Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People

Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People
By Emily Pilloton
Foreword by Allan Chochinov

In January of 2008, with a few hundred dollars, a laptop and an outsized conviction that design can change the world, rising San Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton launched Project H Design, a radical non-profit that supports, inspires and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design. “We need to go beyond ‘going green’ and to enlist a new generation of design activists,” she wrote in an influential manifesto. “We need big hearts, bigger business sense, and the bravery to take action now.”

Urgent and optimistic, a compendium and a call to action, Design Revolution is easily the most exciting design publication to come out this year. Featuring more than 100 contemporary design objects and systems—safer baby bottles, a high-tech waterless washing machine, low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, wheelchairs for rugged conditions, sugarcane charcoal, universal composting systems, DIY soccer balls—that are as fascinating as they are revolutionary, this exceptionally smart, friendly and well-designed volume makes the case for design as a tool to solve some of the world’s biggest social problems in beautiful, sustainable and engaging ways—for global citizens in the developing world and in more developed economies alike. Particularly at a time when the weight of climate change, global poverty and population growth are impossible to ignore, Pilloton challenges designers to be changemakers instead of “stuff creators.”

“Design Revolution is positively spilling at the guts with displays of ingenuity and resourcefulness,” writes Allan Chochinov in his foreword to this book. Showcased within its pages are more than 100 contemporary products and systems— selected by the author, industrial designer and Project H Design founder Emily Pilloton—
that empower people around the globe in myriad ways and demonstrate
that design can change the world.

To purchase Design Revolution, click here.
To learn more about Pilloton and Project H Design, read Metropolis’s 2009 feature story “Fast Forward: Project H.”