How creativity can change lives

Design plays a big role in making our world prettier. But the higher powers vested in design go beyond the latest Chanel Cruise Collection and the most devastatingly designed Bugatti.

French designer and social activist Florie Salnot’s shortlisted entry for the 2014 V&A Jameel Prize, Plastic Gold, might not have won the coveted award but it puts the plight of the displaced people of the Western Sahara back in the world’s spotlight almost 35 years after half of the local population (the Saharawis) was forced to flee to SW Algeria, where they were allowed to establish the Saharawi state-in-exile in refugee camps.

Winning the Jameel would have been nice, Salnot told me later. But according to her, the recognition gave the Sahrawis confidence and a recognition to their cause: “And when all you have left is your arts and craft, that is a big deal”.

Salnot is not the only one harnessing the real power of design. Indian fashion design and conservator Rahul Jain has been working hard at reviving design vocabularies in his home country, just as Mexico City based design house Fabrica Mexico reinterprets traditional crafts and iconography for 2015 and beyond. What these people are doing goes beyond creating beautiful, expensive pieces of self-indulgent works (and living in Dubai, we know how many of those exist). They are holding the hands of people and crafts lost in the time, ravaged by the industrial revolution — as in the Sahrawis case, by war — and are giving them their identity again.