Fill a 5-gallon bucket with water and carry it for one mile. Your back should be telling you what millions of people around the globe—mainly women—already know quite well. Without plumbing, water is a heavy necessity. Carrying it is hard, time-consuming work.

In developing countries around the world, women do most of the water hauling, lugging it in jerrycans for miles from a river or well to their homes and crops. To ease this burden, brothers Hans and Pieter Hendrikse—one an architect and the other an engineer—created the Q drum, a durable 7.5-liter container made of low-density polyethylene that can be filled with water and pulled with a rope.

The Q drum is emblematic of an emerging groundswell of design work aimed at solving the challenges faced by many of the world’s poor, says Cynthia Smith, curator at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.
The Q drum is one of 30 recent innovations that Smith has gathered for Cooper-Hewitt’s “Design for the Other 90%,” an exhibition whose title underscores the fact that most designers focus their work on the desires and needs of the world’s richest 10 percent. Ninety percent of the 6.5 billion people living today don’t have access to the products and services that many of us take for granted.

Advisory group
“What I found as I began my research for this exhibition,” Smith says, “were the many ways that individuals and organizations are working to eliminate poverty and to give people around the globe a better standard of life.”

For example, Godisa Technologies in Botswana has designed and manufactured a solar-powered device that recharges hearing-aid batteries—one of the greatest expenses to hearing-aid users. Vestergaard Frandsen, an international company that produces disease-control textiles, is manufacturing a long-lasting polyester mosquito net impregnated with a synthetic insecticide that kills mosquitoes for up to four years.

And in Nigeria, designer Mohammed Bah Abba has enlisted local potters to make his pot-in-pot cooler. This low-tech device consists of one earthenware pot nestled inside another and uses evaporating water to keep fruits and vegetables cool, allowing farmers to preserve them longer and command better prices at market.

To assist in her task of combing the globe for new innovations, Smith enlisted the help of members of an advisory group “who have been doing work in this area of design for a while,” she says. “They provided suggestions and made me aware of a multitude of different projects from around the world.”

Smith and her advisers looked specifically for low-cost designs that are affordable for the poor and can boost income and improve health. They also looked for designs that can be “replicated and even sold by the users, thus providing them the means to become entrepreneurs in their own right,” Smith says.

The pot-in-pot cooler, for example, “does not require electricity, and the raw materials needed to make the pots are free,” says the cooler’s designer, Bah Abba.

In addition, they are easy to produce. Making and selling them represents an opportunity for jobs and income.

Big Boda
One innovation Smith and her advisers found in Africa is the Big Boda load-carrying bicycle, an extension bolted to the back of a standard adult bicycle—a universal tool of travel and commerce in developing countries. With Big Boda, a bicycle is transformed into the two-wheel equivalent of a pick-up truck. “It is able to carry hundreds of pounds of cargo at a substantially lower cost than other forms of human-powered utility vehicles,” Smith says.

Another innovation from the exhibition is LifeStraw, a simple, 1-inch-diameter straw that cleans water as it is sucked through the straw and into a user’s mouth. Easy to carry, each LifeStraw can filter as much as 700 liters of water, removing microorganisms responsible for diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, cholera and other diseases. Every year, these and other waterborne diseases cause some 2 million deaths around the world.

In the developing world, explains Paul Freedman of WorldBike, the company that makes Big Boda, even “a modest design effort” has the potential to benefit many people. For designers, the developing world represents “a huge opportunity,” as well as a potential base of millions of underserved customers.

Money Maker
A second water-related design that has a positive impact in developing countries is a line of manually operated micro-irrigation pumps—some that work like stairmaster machines and others like bicycle pumps—that can pull water up from a well for irrigation. A small farmer using the Money Maker Pump, designed by KickStart International, can increase crop yields by a factor of 10, increasing income and helping a family climb out of poverty.

Affordability was a critical consideration in designing the Money Maker Pump, says Martin Fisher, co-designer of the pump and director of KickStart International. Designing them so they can be produced locally and promoting the pumps to farmers also was critical to their success.

“Design for the Other 90%” offers visitors a broad survey of other innovations in the areas of technology, education, transportation and health. It demonstrates how design is saving lives, empowering people and combating poverty.

“My hope is that this exhibition will open both designers’ and the public’s eyes to the multitude of ways any of us can take action to improve people’s lives,” Smith says.