for him/her, but the reality is that millions of people around the world still lack or have an understanding of this right. Solutions to these challenges increasingly require collaborations of holistic approaches and perspectives. So often the organizations dedicated to enhance life support lack the awareness, creativity, tools and innovation that prohibits them from experiencing success at their full potential.

There is a growing demand for innovative, highly creative, sustainable, cooperative and responsive design where resources and expertise are scarce. We live in a designed world and designers are crucial to the development of its societies. Creative problem solving should be at the vanguard of all professions, as all industries influence societal development. There are options and methods in the design disciplines that offer a choice of objectives towards which designs can be directed. By properly strategizing these objectives and focusing on precise and realistic goals, designers could collaborate with other industries to enhance and increase underdevelopment and dependence, at which design expertise reduces them. The orientation of the design and industry professions should be progressive, and should promote social justice. In the past, deliberate attention to design innovation has helped businesses and societies during difficult periods and it can do so today; in fact it can do so on a global scale.

There needs to be a life support vanguard that designs solutions to enhance the lives of people who are lacking the basic needs and vital information in order to be able to lead a life where an individual has the necessities to make the right decisions, pursue happiness and enjoy all basic rights of being human.

This vanguard must engage in prosperous, strategic and multidisciplinary design activities that includes the care providers and the care receivers.

This vanguard must be concerned with social, political, ecological, environmental sustainability and resource consequences of design intervention.

This vanguard should neither be elitist nor non-therapeutic for its members.

The design disciplines have established a place for themselves in a phenomenally short time and are now widely accepted as useful practices in society. The reason being is the culture of design, i.e. the ideas, disciplines and strategies of thinking and working that distinguish the field from other fields. Designers are well able to satisfy conflicting demands at once. Recently, design has been poised to play a greater role in industry throughout the world, placing pragmatic values such as economic competitiveness inside a broader theme of social and ecological expression and transformation.

Design is a tremendous and powerful tool. Design has derived from pure functional means to modern times of creating new concepts to provoke transformation and enhancements of societies. Design is a philosophy that can transcend and is transcending beyond products, fashion, graphics and services into education, management and even politics. Equipped with this growing awareness and advanced design technologies Innovative Life Support (ILS) will be formed.

ILS will be a multidisciplinary non-government, non-profit humanitarian design organization engaged in enhancing the vital life support domains; food, shelter, health and medicare, education, recreation, transportation and communication. The organization will mainly consist of a diverse group of industrial designers and architects who believe that design, responsibly conceived and applied, can contribute to solving challenges such as sustainable development and providing for life support needs and services. ILS’s development and application agenda will distinguish it from other humanitarian organizations. All activities ILS carry out will be performed to the highest appropriate standards and beyond, with full awareness to the environment and society in which ILS designers engage. These are exciting times, demanding much creativity, innovative spirit and combined talents of organizations such as ILS.

Innovative Life Support will design to improve the life circumstances of those in need. ILS will design the right solutions so that the solutions will be sustainable and most effective for the current generation and create a better future for the following generations. When designing, ILS will take into account age, gender, the general culture of the target location, whilst abiding by local customs, beliefs and laws.

When designing for communities Innovative Life Support designers will;
1. Connect with the community they are trying to help.
2. Broaden the product, and allow mass customization so it applies to multiple persons.
3. Define the product to be used in desired ways.
4. Simplify, humanize and appropriate the product.
5. Demonstrate the product.
6. Decentralize the product.
7. Enable the community to create their own solutions.
8. Introduce alternative solutions to pre-existing solutions by the community.
9. Study feedback from other similar products and the products introduced into the target community.

Innovative Life Support will not only focus on solving the problems but also on maximizing the use of locally available materials and labor of the target location. The other very important part of ILS is that it will not just be a product development organization. ILS will take the responsibility to consult with government bodies and relief organizations to actively integrate the proposed solutions.

Innovative Life Support will also act as a grassroots network for volunteer designers worldwide, including the creative people in the developing nations to help and to provide long lasting solutions that can make a difference. Through publications, competitions, exhibitions, design build programs, partnerships with community development groups, workshops, educational forums and other activities, Innovative Life Support will encourage architects, engineers and industrial designers to get involved, foster innovation and bring attention to the role design can play in improving lives.

Innovative Life Support will find financial support from foundation grants, fund raising revenues, individual donations, corporate donations, other private donations, in-kind contribution, interest and earned incomes.

Currently Innovative Life Support is an effort in progress by me and two good friends, fueled by a keen interest and advice of people who are willing to generously give their time and talents to support this organization. The next stage of development for Innovative Life Support is to recruit more designers, financial experts, management experts and engineers that fit the organization’s culture and to officially register as a non-government, non-profit humanitarian design organization with all appropriate authorities.

Nyein Aung. (Executive Director / Founder)
I am a third year Industrial Design student at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 1999, I attended the Redwood Christian High School in California, where I received multiple art and design awards including a $15,000 Scholarship from The Art Institute of Seattle. In 2005 I received an Associates of Arts Degree in Industrial Design with high honors and The Best Graduating Portfolio Award.

After graduation I worked for a company called Lift Port Group in Washington. I actively engaged in the development of an easily erected high altitude emergency communications tower.
In 2006 I returned to Myanmar (my birthplace), where my passion for humanitarian design reached a new height. In 2007, my report on Humanitarian Design won the Carl Nielson Professional Development Award, which I used to travel back to Myanmar and conduct thorough research on how Humanitarian Design could help develop my country. I am currently developing a theory paper on industrial design strategies and methods that can help solve social issues within the design discipline and the societies designers are trying to help.

Steven Orlowski (Managing Director).
He is a third year Industrial Design student at the University of Technology, Sydney. His interests within design are varied, but primarily center on sustainability and eco -redesign. He was short-listed as a finalist for an (Australia-wide) ‘everyday product’ redesign competition and is currently working on a theory paper, analyzing the notion of ‘sustainable consumerism’, criticizing the notion of ‘designer responsibility’ and ‘consumer psychology’. His future plans include traveling to Thailand (with UTS), working with ‘Habitat for Humanity’ on a construction project and examining the notion of being ‘environmentally neutral’ for his major project - concentrating on the impact(s) of process.

Mark Crispin (Coordinator).
He is a 5th year Industrial Design/Arts International Studies student at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has always had a strong interest in helping those from developing nations, and most recently, within the capacity of his degree. This interest has been fostered through both his father’s lifelong work in development and his own experiences of living and traveling for a year in rural China during 2006. He is currently writing a paper on the strategies that Industrial Designers use to design for contexts radically different to their own i.e. the Developing World, an area within which he would like to base his Major Project in final year.