Designing be(for)e Disasters

Insurance companies can seem to be stupid sometimes.

The idea of insurance is inherently preemptive - it's something you think about ahead of time. It's proactive, in a way. So when my insurance company rejected coverage of a device on the grounds that I was "too healthy to warrant it", I was surprised. I needed to be sick enough to receive coverage? Wouldn't it be in the insurance company's best interest to keep me healthy, rather than wait until I became sicker, in which case they'd end up paying a lot more? I don't ultimately know why my insurance company initially rejected the proposal (luckily, they did eventually accept it), but my guess is that they weren't thinking ahead.

Being proactive and creating indemnity for disasters is not something humans seem to be good at. Generally, we address problems only after they have already occurred once - and once is one too many times. Herein lies a major problem with disaster relief efforts.

Hurricane Katrina is a prime example of this lack of design pro-activism. Everyone knew that the levies in the area were not up to spec, yet nothing was done to fix the problem. Now it's getting attention (although arguably still not the attention it deserves), but only after the catastrophe had struck. Kate Stohr, of Architecture for Humanity, tells us "You can’t design for disaster after the fact. Unless it's strategically thought about in advance of disaster, these ideas don't work" (Wortham).


Although obviously not intended as temporary, these dome houses clearly had some foresight behind them. They were designed with a solution to a specific problem in mind, and were created before that problem actually manifested.

So how does a design like the one above translate into a temporary structure? Two British engineers, Peter Brewin and William Crawford, have designed an inflatable concrete house which actually hardens into a permanent dome-like structure. The use of a new material called concrete fabric allows these shelters to be incredibly sturdy and last for up to ten years.

Because of their many positive characteristics, these "Concrete Canvas" shelters can address more than the need for disaster shelters. Aside from handling temporary or semi-permanent disaster shelter, they can be used for military operations. They're flame-retardant, can handle snow build-up, and are quite sterile inside. They're also modular and can be customized incredibly easily.

Designing for disasters can be viewed on the immediate scale, but recently I've been thinking that we all have an obligation as designers to look at a larger, global-level disaster that's occurring as I write this. It's not what you'd normally think of as a disaster, but it's been happening for a while - the slow destruction of our planet, and the continuing depletion of our resources, is quite a disaster indeed. What can we do to address this disaster? Should we stop designing things all together? That's obviously not the answer, because if we don't design and manufacture a cheap, popular product, someone else will. What we have to do is change the way the mass-produced products already entrenched in the consumer world are designed and manufactured, so we can begin to reduce our environmental footprint. Then maybe we can stop the climate from spitting out such terrible tsunamis and hurricanes!