Small Design is Beautiful

Recently, I traveled to New York to visit some friends and to see an exhibit about the fruits of a movement to direct engineering, design, and architecture toward socially responsible, sustainable, humanitarian design. Design for the Other 90%, at the Cooper-Hewitt museum until September 23, 2007, is a small but important temporary exhibit at this branch of the Smithsonian museums. I enjoyed seeing the objects on display, but much more valuable are the ideologies spelled out and the stories behind the exhibits.

Again and again, the project leaders credit the concepts laid out in E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful; by designing on the more human scale of the intended customers (poor people included!), you eliminate waste and make the design enterprise more fail-proof. The kicker for me is that you can "design like you give a damn" and since you're operating on the level of the customer, which necessarily includes lots of feedback and hands-on, creative development, projects are almost guaranteed to have an observable beneficial impact.

Here are a few quotes from the second chapter, on peace and permanence (paraphrased from the writings of Prof. Leopold Kohr). They're rather long but they make some important points:

"Small-scale operations ... are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature. There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding. The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things."

"It is obvious that men organised in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry."

Some particularly demonstrative examples from Design for the Other 90% are the Fuel from the Fields project and IDE's Drip Irrigation system. Fuel from the Fields uses a variety of farming waste products specific to the intended customers to make cooking fuel that decreases damaging air pollutants and the demands on the females who usually have to go far afield to find wood, dung, or other burnable materials. The Drip irrigation system incorporates a way to store waters from monsoon season with a simple distribution system that is perfectly fitted to the quarter-acre size of the plots maintained by small farmers, allowing them to dramatically increase their output of high-priced produce in the dry season. Both of these projects incorporate equipment and technology that is low-priced and low-tech enough so it can be produced by entrepreneurs in the region. This means that such entrepreneurs can make a profit by enabling their fellow villagers a more healthy lifestyle and decreasing the harmful impact of deforestation in the case of the fuel, and by enabling an increase in profit and food supply for the case of drip irrigation.