design for displaced people is just like modern day physics

Designing for a different culture presents a unique set of challenges, actually just communicating with a different culture can be a challenge. There is a lot more than just learning the language, social standards and etiquette can change subtly or drastically making effective communication difficult or impossible. Positive comments can be taken as insults and the food you like to eat might be deemed unfit for the dog. These types of challenges create a tough barrier for designers interested in creating solutions for other cultures. These barriers get even more difficult to cross when considering the international problem of refugees. Refugees can be found in every part of our globe and are in need of food, clothing, shelter, and a clean place to go #2. We would hope that providing for mans basic needs would be a walk in the park at this point but unfortunately it is far from it. 50,000 displaced people in need of immediate food, clothing, shelter and bathrooms is a monumental problem and if you are trying to find solutions for these problems that can be deployed anywhere in the world then you have at the very least a doubly monumental problem. The seemingly hopeless search for solutions to the world’s displaced people’s problems has but one light at the end of the tunnel, the solar cooker.

The solar cooker is pretty close to a truly universal design. True, you do need the sun, so displaced people in extreme longitudes may have a problem for half the year, and you do need some foil or mirrors or something reflective but these things are pretty cheap and pretty common so all in all I would say it would probably work for 90% of the other 90%, that’s 81%, not too bad. If the solar cooker is indeed the shining light of universal humanitarian design than what does it teach us that we may be able to apply to the other areas of necessity? After all we still have to figure out a way to put the right food in the cooker and how to provide shelter and clothing and bathrooms. I think that the lesson of the solar cooker is to keep it simple. If we are to provide all of the essentials for life to millions of people from different cultures in different environments we need fundamentally simple solutions.

To find these solutions we must follow the path of science. Ever since Newton provided a seemingly universal set of laws to observe the universe with science has been on the hunt for a universal and inclusive explanation of all of the universes phenomena. Unfortunately, just like scientists, we find ourselves stuck. Physics has the irreconcilable laws of relativity for massive objects and the laws of quantum theory for small and design has Ikea and Disneyland and supermarkets and Brooks Brothers and Home Depot and highways and subways and airplanes (etc.) for the 1^st world and the solar cooker and some broken tents and rice and beans and outdated cancer drugs for everyone else. To follow the way of the solar cooker we must use the scientific method to figure out what the most basic common denominators are between people and their problems. The solar cooker did this perfectly, people need concentrated heat to cook, people have the Sun, the sun is hot, use the sun. We just need to apply this formula to the rest of the problems. People need shelter, people have dirt and rocks……