florica vlad

You might perhaps have seen the Design for the Other 90% Exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, or perhaps have seen countless innovative designs for poverty mitigation in the third world. Now here is a contest for design ideas to tackle first world issues. The Design for the First World contest seeks creative solutions to the following first world problems:

* obesity
* low birth rate
* over consumption
* immigration and integrating into society
….and many others…

The idea behind the contest, as expressed by the festival organizers, is that the paternalistic and misinformed approaches to design that deal with a top down approach, i.e Western design for developing nations, is that it often ends up as a waste of resources and causes more harm than good in the long run.

This approach to aid has been critiqued before, there’s even a term for this kind of design in academia: parachute design or remote design. What happens when some­one does a parachute design is that the well and nicely designed objects aimed to “improve” aspects of a communities are over looking the real problems and the con­text of that community.

Here the festival focuses on design ideas from developing nations to the Western world.

For more information about the contest see here and here.