“Lists like this are useful in shining a light on unseen leaders and unheard voices,” says John Cary, the curator of Public Interest Design, who worked with Autodesk to research the list and create an interactive graphic of it. The list offers a new lens on some favorite TED speakers and TED Fellows — because, it turns out, they’re designers. Below, a look at these honorees:

• William Kamkwamba made the list for designing and building a windmill that brought electricity to his home and village in rural Malawi. Did we mention that he was 14 at the time? He shares the story in his TED Talk “How I harnessed the wind.”

• Jacqueline Novogratz was honored for Acumen, her initiative that has invested over $50 million in ventures like D.light Design, which serve poor communities. She explains the Acumen approach in talks such as “On escaping poverty” and “A third way to think about aid.”

• TED Fellow Hugo Van Vuuren, who co-founded Design with Africa, made the list for his work on design solutions to social challenges across the continent.

• Bunker Roy was honored for his Barefoot College, which seeks to make communities self-sufficient by teaching skills in energy, health, waste management and more. He talks more about his for-the-poor-only college in the talk “Learning from a barefoot movement.”

• Amos Winter, who founded Global Research Innovation and Technology, made the list for his work on products like the Leveraged Freedom Chair. In this talk, he shares more about the development of this “Cheap all-terrain wheelchair.”

• TED Fellow Yaw “DK” Osseo-Asare, of the architecture studio Low Design Office, was honored for his work in low-cost, low-energy, and low-environmental-impact design.
  .
• Bill and Melinda Gates made the list for the Gates Foundation’s work addressing global health and poverty issues, often with design-based solutions. See Bill’s big-picture design thinking in action in the legendary talk “Mosquitos, malaria and education.” Melinda made waves in 2012 with a rousing talk “Let’s put birth control back on the agenda.”

• Zainab Salbi was honored for founding Women for Women International, which helps survivors of war recover from crisis. Her TED Talk “Women, wartime and the dream of peace” is simply incredible.

• TED Fellow Jodie Wu’s Global Cycle Solutions has created a bike-powered maize sheller and phone-charger. These unique designs landed her a spot on the list.

• Alastair Parvin was honored for his work on Wikihouse, an open source construction set that lets anyone build. His talk from TED2013, “The DIY house of the future,” will premiere on TED.com next week. Stay tuned.

Below, check out a static version of Public Interest Design’s Global 100 graphic. And head to PublicInterestDesign.org to play with the interactive version »

The exhibit Public Interest Design gets set up at TED2013. Here, a look at Embrace Nest, an affordable alternative to an incubator, aimed to provide the 20 million low birth-weight and premature babies born each year with critical warmth. It was created by students at Stanford. Photo: Michael Brands

By Courtney E. Martin and John Cary

Editor’s note: designer John Cary and journalist Courtney E. Martin are the curatorial brains behind the show, “Public Interest Design: Places, Products, & Processes,” which opened at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco last October. The entire exhibit has been reinstalled at TED in Long Beach, and we invited the duo to give us a sense of the thinking behind the installation.

Momentum is building at the intersection of design and social justice, or what is called “public interest design”—akin to public interest law and public health. In recent years, there has been a real proliferation of high-profile exhibitions, books, and events. Back in 2007, for instance, museum goers began flocking to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition series; in 2010, “Small Scale, Big Change” was installed at the MoMA, also in New York. Meanwhile, books like Design Like You Give a Damn and its recent sequel, by 2006 TED Prize winners Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr of Architecture for Humanity, as well as events such as the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting on “Designing for Impact,” led by 2007 TED Prize winner Bill Clinton, underline the growing interest in this important topic. Next month even sees the first-ever Public Interest Design Week.

We joined the curating fray last October, working with the Autodesk Gallery team to assemble an exhibition focused on covering the most provocative and interesting areas in the space. In doing so, we aimed to be very intentional about filling in some of the gaps in earlier attempts at displaying and explaining this burgeoning field. We tried to break new ground in a few key ways.

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves livesFirst and foremost, we wanted to put people at the center of the show, focusing on stories of those who were impacted by design as opposed to the stories of the designers themselves. The design itself, after all, is ultimately a means to an end. We wanted to be clear and transparent about the effect and influence of this work.

For example, among the products on display, is the Embrace Nest infant warmer, pioneered by TED Senior Fellow Jane Chen. Many families in India wait to name their babies until nine months after they are born. The reason? High infant mortality rates, caused in part by the inability of low-birth-weight babies to regulate their own body temperature. One mother, Shivamadamma, from a farming family in rural India, gave birth to a premature baby boy weighing only 3.5 pounds. Keeping her baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was impossibly expensive. Fortunately, doctors were able to provide thermal support to Shivamadamma’s baby with the Embrace Nest infant warmer. Now nine months old and feeding well, the baby is ready for his naming ceremony.

The Butaro Hospital is a 150-bed, 60,000 hospital built in the Burera District of Rwanda by MASS Design Group in association with and operated by Partners in Health. Photo: Iwan Baan.

Also included is the Butaro Hospital by MASS Design Group and Partners in Health in rural Rwanda, which sets a new standard for healthcare design, not just in the global south, but beyond. Opened in January 2011, it is a 150-bed, 60,000-square-foot world-class hospital, bringing health care to a district of 400,000 people who previously had to travel long distances to access even the most basic of health services. The building, created from local materials with local laborers—employing 4,000 people over the course of its construction—became something of a symbol of the renaissance of health care in Rwanda. As Neal Emery, writing last week at Atlantic.com, explained it, “Amidst the barrage of stories about failing states and civil wars that characterize the dour American media coverage of the developing world, the reinvention of Rwanda offers hope. Since the genocide with which its name is still synonymous in the United States, Rwanda has doubled its life expectancy and now offers a replicable model for delivery of high quality health care with limited resources.”

The exhibit also deliberately includes products, places, and processes. To be honest, this last category was the hardest to curate. It’s challenging to explain the critical nature of systems in our lives and the lives of the most vulnerable citizens—both domestically and abroad. In some ways, this is the invisible category of design. We hold and touch products. We work, live, and learn in buildings. Both are physical and tangible. Systems, on the other hand, affect our quality of lives in profound ways, but are often difficult to conceptualize, and most certainly, to display.

Home for Good, a multi-organization initiative to end chronic homelessness among veterans in the Los Angeles area, redesigned and streamlined the process of the number of days and steps it takes to get people off the streets and into housing. Graphic by Megan Jett, courtesy of Autodesk.

We drew inspiration from projects like Annie Leonard’s Stories of Stuff and Purpose’s unPAC, which increase systemic literacy with crystal clear, highly visual communication. That’s not always easy to come by, we understood, after trying to figure out a way to demonstrate the efficacy of Community Solutions and Home for Good for the exhibition. These organizations have collaborated to develop a process to get homeless Los Angelenos off the street. Before, it took an average of 47 steps and 168 days for a homeless veteran to get into permanent housing. Since their intervention, the average has dropped to 21 steps and 93 days, with an ultimate goal of 10 steps in 10 days. Our Santiago-based designer Megan Jett worked through at least a dozen iterations before we were convinced that our graphic installation really showed the innovation at the heart of the process.

Ultimately, our aim was to communicate something not about design, per se, but about dignity. Environmental psychology tells us that the moment we are born, the world around us—the rooms we sleep in, the classrooms we study in, the outdoor spaces we have access to, the bureaucracies we see our parents wrestle with—signals something about our own identity, our own worth, what we can expect from life. In this way, we are a reflection of the design we experience in our lives. Which leads us to the critical question: how do we make a world that is more hospitable and healthy for all of us, that signals back to us that we belong, that we deserve beauty and functionality and dignity? And in instances where design, be that of products, places, or processes, is less than ideal, what changes can be made quickly, simply, easily, or painlessly?

Courtney E. Martin is the author multiple books, including Do It Anyway. John Cary is an architect, author, and the founding editor of PublicInterestDesign.org. They are also members of the TED Prize team and co-leads ofThe City 2.0, the 2012 TED Prize focused on the future of cities.

By Courtney E. Martin & John Cary

Pregnancy is supposed to be about life. And yet, every day, 800 women across the globe die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In Malawi, which has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world, a shocking 1 in 36 pregnant women die rather than become proud mothers.

But could this oversized problem be tackled through design? Malawi’s new president, Joyce Banda, certainly believes so.

More and more, global health experts are teaming up with designers to tackle daunting challenges like food scarcity, water contamination and, yes, maternal mortality — be they environmental, product, or systems design challenges. David Kelley on human-centered design Using what IDEO.org calls “human-centered design” — essentially putting the user at the center of a deeply iterative process — some of the most cutting-edge thinkers in public health are seeing old problems in new ways. Design is no longer just a tool of the global elite; it’s increasingly becoming a lever for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world.

Two activists with a deep-seated interest in how design can transform lives, we spent the first two weeks of the year doing fieldwork in Malawi. Despite the fact that it is considered one of the world’s least-developed countries, leaders in Malawi are looking to dignifying design. Banda, who came into office in April after her predecessor passed away, has pledged her precious time in office to emulating places like Rwanda, where human-centered design has improved the lot of many rural poor. Banda faces her first official election on May 19, 2014, giving added urgency to her efforts.

The Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Council on Reproductive Health coordinated our visit to the country, and is also marshaling resources and support Banda’s way. She is the second female president in Africa, following in the footsteps of Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. (Watch Sirleaf’s Q&A on the TEDWomen stage in 2010.) The two are allies and perhaps symbols of a new dawn of women’s leadership on a continent that has long suffered from the corruption and violence.

One of Banda’s first acts in office was to double-down on a Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health & Safe Motherhood, focused on reducing maternal mortality from its current rate to 115 or less per 100,000 live births. She aims to do this by 2015.

Above, Michael Rosenblatt asks “How can we stop death during childbirth?” at TEDMed 2011.

One idea to this end: getting more women to give birth in clinics staffed with health providers and equipped to handle complications. In countries like Malawi, women have historically given birth in their homes with traditional birth attendants. This can be extremely dangerous. Should something go wrong, most traditional birth attendants aren’t trained to respond; many are also known to encourage women to push too fast, one cause of the scourge of fistula in the country.

So what is a country to do when 85% of its population, including women of child-bearing age, live in rural settings far afield of the few equipped clinics and hospitals in the country? It’s a question ripe for a design approach. The Malawian government has pledged to build as many as 150 “maternal waiting homes” near clinics where rural women can stay in advance of their due dates. One waiting home is already in service in Northern Malawi and seven more are currently under construction.

Jane Chen: A warm embrace that saves lives

Blueprints for these brick and concrete structures were developed by the Ministry of Health, taking two forms — a 24-bed version and a slightly larger 32-bed structure. Each is projected to cost between $70,000-$80,000, and will be funded by Malawi’s private sector and outside philanthropic support. These waiting homes have the opportunity to become beacons of hope in a country caught between natural beauty and devastating poverty.

But it’s not just bricks-and-mortar that Banda is using to change women’s lives; it’s also a human-centered design for the healthcare system — too long understaffed and disproportionately urban. The Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health & Safe Motherhood, for example, is already training tribal chiefs in the importance of clinic birth for rural women, recognizing that their influence will largely determine what kinds of healthcare options women feel compelled to access. Once the chiefs have encouraged women to get to clinics, they will be met by new community midwives (Banda aims to train over 1,000 by 2014) and training opportunities at the “waiting homes.” Indeed, the Malawian women we interviewed expressed that they would love to gain new skills and knowledge while they wait for their babies to arrive.

Resource-limited settings, like the rural villages of Malawi, seem like unusual places to find this kind of systemic and environmental design. But there are important precedents. For example, the breathtaking Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, designed by MASS Design Group and operated in January 2011 by Partners in Health (PIH).

Above, Marika Shioiri-Clark talks “Empathic Architecture” at TEDxStellenbosch, describing Butaro Hospital.

Perched on a hilltop once home to a military base, the Butaro Hospital proves that “if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” as Dr. Paul Farmer of PIH is known to say. Farmer is referring to the fact that this world-class hospital is found in a setting where there was no basic electricity until the advent of the hospital. But Farmer is also referring to a unique design imagined by professionals embedded in the community they sought to serve — rural villagers, doctors, and nurses. Further, the hospital was built by local community members using primarily local materials. Thousand of people were employed in making the facility’s exquisite lava rock walls, virtually all of them gaining new skills that may improve their livelihood in the future.

Many details at the Butaro Hospital tell a story about the ways that humans really heal. Rather than being a fortress of internal hallways and small, secluded rooms, like so many American hospitals, it is characterized by open-air external walkways and big, collective spaces with beds directly facing bright windows with beautiful views. Ernest Madu on world-class health care There are also countless places to gather and sit outside — including a beloved koi pond. Color-coded signage paired with the color of wards is bright and easy to understand for potentially anxious visitors, unlike the bureaucracy and bad lighting one finds too often in stateside clinics.

If all goes well, Malawi, like Rwanda before it, will have the potential to teach the so-called developed world something about dignifying design. It’s what many cutting-edge development and design experts are calling South-to-North strategies — where Western countries look to the Global South for the next, big innovations. It’s a refreshing reversal of fortune and a huge opportunity. Not just for the mothers of Malawi, but for all of us.

Courtney E. Martin is the author multiple books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists. John Cary is an architect, author, and the founding editor of PublicInterestDesign.org. Together, they traveled to Malawi and Rwanda this month with a delegation from The Aspen Institute’s Global Health & Development program. They are also members of the TED Prize team and co-leads of The City 2.0, the 2012 TED Prize focused on the future of cities.

Top of page: A mother and baby in a sunny ward at Butaro Hospital. Here: Mothers and children await care at health clinic in the Doa district of Malawi. Photos: John Cary

Great design doesn’t just look good — it has the potential to make lives easier and to enhance the public good. Public Interest Design, the website dedicated to examining how, has created a list of 100 makers, educators, connectors, policymakers and visualizers in the U.S. who are doing incredible work at the intersection of design and service. Among the list, we noticed several TED Fellows and TED speakers. Below, check out their moving talks.

• Yves Behar talks “Designing objects that tell stories” and gives a look at “supercharged motorcycle design”
• Majora Carter on “Greening the ghetto” as well as sharing “3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship“
• TED Fellow Candy Chang poses the question “Before I die I want to…”
• TED Fellow Jane Chen shares a “Warm embrace that saves lives”
• Bill Clinton on “Rebuilding Rwanda”
• Robert Hammond talks “Building a park in the sky”
• David Kelley on “Human-centered design” and on “How to build creative confidence”
• Tim Brown “Urges designers to think big” and shares “Tales of creativity and play”
• TED Fellow Juliette LaMontagne offers “Breakthrough solutions”
• Amy Smith shares “Simple, lifesaving design”
• Jennifer Pahla on “Coding for a better government”
• TED session curator Chee Pearlman goes inside “The Design Studio”
• Emily Pilloton on “Teaching design for change”
• Timothy Prestero warns to “Design for people, not awards”
• Paula Scher “Gets serious”
• Cameron Sinclair sounds a “Call for open-source architecture” and introduces us to the “Refugees of boom and bust”

Good design isn’t just about making a great-looking colander. Good design can actually improve our lives, both individually and collectively.

In the new Autodesk Gallery exhibit “Public Interest Design: Products, Places & Processes,” curators Courtney E. Martin and John Cary showcase 12 projects that were designed with the common good in mind. Of the four objects, four places and four systems on display, many are the work of TED speakers and TED Fellows. (As is the exhibit itself, in fact: Watch Martin’s TEDTalk, “Reinventing feminism.”)

Gallery-goers will find Jane Chen’s Embrace Nest, a low-cost portable incubator designed to save the lives of premature babies in the developing world, where it’s estimated that 450 preemies die every hour. Yves Béhar’s fuseproject design group is included for its initiative “See Better to Learn Better,” which helps students in Mexico design their own low-cost eyeglasses to make them more fun to wear. Jennifer Pahlka’s Code for America gets a nod in the exhibit for Adopt-a-Hydrant, a web platform that lets community members take responsibility for shoveling a nearby hydrant after it snows. And David Kelley’s IDEO is featured for its project Clean Team, a low-cost in-home toilet system that is making a difference in Ghana. The TEDx program is even featured in the exhibit, for creating a global platform for the sharing of ideas in under-resourced communities thanks to TEDx-in-a-Box.

The idea of designing for the public good is just starting to appear in our collective consciousness. As Martin and Cary write in an op-ed in The New York Times:

“It used to be that young people with humanitarian aspirations went into law or medical school or applied to Teach for America or the Peace Corps. But today, increasing numbers [have] decided to try to design their way to a more beautiful, just world. This new breed of public-interest designers proceeds from a belief that everybody deserves good design, whether in a prescription-bottle label that people can more easily read and understand, a beautiful pocket park to help a city breathe or a less stressful intake experience at the emergency room.”

The exhibit “Public Interest Design” is on display at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco. Below, see an infographic overview of the exhibit, for anyone who won’t be able to see it in person.