Development Work – Living on the Straight Edge

A Love Letter to Fashion

August 13, 2015August 13, 2015 Allison MillerLeave a comment

I was born a fashionista. From the white socks with the rainbow beads tied around the edges to subscribing to Vogue, fashion has always been my lover. So imagine my delight when over the past few weeks I have been inundated with instances of how fashion and design are colliding in incredible ways.

These are not simply the latest fall trends. Nor are they highly tech oriented explorations which still have the Arduino boards attached to them. No. These are beautiful, refined pieces of fashion that go above and beyond the call of duty and achieve something truly remarkable.

The following are my 3 favorite instances:

1. Seated Design: As if I needed another reason to love NPR, they had to go and report on designer Lucy Jones. Inspired by her cousin who is paralyzed, she wanted to created a fashion line that was both stylish and usable for those in a wheel chair. What resulted was a refined collection with clean lines and user centered designs. The article goes on to talk about students at the Fashion Institute of Technology who designed for veterans with prosthesis and a blogger who lobbies for stores to carry accessible clothing.

2. Danit Peleg: A brand new fashion design graduate, she promoted this video in july exploring an entire fashion collection made with a 3D printer. Not only are the designs lovely, but this collection pushed the boundaries of 3D printing bringing it out of the tech nerd’s lab and into a environment of elegance. I am so excited to see where she goes.

3. Thinx: Finally, I have to give a shout out to any lady who can successfully use fashion to advocate for women’s rights. Just today, I stumbled upon the ladies of Thinx. They have developed what might be the most insane thing I have seen in a long time. They have designed underwear for your period sans pad or tampon! I know. It seems crazy, but as I (and Buzzfeed) looked into it, i discovered how brilliant these are, and how tirelessly these ladies have been working to develop Thinx. Also, can we just talk about the crazy good branding!? Plus, every pair your buy, supports reusable pads for school girls in developing countries. Being a cause close to my heart, I could definitely get behind that!?

So, a huge “WOOO!!” to all the awsome ladies using fashion, design, and technology to help transform lives. Never have I been so proud to be a fashionista.

The Real Value Add of Design

July 16, 2015July 16, 2015 Allison MillerLeave a comment

A few weeks ago, I had a whim.

I wanted to see if I could utilize the local Museum of Design Atlanta for a design education project we’ve been working on. A few emails later, myself and the Spark Corps team were in the office of Executive Director Dr. Laura Flusche. As we discussed our project and our goals, we began a larger discussion on design education and its relevancy in the Atlanta community.

Dr. Flusche began telling us about a design education workshop she had led in a low income school district. From a designer’s stand point, the event had gone fine. The children were somewhat engaged, the teachers were content, and there were no major mishaps. From a designer’s stand point, it also could have gone better. That’s our curse. Things can always be better.

Her team left the school, and returned to the office. Over the course of the next few weeks, Dr. Flusche was shocked with the range of positive feedback she was receiving. Suddenly, she had calls from The Boys and Girls Club Atlanta, The United Way Atlanta, YMCA, and other regional community organizations. All of these groups wanted to talk about her design workshop in the school.

Here’s the thing, though. They didn’t want to talk to her about design. They didn’t want to talk to her about the quality of the outcomes, the rigor of the methodology, or the outlet for creativity. Theses organizations wanted to talk to Dr. Flusche about teamwork, empathy, confidence, and pride.

Designers love design, and rightfully so. I love this career I have chosen, and could go on about all the reasons why designers deserve a place at the table. Yet as the five of us sat around MODA’s table we all took a moment and sat on her words. We had almost 50 years of design experience between us. How had we never seriously considered the benefits of design that were not design related?

The value add of social skills are an untapped aspect that designers need to start using when promoting the value of design. We are excellent at promoting the value of our designs. So, let’s be smarter about how we promote the value design itself. How does design teach children the skills to become leaders in their community? How can design empower groups of young people? How can design build confidence, empathy and compassion in those who need it most?

Countless community organizers, organizations and non profits operate around the country promoting these values. How amazing would it be for designers to lend their skills and expertise to enhance the efficacy and mobility of these groups?

Some food for thought.

Our own design team brainstorming how to use design as tool for social development

Design Ethics and Global Waste

April 26, 2015May 24, 2015 Allison MillerLeave a comment

In one my my courses, we recently had a lecture on design ethics. We looked at a range of design organizations including IDSA and ICSID, looking at their articles as well as looking for gaps. We were then instructed to create our own code of ethics as designers.

Not too shortly after this lecture, I came across the article Inside the Hellscape Where Our Computers Go to Die written by Jakob Schiller in WIRED. In this article, he describes Agbogbloshie, Ghana, a dump for electronics that are burned and set to waste away. It’s a chilling and humanizing view on the impact our consumption is contributing to the global waste stream.

These are our computers, our iPhones, our tablets and our smart devices. Not only as consumers, but as designers, I strongly believe that it should be within the ethics of our conscious to consider topics such as this. How do we, as designers, better design for disassembly? How do we create humane working conditions for the workers mining and dissembling these minerals? And how could we, rather than ignore our contribution to cycles of poverty, empower these communities?

This is a big issue, and I know that there are countless amazing people working around the globe to answer these questions. But its time that designers come to the table and not only acknowledge our part in the process, but use design thinking to solve these issues.

Let’s Talk About Periods…and User Experience

February 1, 2015February 9, 2015 Allison Miller1 Comment

No, gentlemen, I am not talking about grammar. I am talking about the necessary evil and paradoxically beautiful event necessary for creating life. But before you get your undies in a bunch, and run from this page as fast as you can grunt, “Super Bowl Sunday,” let me give you a little back story. This week, I was on Facebook when one of my favorite sites for girls empowerment, A Might Girl, featured a story about Arunachalam Muruganantham. A lower-middle class Indian man, Muruganantham was shocked one day to find that his wife was continually choosing between purchasing food for their family and purchasing sanitary pads.

https://i0.wp.com/news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/73331000/jpg/_73331692_muruga6.jpg

Rather than purchase sanitary devices, his wife and many other women globally resort to using rags, leaves, grass, hay, and even mud to prevent embarrassment. In many parts of the world, access to basic hygiene is a luxury, and specifically with regards to female health. These alternative methods lead to a host of UTIs and vaginal infections, all which are easily preventable. To add another layer of complexity, the lack in access to hygiene devices causes girls to routinely miss school, and makes it difficult for women to hold steady jobs.

Muruganantham, like many men, was shocked by this realization. He began tinkering with a host of low cost designs and prototypes, and at one point began wearing his inventions himself (with the aid of goats blood!) because finding women to were willing to test them was so difficult. Currently, Muruganantham’s products are manufactured in over 1,300 villages and 23 Indian states, as well as employing as many as 10 women in each village. In 2014, Time Magazine named him one of The 100 Most Influential People.

I took a step back, and thought about his work through the lens of the industrial designer. User experience is an increasingly important aspect of design. If we don’t understand how our client thinks, acts and what they experience, there will always be a disconnect no matter how strong the product is. Companies like IDEO have near-perfected this model, and countless others have provided supporting material. But what do we do when the user wont engage with the development process? In the case of Muruganantham, there was a very real and critical need. He had to bring “User Experience” to a whole new level, literally putting himself in the position of the client in order to bring a viable product to market.

I was also enamored by the idea of a man with no formal education or exposure to design methods using a principle that is still being explored in the design field to a whole new height. It reminded me of a similar story published in 2013 in which in Jorge Odón, an Argentinian car mechanic, invented a life saving device for emergency births.

While part of me reads these stories and thinks, “Why am I in design school again?” the other part of me is inspired by these inventors and further affirms my belief that to be a good designer you need to have a strong understanding of the world you want to design. Being able to wade through the endless sea of design methodologies and diagrams will only get you so far. You need to actually understand the problem you are addressing. This should be common sense, right, but I seem to be finding this isn’t always the case.

With this in mind, I leave you with a quote I heard from Dan Formose of Smart Design, New York in the documentary Objectified. He stated, “What we really need to do to design is look at the extremes. The weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the fastest, or the strongest person. Because if we undersand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.” In the case of Muruganantham and Odón, they looked at the extreme. They saw a problem, learned about the user, and worked tirelessly to solve it. The rest, as Formose, stated, took care of itself.

This is Your Brain on Grad School

January 25, 2015January 25, 2015 Allison Miller1 Comment

I think its safe to say that almost everyone who was alive in the 90s remembers the “This is your brain on drugs” PSA where the woman cracks an egg into a hot skillet and we watch in horror as our poor brain is cooked to a pulp. Replace the word “drugs” with “graduate school” and you essentially have the same idea.

This past week has been a dizzying string of deadlines, deliverables, lectures, and exams. Hardly a month in, I was already feeling the same level of intensity that I didn’t feel until finals time last semester. My biggest priority became checking as many things off of my to-do list as possible. The more and more I did this, the less joyful and inspired I felt.

This changed when the other day I was flipping through an old issue of Marie Claire. No, I was not leisurely absorbing the latest spring fashions (if only!). Instead, I was finding images that would become part of an interactive products assignment. While my primary goal was to find images of vintage women’s fashion, my eyes stopped when I turned the page and saw a LifeStraw accompanied by the ostentatious title 6 Simple Ways to Save the World.

Having exposure in the nonprofit and development sector, LifeStraw was nothing new to me. Why, though, was it in Marie Claire? The brief article went on to describe incredible, simple innovations for promoting positive change in the lives of women and girls around the world. In addition to LifeStraw, it highlighted Q Drum, clean cook stoves, a cervical cancer screening test with vinegar, natural pads for schoolgirls, and rural birthing kits.

I sat for a moment and took the article in. As I looked at the pages, I suddenly remembered why I wanted to be an industrial designer. These products were not new to me. In fact, I remember being just 18 when I first learned about Q Drum. But these products were significant to me for a range of personal and professional reasons. Revisiting them in Marie Claire was a wake up call for me, aggressively reminding me why I was here in Atlanta. These were the i-pods of the development world, and the preeminent example of the kinds of products I wanted to design. Being a part of the global development community has always been a goal of mine. I won’t hide the fact that I am an idealist, nor will I suppress my desire to make truly impactful designs that will improve the lives of women and girls, globally (as goody-goody as that may sound).

I still have a long way to go, however, and my current skill set will be of no use to anyone until I put in the time to work on it. Seeing this article was a breath a fresh air, and the jolt of inspiration I so desperately needed to keep moving. So, while I may not be ecstatic about every assignment, and there might be some nights that I want to pull my hair out, I need to be conscious about putting things into perspective and remembering my end goal.