The headline is a quote from Allan Chochinov’s foreword to Emily Pilloton’s book ‘Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People’ and very precisely frames what the book is about and what it aims to demonstrate. In it’s full length the quote goes “(…) designers would do well to remember that they are not in the artifact business. They are in the consequence business”.

Through her own introduction ‘Design Can Change the World’ and the book’s more than 100 examples from the real world, Emily Pilloton illustrates co-creation as a basis for social entrepreneurship through design and how designing for sustainability (for people, planet and profit) transforms challenges into opportunities.

“Design has been disconnected from reality”, Emily Pilloton says and through Project H Design, founded in January 2008 by Emily herself, she strives to re-establish the connection based on the bold (and somewhat beautiful) statement that design is problem solving with grace and foresight. One of the keys to re-establish the connection is to not just consider HOW we design stuff (as most ‘green design’ is about) but to carefully consider WHAT we design, and use design as a catalyst to create solutions that go beyond doing no harm.

Even though, HOW we design is an important issue to Emily Pilloton and the best introduction to the principles of Project H Design might as well be her own as can be seen here.

The book’s examples illustrate the true nature of designing for sustainability. Though the focus is on societal design or social entrepreneurship through design, it is evident that nothing exists in a vacuum and all projects though aimed at solving one specific problem (perhaps through grace and foresight) also target a variety of other issues. Thus most of the books examples though categorised into one of the eight main categories Water, Well-being, Energy, Education, Mobility, Food, Play and Enterprise, could be categorised under several others, which is also illustrated by an easy understandable iconography throughout the books simple and sober design.

It would be too extensive or too narrow to pick specific examples from the book here. So let me just pick one that demonstrates Emily Pillotons ambition to “Design for the 100 Percent” (a reference to the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt exhibition ‘Design for the Other 90%’) and dissolve the distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’: Learning Landscape is developed by Project H Design in partnership with Architecture for Humanity and is a modular and scalable playground system for elementary math education based on 10 math-based games to be played within a squared grid. The Learning Landscape is designed with teachers and children and is so far implemented in Uganda, Dominican Republic and South Carolina. The success of the design derives from a systemic approach (as opposed to an object or product based approach) making it scalable, universally adaptable and context specific.

For reasons unknown, in the European release of the book later this year, the subtitle has been changed to ‘Design that Changes Peoples Lives’. Ironic, as the key to success for most of the showcased project is not forcefully changing people’s lives but exactly empowering them by designing with them not for them. Which I believe most people are better off with.