As an Industrial Design student, I had a major lesson 10 years ago. That same lesson was repeated earlier this year.
At the start of 2010 I was due to start wrapping up my studies at TU Delft.Like what happens at many Design schools, the final year of my grad studies mandated that I develop a project. A longer, better researched Design Project.
Torn between my constant fascination with tactical equipment but not wanting to do work for the military industry, I choose to create a vest for medical first responders. It would be “high-speed-low-drag” and have plenty of cool pockets and velcro. But it would be red and not black and worn by emergency staff and not armed forces. It thought it was a smart move.
Obviously, I was about to get schooled.
In the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic, information was even harder to parse than it is now. The disease was still only active in China and data and anecdotes were predictably hard to verify. In this environment, there were a lot of unknowns and for some (me included) a sense of impending doom made paranoia a somewhat reasonable rule of engagement. Freak out now and be safer later, even if this isn’t very productive.
As the virus spread, we were all presented with diverse strategies of choice from different countries. One theme was somewhat common: the government tends to be too slow in reacting and does not have a real incentive to act before the population sees the danger at its doorstep. It does not matter what the experts say. In a democracy, you need to sell every idea to your countrymen. Doing this at scale takes time, but on a local level, it can be sometimes quicker.
To start my graduation project, I also had to find a corporate sponsor: a company that would be willing to act as a real-world client, holding my feet to the fire. This is meant to incentivize students to try to solve actual problems and not try to come up with cool designerly ways of solving problems that no one really has.
My company sponsor was Lard Breebaart, an independent designer from Amsterdam that had done some projects around urban mobility and carried a refreshing dose of curiosity and critical thinking. As I told him about my vest idea, he pointed me to a documentary about informal markets in Lagos, Nigeria:
“Maybe…” Lard said “…this vest is not how you can have the biggest impact on people in need of help. Pay attention to how people organize themselves and fix their own problems when government lags behind”
These conversations took place at the very start of my final project, a few days before the official kick-off. Finally the project started on the 11th of January of 2010. On the very next day, a catastrophic earthquake devastated Haiti.
At some time in the Corona pandemic, people became aware that the biggest risk of Covid-19 was not the disease per se but how it had a tendency to overflow the health care system with patients that required intensive care and even ventilators. Even if only a few percent needed this advanced care, due to the virus’ high infectivity, this percentage was a slice of a very large pie.
Not only ventilators were lacking, but also protective equipment and disinfection materials. This made Covid-19 a technical problem that could perhaps be solved using technical ingenuity: there were numerous calls to arms for makers and hackers.
Even I remember writing an email to Hackaday.com on February 25th , urging them to start showcasing solutions around these problems. I also created a simple list of DIY (Do It Yourself) approaches to making your own ventilators and masks. I wasn’t alone and plenty of more detailed and comprehensive materials started to go around.
In 2010, for a young design student interested in making equipment for medical emergency teams, waking up to a massive earthquake was a unique opportunity to understand how disasters are handled.
For the following weeks I poured over the reports coming in from Haiti, official accounts from the UN and other international organizations. Everyday I checked the numbers: more USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) teams were sent to Haiti than to any other disaster until then. These highly trained teams managed to rescue record numbers of people trapped under collapsed buildings. These were the professionals that would supposedly wear the cool equipment I really wanted to design.
But then I did some back of the napkin math: for every person rescued from the rubble, thousand others did not need saving but needed aid: they had nothing to eat, no shelter, no access to safe water.
A nifty vest would not change anything.
As makers, engineers, hackers and designers flocked to the problem space surrounding the Covid Pandemic, DIY solutions started to appear. Turns out you could make a good enough ventilator with a motor and some first-response respiratory equipment. You could 3D print a facemask to make up for the shortage of “proper masks”, you could have a little gizmo bathe stuff in UV-C light and kill all biological contaminants.
3D printers, in special, got a lot of attention, perhaps due to their quasi-magical nature of creating real stuff out of (apparently) nothing.
Slowly, some calmer voices raised important questions:
- how do you train medical staff in using these home made solutions that had their own quirks?
- Would hospitals risk the liability of resorting to unproven equipment?
- How safe were these products?
These voices were not popular, as they deflated every maker’s dream of tinkering for good. But they showed a crack in the logic of just throwing creativity at the visible parts of a problem.
Ten years ago, as I studied the disaster going on in Haiti (I had to study a bit about Disaster Management and it turns out Disasters have phases that go beyond the initial shock) it became much more evident that for every US Dollar you invest in preparedness, you save 10 in response.
The smart thing, the thing that scales, is not Disaster Response (i.e. cool vests for USAR) but Disaster Preparedness. It was not about cool products or gear. It was about communities being organized, ready and self-sufficient.
As the initial Covid-19 shock is subsiding, what I’m seeing more and more is return to simpler, more mundane solutions. They are not about making impressive machines but perhaps, just reusable cloth masks everybody could afford and disinfect at home. This speaks to another frequent topic around innovation that is our fascination with the new and how little attention we pay to the “boring” maintenance work.
How we pay more attention to epic efforts than common grit and ingenuity perhaps helps explain our fascination with some of the solutions emerging right now. And to be clear, I’m positive that having a lot of creating people pouring over this is a good thing. I just want to suggest that we tone down some of our more heroic tendencies in favor of a broader view of the things we are creating and how they’ll be made and used.
In those first weeks of my Industrial Design graduation project it became obvious that I had no business in creating another high performance vest for advanced rescue teams. I had to work on what happened before the disaster.
I shifted my entire project towards research and instructional design, focused on creating materials that poor communities could use to create some resilience prior to the impact. As the hardest hit communities in a Disaster tend to be poor (they also usually live in the most threatened areas), my advice could not be “stock up food for a week”.
I look back on that project and see a million flaws and some embarrassing assumptions. But the most valuable lesson was to focus not on what would look nice but on what could actually improve things somewhat.
The love of the new asphyxiates great ideas from the past.
This focus on the shiny and new is natural and nowhere is it more evident than in the “Innovation Economy”: Consultancies and experts extol the possibilities of tomorrow’s tech and theory and the evening news reminds us that in the near future our groceries will be delivered by drone (is this really in the horizon? Does this really change things on a qualitative level?)
We start projects that are fueled by enthusiasm and a vision of “innovativeness” but care little for the messy issues that sustain the application of any new solution: procurement, scaling up, convincing people of its value and assuring its correct application, providing support and technical servicing. Making sure it works in the real world.
I want to make very clear that I’m not criticizing the enthusiasm of the myriad teams that went ahead and created alternatives to common healthcare equipment. I merely want to point out that (especially with self-started projects) we frequently work towards a solution we want, not the solution that is needed. The best intentions, if reckless, can hurt a lot of people.
Two examples:
- Using masks that don’t allow for enough airflow can kill you via CO poisoning (Carbon monoxide, if trapped in the mask will not smell or taste, but can end you). This is particularly relevant for rigid masks that have a little window of breathable material that could prove insufficient for proper airflow. That fancy 3D solid mask you saw on your timeline is potentially dangerous.
- Not all medical ventilators work the same, and there are designs out there that flood the room with aerosolized contaminated secretions: they create contaminated clouds that are much harder to protect against. Some people have questioned if this wasn’t the reason behind the nightmare Italy went through.
We like being useful, we honestly care about the world and want to employ what we know in dealing with uncertainty to help with this crisis. But the gift of creativity sometimes comes with the curse of ego and it could be useful to truly examine the reasons behind some of our “solutioneering”, as we create solutions in search of a problem and ignore the small, gritty, uninteresting aspects of the challenge.
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