Design for the First World

Dx1W is a competition for designers, thinkers, artists, scientists, architects and anyone in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems. Why? Because we care.

The project began as a sar­cas­tic com­ment. The idea came to me in a class in which I was asked to cre­ate an object on “social design”. The assign­ment was one week long and there was no spe­cific con­text. Why would you assume that you can design some­thing to solve a prob­lem for the Third World –a world you don’t know– in a week? Well, because Bono has told us so. Didn’t we all just change the world by going to the Live 8 con­certs? Hav­ing this assign­ment in class (in NYU) imme­di­ately fired me up and raised my dis­com­fort lev­els with the attempts from First World agents to solve Third World Prob­lems to nuclear fusion tem­per­a­tures. I decided to do some­thing about it and this is how this com­pe­ti­tion was born.

I then was carried on by the topic and turned it into my thesis project. Now it is open for the world, and people can enter the competition until July 1st, 2010 and follow what is going on through the blog, the twitter feed, the facebook fan page and the twitter feed.

Press
Some selected articles:
Corey Doctorow in Boing-Boing
Bruce Sterling in Wired
An interview with CBC
Worldchanging

Planeta Sustentável
Worldwatch Institute
Core77
Aid Watchers

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