At Cooper-Hewitt, Good Design For The Poor

“The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. (Paul) Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent…. ‘We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,’ he said. To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to ‘the other 90 percent,’ particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.”