What People Are Saying About Design Revolution

"Seeing all of this product-design innovation in one place is a thrilling experience-- Design Revolution opens the doors and shows you the power of what smart design can accomplish. The book proves that this is the direction we should all be going in, and Emily Pilloton is going to help get us there."
-- Amy Novogratz, TED Prize Director

"Pilloton is a force of nature and Design Revolution is the perfect storm of inspiration, optimism, and ingenuity. This book should be on every designer's shelf -- no, in his or her hands."
-- Valerie Casey, Global Practice Head, IDEO; founder, The Designers Accord

From The Back Cover

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.

The Design Revolution Road Show

The Design Revolution Road Show was a different kind of book tour. In the Spring of 2010, Project H's Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller took to the road for a traveling exhibition and lecture series bringing “product design that empowers” to 35 high schools and university design programs across the nation. The Design Revolution Road Show featured forty of the humanitarian design solutions featured in the book, installed as a pop-up exhibition in a 1972 Airstream trailer. Instead of book signings in libraries and book stores, the road show made design accessible in a hands-on, personal way.

The programming for the roadshow brought the evidence of and tools for design for social impact to the doorsteps of students, to enable and empower the next generation of creative problem-solvers to apply their skills to the world’s most pressing problems and improve life on a global scale. MORE INFO on the Design Revolution Road Show website.