Emily Pilloton gets sick of emailing, though that hasn’t stopped the design-focused nonprofit she founded in 2008 from flourishing into an industrious network of 300 volunteers covering six major American cities and a handful of foreign capitals. “I went to design school so I could get dirty,” the 27-year-old Pilloton says, citing a sort of unofficial tag line for her Project H, which has 22 active programs dedicated to realizing the humanitarian potential of design — the H stands for Humanity, Habitat, Health, and Happiness.

In its first endeavor, Project H helped distribute a well-known water transportation device for the developing world, a combination wheel and jug called the hippo roller. In doing so, they quickly identified a way of improving the roller's design and then led a collaborative effort to implement it.

Pilloton has since honed her eye for designs that "empower," that are rooted in a struggle to meet life’s challenges, that rely on community participation or individual resourcefulness, and that apply informal methods and new technologies. In a new book called Design Revolution, Pilloton brings together 100 products that tackle issues from resource management to health and education, from Michael Graves’s noted designs for the physically disabled to a bicycle-powered washing machine and a recipe for do-it-yourself bio-diesel fuel. Holding a banner to a new generation of activists, Pilloton emphatically believes that design is not an object, a look, or a lifestyle but rather “a verb, a process, and a frame of mind,” geared to people, communities, and problem solving.

On the occasion of her new book, and on the tail end of recent appearances that included Copenhagen Co’creation and the ICSID World Design Congress, ARTINFO spoke with Pilloton from Project H headquarters — a 1972 airstream trailer parked near San Francisco — about design's emerging responsibilities, its pitfalls, the renaissance of craft, and what corporations don’t do well: partner with their users.

Click on the photo gallery at left to see some of the designs featured in Design Revolution.

You have an incredibly generous perspective on design. Your term for a socially conscious designer, “citizen designer,” suggests that everybody can design in some way. Is this really true?

Everyone has the capacity to solve problems in creative ways. Not many of us do it as much as we should. I think what separates the skilled from the unskilled designer is a honing of a skill set that helps implement, prototype, and realize creative solutions. For Project H initiatives, we’ve worked with foster children and homeless women and fourth-grade students. When it comes to weighty issues like global education, the fourth-grader is the expert. We have no idea what is really happening at inner city schools, so there, they are the experts.

What about the problem of creating consensus around something that involves a range of subjective elements? The classic argument against a multi-vocal approach in design is that quality suffers.

Collaboration is generally viewed as bringing people from different perspectives to the same conclusion. But that’s not the point. I also don’t think many people know how to collaborate. It took one of the largest industrial design firms I know seven months to agree on a design for a holiday T-shirt. If we can’t do a project in two weeks, I don’t want to do it. Ultimately the most powerful thing is to be able to make a decision and run with it. Collaboration is key for a high-stakes project, but it is often a crutch, a way of preempting a decision because everybody has to be happy.

With the idea that individuals have a lot to offer an expanded definition of design, you make a nice distinction between innovation and ingenuity. What is it?

We view innovation as something that has to be hi-tech, shiny and new, and designed by people like James Dyson, IDEO, or Samsung. "Ingenuity" is much more appropriate term. When you talk about ingenuity you're probably talking about one person coming up with a really great solution that works for them in a pinch. It probably isn’t pretty, but it's ingenious. Ingenuity is a proactive, self-initiating process, whereas innovation is cloaked in talk of collaboration and corporate aspirations. Ingenuity is sort of the overlooked younger sister of innovation, and is perhaps a more efficient approach to design.