Threatened by obesity, overconsumption of environmentally unsound mass-produced goods, an aging population with a low birth rate, and socially disruptive clashes between immigrants and existing populations, Western countries have failed to control their problems and desperately need outside intervention.
Or at least that’s the partly tongue-in-cheek idea behind Design for the First World (Dx1W), a competition that seeks solutions to the rich world’s most pressing problems from designers and thinkers in the third world. Why? Because “the First World problems demand Simple Third World solutions.” The website elaborates:
We have been focusing our energy and resources on trying to solve our Developing World problems to become more like the First World. But perhaps it is time that we, the so-called Third World minds, focused our energy and creativity on solving some of the First World problems. We will have a brighter future to look forward to, and perhaps this can help us rethink and approach our current problems from a different perspective.
Contest entrants have to choose one of four program areas: “reducing obesity; addressing aging population and low birth rate; reducing consumption rate of mass produced goods; and integrating the immigrant population.” Only people born and currently living in the developing world (the website provides a list, cribbed from the IMF, of countries that qualify) can apply. Entries will be judged by an international panel, and the winner gets a cash prize and space in a New York gallery exhibition.
The contest, created by Carolina Vallejo, a Colombia native and graduate student in NYU’s Interactive Technologies Program, is meant to propose subversive answers to some very familiar and fundamental development-related questions. What does it really mean to be developed? If developed countries have so many problems, are we (developing countries) sure that’s where we want to be heading? Why does the West think they have a monopoly on innovative development solutions?
But the idea that the rest should be saving the West is vulnerable to the same critiques as its inverse. Isn’t it just as easy to misunderstand rich country problems as poor country problems? Should you really lump together Iowa, Iceland, and Italy into one category called “First World”? Contest entrants are born abroad and live abroad, possibly just as removed from and ignorant of the problems they’re designing for as a misguided Idaho missionary is from the “orphans” of post-earthquake Haiti. Does the developing world think we’re just some monolithic mass of non-baby producing, over-consuming, immigrant-hating old people? And hey, are you calling us fat?
One final question: is Dx1W a spoof, or a real contest? Is it supposed to produce real solutions, or just give the West a taste of its own medicine? Ms. Vallejo manages to suggest it’s both at the same time.
Perhaps Dx1W will generate some brilliant ideas. And if not? Well, at least we in the rich West will know what it feels like to be stereotyped and misunderstood.
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The deadline to submit entries to the contest is May 30, 2010. Check the Dx1W site for contest rules.
4 Comments
I think it’s great for all of us to become more conscious of what it must feel like to have your culture analyzed and dissected around you in ways that don’t resonate with your own experience of it.
We DO need a taste of our own medicine.
E.g., one of the issues with addressing FGM/C is that communities often wonder why of all phenomenon in their reality – is FGM/C the one Westerners are obsessed with? (the word ‘obsessed’ has been used by communities in case studies).
It’s really important for all aid workers involved in grand schemes of social engineering to realize how absurd and belittling so much of the work is that we do.
Congrats to Carolina for a great idea!
I thinks this idea is great. In spite of the stereotyping that might carry (not more than just pointing towards the problems that the “developed” world has) it forces/pushes reflection on the aspects of “development” that shouldn’t be desirable. It was actually a Colombian student in a Latin American Economics Student conference back in Mexico who pointed to me for the first time in my life how biased the concept of “poverty” and “underdevelopment” is, and by that time I thought it was nonsense. I respect the awareness about the Western speech I’ve seen in many Colombians so far.
Here’s a delicious catalog of problems for them to get working on:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/First-World-Problems/78673529100?ref=ts
Awesome. I hope it’s real. We need some outa the [coco puffs] box thinking!
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