Emily Pilloton is the founder of Project H. If you aren’t already familiar with the initiative, Pilloton’s Design (Anti) Manifesto will give great insight into the type of design goals Project H is working towards.

This week in Inspire, she wrote on the 5 tenets driving her organization.

There is no chapter without action.
Design with, not for.
Start locally, scale globally.
Document, measure and share.
Design systems not stuff.

This is definitely worth a read, with detailed examples on each. If these tenets were adopted by fashion design educators within their individual curriculum, fashion design students might realize their enormous potential and responsibility to design solutions.

You might also note that she has a new book coming out in September, with a forward from Allan Chochinov of Core77, titled Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People.

Below is an excerpt from the back cover. You can sign up here to receive an email notification when the book is available for purchase.

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.”

Source: Core77 and Project H

Mary F Hanlon

Mary has a PhD in Sociology from University of Edinburgh, researching responsible fashion and transnational labour rights activism in the wake of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh.