e (let's not call them "users") safer, it promotes social exchange and entrepreneurship within communities.
Approaches to socially responsible design (aka design for social impact, aka transformative design, et al) have changed dramatically since architect Rem Koolhaas breathlessly extolled the virtues of Lagos, Nigeria's chaotic beauty. Koolhaas was less interested in solving that city's dire challenges than he was in celebrating its dynamism. Among the jaw-dropping observations in his 2006 documentary, Lagos: Wide & Close, were ones like this: "The city has these unbelievable — you can only call it abstract — compositions. Red turning into white turning into black. You've never seen geometry at that scale in the world."
This abstract art aspect is perhaps less interesting for the residents of Lagos who face very real, non-aesthetic challenges on a daily basis. And post-Wide & Close, many architects and designers veered too far to the opposite end of the spectrum, dropping into places like Lagos with the belief that they could quickly "fix" them. There were problems with that approach as well, of course. You need to do more than walk a mile in someone's shoes in order to understand and improve upon their station.
With this exhibit, the Cooper-Hewitt, like many designers working in this space, has learned from past mistakes—its own and those of others working the field. For example, the "prequel" of sorts to "Design with the Other 90%: Cities" was titled "Design for the Other 90%," and that seemingly subtle shift from "for" to "with" is not at all inconsequential. As Bogota-born designer and writer Carolina Vallejo pointed out in her provocative NYU thesis project and subsequent competition cheekily called Design for the First World, there's a whole lot of "paternalistic let’s produce unnecessary crap and throw it out there projects" (she points to One Laptop Per Child as a particularly egregious example) created by designers for—and not in collaboration with—the communities they intend to serve. "Design With the Other 90%" focuses more about how designers can develop solutions with communities and in so doing, critiques previous and still-prevalent tendencies to drop in and "fix" what ails them. Cooper Hewitt has smartly avoided showcasing a lot of this kind of stuff, as they did in 2007, in favor of more systemic solutions such as the ingenious bus rapid-transit system in Guangzhou. I do wish the exhibit had included a few domestic projects: our American urban condition—not to mention or social, economic, and political ones—has more than its share of dysfunction, too.