My wonderful Nana discovered I had a list of books/music I wanted on my Amazon.com Wish List, and she bought me a bunch of it for Christmas. One book didn’t come until a couple of weeks ago, and that was the Design for the Other 90% book I wanted. This book came out of an exhibition by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the same name (check it out here). The exhibition brought together designers and engineers from around the world designing for the “5.8 billion people, or 90%, [who] have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted…”

The book is made up of several smaller articles by leaders in design and innovation of products for this audience. Last night, I read Paul Polak’s article. Paul Polak is the founder of IDE, or International Development Enterprises. He had so many amazing things to say, but his main points were…

• There is money to be made in designing for the other 90%. He says that the reason he thinks most designers design for the 10% of luxury consumers is “Because that’s where the money is.” There is this belief that there is no money in designing products for the world’s poorest customers. His counter to this, using the example of a high-cost drip irrigation system, is incredibly simple (yet brilliant):
  If a hundred million small farmers in the world each bought a quarter-acre drip system for $50— a total investment on their part of $5 billion—it would amount to more than ten times the current annual global sales of drip-irrigation equipment. These millions of small farmers could put ten million additional hectares under drip irrigation and increases current global acreage under drip irrigation by a factor of five.Well, when you put it that way…
• Going along with the last point, we must think of the world’s poorest as customers, not as charity cases. Polak says this completely changes the design process. He also has a “don’t bother” trilogy that I just love:
  - If you haven’t had good conversations with your eyes open with at least twenty-five poor people before you start designing, don’t bother.
  -If what you design won’t at least pay for itself in the first year, don’t bother.
  - If you don’t think you can sell at least a million units at an unsubsidized price to poor consumers after the design process is over, don’t bother.

• The three most important things to consider when designing for poor customers is:
  1. Miniaturization – make the design work on a smaller scale.
  2. Affordability (Polak quotes Vince Lombardi – Go Pack! – but changes a key word. Rather than “Winning isn’t everything; its the only thing,” Polak says “Affordability isn’t everything; its the only thing.”) – Quality is a key tradeoff for affordability.
  3. Infinite expandability – “If a farmer can only afford a drip system that irrigates a sixteenth of an acre, design it so he can use the income it generates to seamlessly double or triple its size the next year.”

Although these are just a few points in Polak’s short 7 page essay, he completely opened my eyes to designing for poor customers. I’m really excited to read what the rest of the essays are like…I’ve already seen the likes of a solar powered hearing aid, international video-conference doctor’s appointments, and the LifeStraw, a personal filter in the form of a straw that purifies water from the contaminated bodies many villages depend on. Very exciting stuff, I’ll post more as I go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 8:46 am and is filed under Designers, General, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.