Sitting on my desk in New York are prototypes of two devices that make contaminated water safe to drink. For flood victims or people in a refugee camp, they are hope made visible. Bad water – water that contains industrial pollutants or parasites or bacteria like E. coli – is responsible for half of all hospitalizations worldwide and five million deaths a year. One of the devices is businesslike brushed metal with black plastic inserts, something like a commuter coffee cup. The other looks like a toy rocket-ship, standing on cheerful green plastic fins. Both can be made cheaply, by the millions, and delivered fast; a flood won’t wait for you to build a water-treatment facility. Neither one needs an owner’s manual to use. In both solutions, bad water goes in, good water comes out.

Simple. Not to mention needed, personal, fast and cheap-as-possible. When you have design attributes like that, “scalable” takes care of itself.

What makes the prototypes on my desk unusual is that they were produced by students. The only spec was that their solution had to address the world’s water crisis in a meaningful way. It was up to the students to find their own problem to solve. Two teams, from Sweden and South Africa, chose decontamination. Other finalists in our design challenge chose other problems. Getting citizens of Los Angeles to give up their titanically water-wasting habit of rich, thick, green lawns was one. It takes some nerve to get a whole city to change behavior. But students, well…they’re up for it.

Will this project succeed?  I certainly hope so. Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling used to say that the best way to have a good idea was to have lots of ideas. Industrial-scale innovation limits your options. The bigger the bet, the more conservative any organization is going to be. On the other hand, thousands of undirected, small-scale, fast ideas are almost certain to generate hundreds of practical solutions that weren’t there before. One of these ideas, I hope, will be the dandelion seeds of new futures for people.

INTO THE WILDERNESS

Innovation doesn’t pop out at the end of a PowerPoint presentation. Innovation is personal. It happens at the extreme margins of enterprise, where no one knows what the exact problems are because the maps are blank. Send a designer out there and she’ll come back with something nobody’s ever seen, a prototype that fulfills a need you didn’t even know existed.

You never really know what’s out there. That’s what’s wrong with hiring problem solvers - a definition for designers as crippling as it is outdated. The great problems, the ones really worth solving, aren’t already on the agenda. Innovation is personal: if we are open, curious, and empathetic, the great problems will find us.

The water problem picked me in 2007, although I didn’t know it at the time. John Bielenberg had invited me to go down to Greensboro, Alabama, with his remarkable program Project M. Project M is like a self-guided Outward Bound course for socially conscious designers. Every year Project M parachutes a team of young designers into a poor or challenged area and leaves them on their own to discover a problem that they can solve in a month or so. Nobody tells them what to do, or even what the problem is. They live with local families, look around, talk to people, and find something they can put their hand to that will do some good.

They become problem seekers.

In Hale County we discovered that one family in four had no access to safe water. Some of them were going to the local Texaco station with buckets because their water at home was full of foul waste from the county’s biggest employer, a catfish farm. A thousand families couldn’t get city water because they couldn’t afford the $425 hook-up for a water meter. Getting these people meters was what the designers decided to do. They created communications and a website to bring national attention – and money for meters – to Hale County. Go to buyameter.org and you can see how the project’s doing. They’ve connected over 100 families so far. That’s not a bad month’s work for a brand new design team.

After my experience in Alabama, I started seeing water crises everywhere. Half of China’s cities have water shortages and 700 million people drink contaminated water every day. The World Bank calculates that 30 million people will have to relocate by 2020, 30 million “water refugees.” In Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley, where humans first domesticated corn, there is no longer enough water to grow corn. In rural Africa, one woman in five spends two hours a day fetching water on foot from wells miles away. There are Hale Counties everywhere.

INSPIRED IN DAVOS

Former NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger and I shared some of these water stories at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Four months in orbit aboard Mir, looking down at Earth’s shrinking river systems had made Jerry a water hawk, too. Water wasn’t at the very top of the agenda in Davos, but it quickly emerged as the axis that connects many of the other problems that were. By itself, the lack of safe water unleashes all four horsemen of the apocalypse: death, famine, pestilence, and war. In fact, the U.N. predicted outright conflict over water in the next five years.

So Jerry and I, with the remarkable support of Carl Ganter with the organization Circle of Blue, invited a group of global thought leaders to explore this issue in a quickly organized work session at Davos. They already knew the global to-do list was pretty full. We needed to come up with our own resources to put more effort against these water crises. Design students are one of Earth’s abundant resources, so we set out to engage them. Working in partnership with INDEX: Design to Improve Life, the AIGA and Circle of Blue, too, we decided to invite 10,000 of them from around the world to participate in The Aspen Design Challenge: Designing Water’s Future.

These students would be our dandelion seeds. As it turned out, more than 700 students from 28 countries provided 225 water solutions that weren’t there before. The best of them will be shaped for venture capital and presented at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Now that these prototypes exist, it’s time to work with our gifted PowerPoint friends to do what they can to unleash the mighty wheels of enterprise that replicate and distribute innovations at scale. Because we need to get solutions like these out and into the world. And fast.

A link to their work is here.

Designers work at human scale. For a designer, the obligation to make life better with workable, tangible solutions is immediate, personal, and direct. And while institutions are very good at making lots more of something that already exists, they are not as good at inventing the new.

Institutional action and big money are blunt instruments that can do as much damage as good by virtue of scale alone. Heroic water management projects - like dams - rarely benefit the people they’re meant to help, because the local communities get moved somewhere else and the big returns usually go somewhere else, too. Before it imploded, Enron was going to solve the world’s water problems by creating trading desks. They were seeking to monetize hydration.

Efforts like Project M and The Aspen Challenge are creating an architecture of participation outside of these kinds of silos. Over the last nine years, Project M alumni have emerged as one of an increasing number of influential networks of designers that want to make a tangible difference in people’s lives. As a discipline, design is now transcending the traditional “service” roles of the institutions that employ us. As designers, how should we best use our new-found powers and influence?

The first of something used to be hideously expensive; there had to be a mass market to earn back development costs. This is still true for new drugs and airliners, but not for most of the other things people use in their daily lives. In short, rapid prototyping systems have transformed the designer’s role. We can move out of the Concept business and into the real-world Solutions business faster than we had ever imagined.

Within a single generation of designers, the cost of creating innovative solutions for small groups of people has become almost trivial. Now every designer can be a factory where the future is made.

What we can see, we can solve.

And we’ll all see a lot more far beyond our office walls.