In this movie filmed by Dezeen, London Design Festival deputy director Max Fraser summarises the aims and key themes of last month’s Global Design Forum series of talks and discussions.
London Design Festival deputy director Max Fraser
Global Design Forum is held annually over two days as one of the key events during London Design Festival. “What we’re trying to get to is the core of how design can help make the world a better place,” says Fraser in the movie. “We’re trying to eke out some of the issues that are affecting design right now.”
Peter Saville (right) in conversation with Peter Morley
From left to right: Alexei Orlov, Carmel Allen, Jaime Hayon and Ross Lovegrove
“We’ve tried to encourage a mixed variety of speakers,” says Fraser. “We wanted to invite people from different parts of industry to come together to debate issues and hopefully disagree and provoke each other, then see if there are any ideas that can be implemented or if there are any new processes or techniques that can change the way that the business of design is done today.”
From left to right: Michael Young, Francis Stevens, Justine Simons, Guta More Guedes and Ben Page
News: a water-filtration system that uses plants to extract arsenic from water supplies and allows the user to sell the poisonous substance at a profit has been voted the “Idea that will change the world” at the Global Design Forum in London today (+ interview).
Clean Water, developed by Oxford University MSc student Stephen Goodwin Honan, was voted the best of five world-changing ideas presented at the forum, held today at the Southbank Centre.
Arsenic poisoning from contaminated water has been described as the “largest mass-poisoning in history” by the World Health Organisation, causing cancers that kill an estimated 1.2 million people in the developing world each year.
Arsenic-absorbing plants
Clean Water uses special, arsenic-absorbing plants, which are grown in a container. Water is pumped through the container and arsenic is trapped in a filter, and then absorbed by the plants where it poses no danger.
The filtered water is then safe to drink while the plant can be harvested each year and the arsenic chemically extracted. The plants are a naturally occurring species selected for their ability to remove arsenic from the soil they grow in.
The system costs just $10 (£6) to set up but can produce arsenic – which is widely used in industries including the semi-conductor and mobile phone industries – worth $85 (£53) per year. All parts of the system, apart from the filter and the plants, can be sourced locally from everyday materials such as plastic tubs and bamboo.
There are no running costs and no specialist expertise required to maintain the system. “Eighty percent of people in Bangladesh [where the system has been trialled] are subsistence farmers,” said Honan. “They understand how to look after plants.”
“It seems that the design works and the economics work,” Hoberman asked Honan during a question-and-answer session. “What’s holding you back?”
“As soon as we can sign an agreement with a semi-conductor company that wants to buy ethical arsenic, that will make the difference,” Honan replied.
The panel then gave Clean Water the highest vote of the five ideas pitched and the decision was ratified by an audience vote.
The system in use in Bangladesh
Honan is a FitzGerald Scholar studying an MSc in water science, policy and management at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford in England.
Here’s an interview Dezeen editor-in-chief conducted with Stephen Goodwin Honan after the presentation:
Marcus Fairs: What is Clean Water?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: The product is an environmentally friendly, low-cost, easy-to-use filtration system that rapidly accumulates arsenic from drinking water. The arsenic is able to then be recycled for productive purposes such as semi-conductors, solar panels, cellphones, computer electronics.
The system itself employs a natural mechanism for filtration. It uses a naturally occurring plant that grows directly in the water and directly removes the arsenic from the water prior to consumption. It requires zero electricity and is fully modular and scalable for varying levels of demand.
Marcus Fairs: How much does it cost and how much can the user earn from selling the arsenic?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: It costs $10, which primarily goes towards the distribution of the [young] plants. The users then grow the plants themselves and they can use any sort of products they have lying around, buckets and pipes and things, bamboo for the stands and so on.
$85 is the raw value of the high-purity arsenic that we’re able to produce from the waste of the plant itself [per year]. The costs of the chemicals [used to extract the arsenic from the plants] is very minimal. The difficultly is the economy of scale – we need to have the right type of facilities in order to do this type of production. So ideally we’d have the recycling scheme occur in a semi-conductor fabrication lab, because they already have all the clean rooms and everything else. Currently Bangladesh has an emerging market for semi-conductor fabrication, so we’re hoping to pair those two parallel paths – the arsenic contamination and the semi-conductor industry that’s emerging.
Marcus Fairs: What type of plants are used? Are they bio-engineered?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: There’s no bio-engineering involved. They’re naturally occurring plants that already have an affinity towards arsenic. The transport mechanisms in the plant are tailored specifically towards arsenic so they don’t compete with other plants for other minerals in the water, such as iron or nitrates. So the plan itself doesn’t need any bio-engineering.
Marcus Fairs: How many people are affected by arsenic contamination of drinking water?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: There are over 150 million people worldwide who are exposed to arsenic contamination. Specifically in Bangladesh it’s anything between 35 million and 88 million people [affected] out of a total population of 156 million.
We have over 1.2 million cases of hyper-pigmentation, which is an early stage of cancer [caused by arsenic poisoning]. It’s very difficult to get accurate figures for the numbers of deaths attributable to arsenic, because they don’t do autopsies. But those are the ballpark figures. It’s a massive proportion of the population that are affected.
Marcus Fairs: You’ve completed trials in Bangladesh; what happens next?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: So we’re post-pilot project and we’re looking to scale up. We already have 500 people who’ve signed up for the next iteration of the pilot project. They actually approached us to do the next phase. We’re then looking to partner with a semi-conductor company and hopefully we can close that gap and do the recycling in plants that are on the ground [in Bangladesh] and produce the first batch of “responsible arsenic”.
Marcus Fairs: $85 is a lot of money for a family in Bangladesh.
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Yeah. The average income in Bangladesh is roughly a dollar a day. It’s subsistence-level farming. The paradigm shift is that people will be able to earn money from producing their own clean water as opposed to paying to have clean water.
That’s a really big stickiness factor for the design itself. It can appeal to the farmers because this can be a real potential revenue source for them. Ideally we’ll have a dividend scheme where we buy the filters off them after they’ve been used.
Marcus Fairs: Have you set up a company to take this forward?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: I’m still a doctoral student at the University of Oxford. I worked with a couple of MBAs at the Said Business School and I’m looking to figure out the best way to implement this. I think that having open-source access to the design of the filter is the best way forward, but controlling the recycling scheme so the collection and processing happens under a watchful eye is going to be really important. I envision a non-profit organisation that delivers the filters and a social enterprise that would then run the recycling scheme.
Marcus Fairs: So the filter is a bit of technology that sits in the tub and the plants then absorb the arsenic that’s caught in the filter?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Yes absolutely. The filter technology should be accessible to everyone but the recycling process should be separate. Right now we don’t have a company incorporated to do that be we do have a team that’s looking at other problems such as going into old landfills and recycling metalloids that are wastefully thrown away and could be upcycled.
Marcus Fairs: So this idea could be spread laterally to recycle different types of pollutants?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Oh yeah. The idea itself can be used in many applications. The landfills are what we’re looking at next. We’re looking at value chains, how you can add value to recycling different supplies that are in demand by industry.
“We’re looking at ways of writing ‘Kanye West’,” Saville told Dezeen after the talk, held at the V&A museum as part of the London Design Festival. “What does ‘Kanye’ and ‘Kanye West’ look like written down?”
The designer added the collaboration was open-ended, rather than a commission to design a logo or a specific artwork. “It’s very casual,” he said.
During the talk Saville, who is best-known for his 1980s record covers for bands including New Order and Joy Division, explained how he had discussed the project earlier that day with West, who is in London rehearsing for a performance.
The two talked about Adolphe Mouron Cassandre’s iconic 1961 logo for Yves Saint Laurent, featuring the overlapping letters YSL, Saville said. “He said to me: ‘You’re Cassandre’,” he told Dezeen. “He wants a YSL”.
Saville is the recipient of this year’s London Design Medal. He will receive the award at a ceremony on Wednesday. Read our earlier story for more about the award, and for more details of the conversation with Morley.
Competition: as media partners for the Global Design Forum, Dezeen is giving readers the chance to win one of five pairs of tickets worth £395 each to the event in London on 16 and 17 September, which features speakers including Peter Saville (pictured) Jaime Hayon and Ross Lovegrove.
The Global Design Forum combines a series of talks and debates lead by key design industry figures and international designers over two days, organised by the London Design Festival.
Jaime Hayón. Top: Peter Saville
Tickets will allow delegates to attend every event in this year’s programme and are each worth £395.
Opening night at the V&A museum will see artist and designer Peter Saville in conversation with journalist Peter Morley, followed by a drinks reception in the museum’s Paintings Gallery.
Michael Young
The next day at London’s Southbank Centre, the full-day programme will include four main sessions and over 20 international speakers.
In one section, entrepreneurs and inventors will present their innovations to a panel of experts then the audience will vote for their favourite.
All ticket holders become members of the London Design Festival’s VIP Programme, giving access to a bespoke series of events throughout the festival from 14 to 22 September.
To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Global Design Forum 2013” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.
You need to subscribe to our newsletter to have a chance of winning.Sign up here.
The Royal Festival Hall at London’s Southbank Centre
Competition closes 12 September 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeen Mail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.
Read on for more details from the organisers:
The Global Design Forum is the agenda-setting thought leadership event for design, organised by the London Design Festival. The event is a unique platform for the most challenging thinking about the future of human society and design’s role in it.
Speaking at this year’s Forum are individuals from a variety of business backgrounds where the implementation of intelligent design thinking is absolutely core to their strategy and competitive advantage, and that of their clients.
The Global Design Forum will start with a bang at the V&A as British artist, designer, art director and cultural game changer Peter Saville will engage in a provocative head-to-head conversation with leading journalist and commentator Paul Morley. With these two in the hot seat, you should expect the unexpected! The talk will be followed by a drinks reception for all delegates in the museum’s Paintings Gallery.
The next day, on Tuesday 17 September, delegates will come together at the Southbank Centre for the full-day programme, which includes four main sessions and over 20 international speakers.
Sessions will explore where innovation is at its most exciting, most relevant and farthest reaching; five bright entrepreneurs and inventors present their ‘world shaking’ ideas in only five minutes, scrutinised by a panel of experts and voted on by the audience; as cities grow in size, experts from around the world ask how creativity will be central to a ‘smart’ city’s future success; and as communication, production and distribution evolve, what new challenges does that present to designers and brands?
Speakers on the day include advertising guru Sir John Hegarty, serial entrepreneur Brent Hoberman, designer and educator Ilse Crawford, HTC’s Head of Design Scott Croyle, Senior Vice President of BMW Group Design Adrian van Hooydonk, and designers Ross Lovegrove, Jaime Hayon and Michael Young, to name a few.
Attend the Global Design Forum for provocative thinking, game-changing ideas and fresh insights.
News: a group of libertarian activists in the U.S. plans to distribute open-source blueprints for homemade 3D-printed guns, provoking questions about the potential uses of the increasingly affordable technology.
Defense Distributed, the activist group led by Texas law student Cody Wilson, has just received $20,000 in funding for its Wiki Weapon project to create instruction kits for working guns. Individuals would be able to download the kits and use them to 3D-print their own weapons at home, sidestepping the need for a gun license.
News of the project comes just weeks after another American hobbyist became the first person to successfully build and fire a 3D-printed gun. Michael Guslick claimed to have fired 200 rounds from his .22 calibre pistol, which he made by fitting a 3D-printed plastic receiver – the only part of a gun that requires a license in the U.S. – to the other gun components, which don’t have to be registered. Guslick said he then adapted the components to make a semiautomatic rifle (below).
Anab Jain, founder of the collaborative design practice Superflux, drew attention to Guslick’s homemade gun and the legal and ethical questions it posed at last week’s Global Design Forum in London. Making guns with 3D-printing technology might seem “unsettling”, she told the audience, but it points to the dramatic changes that lie ahead as design expertise, technology and equipment become more accessible to individuals.
“The old rules and regulations about who is the designer, who is the manufacturer and who is the distributor change when people have the tools and opportunities to become the designer, manufacturer and distributor themselves,” Jain told Dezeen today.
“The problem is that sometimes we get so scared about new technology and just think about the worst case scenario, which is what happened with GM [genetically modified food],” she added. “It’s about making sure there is a possibility to debate these things instead of just becoming passive consumers and saying, ‘tomorrow I can order a 3D-printed gun if I want’.”
3D printing technology has become significantly more accessible recently, with retailers now offering the printers for as little as $600, but the legality of homemade guns remains an unresolved issue.
On its website, Defense Distributed states: “It is legal to produce any category of weapon you could ordinarily legally own, so long as you are not providing it for sale or are not prohibited from possessing firearms in the first place.” These rules would only be relevant to U.S. citizens, however. ”If you are in another country, proceed with the expectation that every bit of this is illegal,” the website adds.
Today the group made public a letter it had received from StrataSys, a company that makes 3D printers, cancelling their lease of a printer and stating that it was company policy “not to knowingly allow [its] printers to be used for illegal purposes.” Meanwhile, the group has announced that computer files for its ‘WikiWep’ prototype plastic handguns will be made available for download in the coming weeks.
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