CS: This project started in the spring of 2000. I took a class at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2005, the Social Entrepreneur Lab, which featured a lot of this work.

RP Why create an exhibit of this kind for an audience of designers?

CS: I have no problem with people who make money designing products for the rich. Entrepreneurial brilliance deserves to be rewarded. What astonishes me is that a huge, unexploited market, which includes billions of poor customers, continues to be ignored by designers and the companies they work for.

Think about this: if a hundred million small farmers in the world each bought a quarter-acre drip system for $50 – a total investment of $5 billion – it would amount to more than ten times the current annual global sales of drip-irrigation equipment. These millions of small farmers could put ten million additional hectares under drip irrigation and increase global acreage under drip irrigation by a factor of five.

RP: What is the criteria you used to select products?

CS: That the object be as simple as possible to produce, and that it help the poorest of the poorest. One of the main points I wanted to get across is that the vast majority of people who need these products are women. Women make up 70% of the 1.1. billion who live in extreme poverty, so I wanted to choose examples that address this – products that, in the simplicity of their design, can facilitate an easier way of life. For example the pot in pot cooler – which helps those women tasked with taking produce to markets. It is a low-cost way to refrigerate produce. Also the Q Drum, which makes it so much easier to bring water across several kilometers – another task that often falls to women.

RP: And why do you think people are interested in this area of design now?

CS: Technology allows people to communicate quickly and easily. There’s been a shift in thinking.

Before – designers and aid workers were providing goods that were not economically sustainable. Now, they are making more low-cost and affordable goods – which are simple to manufacture.

There’s also growing public awareness of the UN’s millennium goals.

RP: Can you give me some examples of what you mean by more low-cost and affordable goods?

CS: Take microirrigation. In the show, we feature the India-based International Development Enterprise’s IDE Drip System, developed by Paul Polak. It’s a rainwater harvesting system that collects, settles and stores rainwater in a ten-metre-long, double-walled plastic sausage in an earth trench. By using the earth for support, the team reached their price objective of $40 for a 10,000 litre storage tank.

There is also the kitchen garden drip kit, which sells for $3 in India and consists of simple filters and plastic tubes at drip points. Drip lines are moveable from one row of plants to the next – and the system can be expanded systematically. One farmer, Mohan Nitin, bought the system for $160. He now estimates he can earn more than $1000 in the dry season alone, compared to the $150 or so he was earning before.

RP: Do you have any advice for designers interested in this field?

CS: What’s important is to think of poor people as customers, instead of as recipients for charity. That radically changes the design process, and here’s some ways to do it.

Talk with at least twenty-five of those living in the other 90%, before you start designing, and listen hard to what they need;

Make sure what you design will pay for itself within the first year;

Do that by ensuring you can sell at least a million units at an unsubsidized price to poor customers.

Design cheap. What do I mean by that? Put tools on a weight loss diet. You cut the cost if you find a way of cutting the weight. For example, with a small drip irrigation system –you cut the weight and the price of the pipe by cutting the system pressure by 80%.

Make redundancy redundant by asking customers how long they need the tool to last and how much they are willing to pay to make it last longer.

Update the old package with cutting edge materials – revise outmoded designs with any new materials that may have come available, so long as affordability is not compromised.

Make the project infinitely expandable. If a farmer can only afford a drip system that irrigates a sixteenth of an acre, design it so he can use the income it generates to seamlessly double or triple its size the next year.