Design for the Other 90% explores a growing movement among designers to design low-cost solutions for this “other 90%.”
They partners with both local and global, individuals and organization to find unique ways to address the basic challenges of survival and progress faced by the world’s poor population.
Designers, engineers, students and professors, architects, and social entrepreneurs from all over the globe are devising cost-effective ways to increase access to food and water, energy, education, healthcare, revenue-generating activities, and affordable transportation for those who most need them.
This movement has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, when economists and designers looked to find simple, low-cost solutions to combat poverty.
They have 6 sections that they are working on. Shelter, health, water, education, energy and transport.
Shelter:
Numerous individuals and groups, from manufacturers partnering with architects to grassroots activists for the homeless, are exploring innovative materials and building methods to provide temporary, transitional, or permanent structures
Partners with Mad Housers Inc. It is based in Atlanta, It was started by a small group of Georgia Tech architecture students in 1987 which is a non-profit corporation engaged in charitable work, research and education. Their goals and purposes is to provide shelter for homeless individuals and families regardless of raced, creed, national origin, gender, religion or age.
To develop low income housing for people in need of housing. To increase the quantity and to improve the quality of house in the world.
Global Village Shelter is a for-profit company based in Connecticut.
It is co-owned by father-daughter team Daniel A Ferrara and Mia Ferrara Pelosi.
These shelters are made from biodegradable laminated material, are low-cost temporary emergency shelters that can last up to eighteen months. Prefabricated, shipped flat, and requiring no tools to assemble, they are easy to deploy. The first prototypes were sent to Afghanistan and Grenada, and later used in tsunami-hit countries in Asia; Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir Province, which was devastated by an earthquake, and to Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina.
