mostly by women and children.

PlayPump as a system is lifting people out of poverty. PlayPump with its system:
1. Provides access to safe, clean drinking water
2. Improves sanitation and hygiene
3. Reduces barriers to education
4. Promotes play
5. Increases opportunities for women and girls
6. Spurs economic development
7. Helps reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS

The New York Times Editorial puts the effect of PlayPumps succinctly, "South Africa has already installed 500 PlayPumps, which are more efficient, easier to use, and cheaper to run than wells with hand pumps."

If you want to know more about how it works, click here.

By Sanjay Basavaraju

Q Drum in action

In developing countries, women walk miles in heat to fetch water. Studies suggest that in remote villages of these countries, women spend more than half their lifetime fetching water. Q Drum is trying to change that equation. Its design is a perfect example of form aiding function.

What Q Drum achieves is staggering. It is a known fact that clean water is one of the essential resources for everyday survival in developing countries. Q Drum is popular with children because they find the very nature of its design engaging. The activity of using Q Drum allows children to be active helpers in domestic duty, which could free women from fetching water. Since children are going to use it, the ease of use was a primary concern. A child can pull 50 liters of water over flat terrain. The Q Drum is simple, cost effective and durable. The idea is to keep the weight on the ground. In achieving that, the surface of the container will be in contact with the ground so it was essential to have no moving parts or handles that could break. Considering the space these drums occupy, they are stackable.

In the early 90's Pieter Hendrikse worked in rural areas and villages around Pietersburg, South Africa, and he noticed how women and children struggled to get water from few taps to their homes, in some cases kilometers away. Usually women carried the containers on their heads like in the rest of rural Africa, which invariably caused many neck and spine injuries. In an attempt to find an easier way to transport water, a doughnut hole through a cylindrical container was prototyped.

While I am at this, I find another solution for a same problem. It is called Hippo. It is again based on the concept of rolling rather than carrying. These cans hold 90 liters of water. Although the weight of a filled can is 90 kg, it is transformed to an effective weight of 10 kg, which means that almost anyone can easily manage a full roller.

Conceiving the idea is relatively easy, but to resolve manufacturing details is key to the success of such innovations. It is a challenge to bring down manufacturing costs. At times, it can be frustrating where the manufacturing technology can't aid the design. The development of a concept and its testing, needs time, effort and money.

Collecting water reduces productivity, limits educational opportunities and traps households in poverty. The strategy of these products is to focus specifically on reducing the social, economic and health consequences of carrying heavy loads of water over long distances.

By Sanjay Basavaraju

In the developing world, clean drinking water is a luxury. More than one billion people worldwide are without access to safe drinking water. Each day, around six thousand people, mainly children die from water borne diseases. Water is life, and clean drinking water could transform the way people live. It could save lives, keep families healthy and working, help keep children in school, reduce the need for women to walk miles for water, and is the first and most basic step of poverty alleviation.

An invention of Vestergaard Frandsen called LifeStraw, may be the first major step in providing millions of people with this most essential resource. It is a 25cm plastic straw, which is a low-cost water purification system. It does not need electricity, has no removable parts, and positive test results have been achieved on tap, turbid and saline water against common waterborne bacteria such as Salmonella, Shigella, Enterococcus and Staphylococcu. It has proven to be effective against waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea, and removes particles as small as fifteen microns. It has a lifetime of 700 litres, which is around one year's water consumption of the average person. Like any straw, one simply has to suck water through it, which even a child can do, and the germs are removed inside its plastic body.

LifeStraw is priced at around $3.50 (£1.85) a straw. A spokesman for UK charity WaterAid, which works to supply clean water and sanitation in 17 of the world's poorest countries, condemned the device as overly expensive, and said it was not a real solution. This is like telling a drowning man that you won't throw him a life-jacket because a ship 3000 miles off is coming to save him. If one considers the lives that LifeStraw can save, even if it is a so-called 'short-term' solution, then it is commendable. The 'long-term solution' is total eradication of poverty, which if not utopian, is definitely a long way off. If we sit around waiting for that solution to strike, millions will continue to die for lack of clean water, and it is exactly this need that LifeStraw fills. It takes years for governments and international organisations to provide drinking water infrastructure to vast areas of the developing world. Till they achieve their goals, LifeStraw can help thousands of thirsty people.

LifeStraw is protecting users from the deadly Guinea Worm disease. Besides LifeStraw, Vestergaard Frandsen also manufactures ZeroFly, the insecticide-incorporated plastic sheeting, which not only creates shelter for displaced people, but also prevents diseases like malaria. They also have PermaNet, a long-lasting insecticidal net that also helps prevent malaria. This is no small feat considering 40% of the world's population are at risk of malaria. PermaNet is a ready to use fabric, containing insecticide, that stays intact even after several washes, and is safe for children and pregnant women to use.

A straw, a plastic sheet , and a net were just ordinary items used by the poorest family in any developing country. Vestergaard Frandsen has transformed them into LifeStraw, ZeroFly and PermaNet, designs for the other 90%.

Companies that design for the most basic needs of people, are the companies of the future.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju