Only 10% of designers understand design ethics and what it means to save society. Design has a minimal bias on who is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in society. Design is a very outward discipline. It accommodates the poor, middle-class and rich income earners. Design is meant to take care of everyone; everyone you and I hate and love. Design looks at reality objectively. The law looks at society subjectively. Hence, my professor Dr Soheil Ashrafi once stated the truth about the law, “The law cannot please every morality; design can”. And in saying that, as the great Kevin Samuels once stated, “Technology was made to challenge nature”. Design is very understanding of the human biological imperatives.
Everyone will die one day, but everyone reaches old age at different times to a point where even hospital capacity aren’t overwhelmed, making a practical society. Viral pandemics don’t care about capacity.
I read many books about healthcare workers’ and laboratorists’ experiences on the front and statistics before the pandemic. I had to stop the gunman from walking in and shooting everyone. I knew what would happen to first and third-world countries. I sometimes am so baffled by the things I learn from all that reading. Imagine knowing all the chaos that would occur on a large scale and knowing that it would be genocide to sit back and let it happen. Imagine knowing how flawed the tools were for epidemic containment that cost healthcare workers, the public their lives and the economy because people ranging from poor to rich are the backbone of the economy.
A whopping 58% of healthcare workers who tried to contain the Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2015 lost their lives; they left the more giant killers to assist with the more diminutive killer (Ebola). Malaria (the biggest killer) killed 50 times more than the Ebola death toll. I found a safe material for the garments in a technical textile book that wouldn’t put the healthcare workers in danger (but is not feasible on a pandemic scale); then, I found a humanitarian communicative system that healthcare workers used for outbreaks since the 1960s and planned how that would function for responders and then I thought of rapid computational genome systems which computer scientists never invented. No fast genome systems were invented to keep up with that 40% to 90% mortality rate virus because its overestimated mutation rate was 9.5 until 2020 by Ark Innovations.
Emotionally by Jan 2019—I was swimming in a pool of my very own tears and sweat because nobody understood ‘probability.’
Look—90% of product designers do commercial work. They’re not impacting the global economic place with world-improving products/services. And most companies settle for mediocrity by employing people who don’t want to grow the 10% of designers who are contributing meaningfully.
When people say, “Pandemics are normal”, they don’t know that superviruses (if they go global) will be the demise of our human biological imperatives. Even social media is disagreeable with our human biological imperatives. Everything has a capacity.
The notion that ‘work from home’ was a revolution could’ve been done without a pandemic. Why didn’t people who passed their probation period or have excellent performance ratings at work get to work from home before the pandemic? Yes, money through public transportation spins the economy. But preventing pandemics spins the global economy.
You can expand that 10% by doing construction, biomedical engineering, engineering (all disciples), computer science and Industrial Design (to design medical equipment and devices) or any sustainability discipline.
I would encourage young men, in particular, to be excellent in those fields because men have designed everything in this world since the beginning of time, and men can design more sustainable economic infrastructures.
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