Why an ICS Bangkok Teacher Calls Design a Moral Choice

Cammie Lattice has taught art at the International Community School of Bangkok for seven years, but the idea that shaped her thinking about design most didn't come from a classroom. It came from a wedding. Lattice's husband was a high school classmate of Scott Harrison, the founder of the nonprofit charity: water, and that connection put a specific book in her hands years before she needed it for a podcast: David B. Berman's "Do Good Design: How Designers Can Change the World."

On a recent episode of Students Incorporated, the student-produced podcast out of ICS Bangkok, Lattice joined ceramic artist and designer Tim Mills and the school's own graphic designer, known on air simply as Darwin, to talk through what design education is actually supposed to teach teenagers. Their answers kept circling back to one claim: design is never neutral. It either helps people or it manipulates them, and to Lattice, the charity: water story is proof that the first option can also be the more successful one.

A Birthday Party That Became a Movement

Charity: water launched on September 7, 2006, Harrison's 31st birthday, with a party at a nightclub in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, according to accounts from CNBC and Forbes. Harrison had spent almost a decade as a New York club promoter before volunteering as a photojournalist aboard a Mercy Ships hospital vessel off Liberia, and came home convinced that people who'd pay $16 for a cocktail without blinking would fund clean water if someone made the ask well. He called in favors from his old promoter network to get the venue and liquor donated, then charged $20 at the door. The party raised $15,000, enough to repair three wells and dig three new ones in a refugee camp in northern Uganda.

The person who then built charity: water's visual identity, Victoria Harrison, was Scott's designer before she became his wife. Lattice knows her personally through that high school connection, which is how a design philosophy book ended up on her shelf long before it became talking points for a class podcast.

The Trust a Logo Had to Earn

Nineteen years later, charity: water has raised more than $1 billion and funded clean water access for over 20 million people, according to the organization's own reporting. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, its public dashboard listed 1,476 funded water projects, including 79 school water systems, bringing safe water to an estimated 295,351 people in that quarter alone. None of it happens without branding that holds up under scrutiny: the pitch rests on one promise, that 100 percent of public donations go directly to water projects, full stop. The organization covers its own salaries, supplies, and field travel through a separate pool of major donors it calls "The Well," and it even reimburses credit-card processing fees so a $100 gift arrives as a full $100. That promise only works if people believe it, and getting strangers to believe something is design's actual job, not just its decoration.

Lattice tied the story directly back to Berman's book on the show, quoting it almost verbatim: "In a time of unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises, designers must now choose what their young profession will be about, deploying weapons of mass deception or helping repair the world." For her, charity: water is the "repair" option working: the same visual toolkit that sells Coca-Cola, redirected at a refugee camp's water supply.

Art Doesn't Answer to Anyone. Design Does.

Before any of that, Lattice draws a sharper line between art and design than most people bother to, even though the two fields borrow the same tools. "Art doesn't have a set purpose," she said on the show. "It can be what the artist wants... Design is a lot about function. Usually when you're designing something, you're thinking of someone else or something else." Her go-to example is fashion: a runway piece can be pure provocation, but the version a mass retailer sells with a guest designer's name on it has to actually function as clothing.

That distinction is what makes charity: water's branding a useful case study rather than just a feel-good anecdote. Victoria Harrison's design work wasn't made to express her own feelings about water scarcity. It was made to make strangers trust an organization enough to hand over money for wells they would never personally see.

Design creates so much of what we see, what we use, and what we experience.

A Campus Learns to Read Itself

The same logic shows up at a much smaller scale in ICS's own hallways, Darwin's project, not Lattice's. When he was hired as the school's web and graphic designer, one of his first assignments was fixing the campus wayfinding. The signage he inherited, colleagues told him, had been there "since this building was built": mismatched green plastic room placards with no relationship to the school's actual colors. The timing complicated things further: the elementary building was being repainted blue and white, with the middle and high school buildings scheduled to follow, so his signage had to anticipate a rebrand that wasn't finished yet.

His process started with walking the halls and watching how people actually moved through them, a rougher, physical version of what design guides call wayfinding: using color, contrast, and consistent placement so visitors can orient themselves without stopping to squint at fine print. He landed on blue acrylic room signs with bold white lettering, sized so a room number reads from a distance instead of requiring someone to walk up to it. Color is commonly matched to a building's use, industry guides note: warmer tones like orange and yellow read as energetic in schools, while cooler tones read as calming in healthcare settings. Darwin's blue-and-white system splits that difference: calm enough not to visually shout, contrasted enough to register at a glance.

Design That Refuses to Go Out of Style

Mills, who trained as a ceramic artist and worked professionally as a designer before returning to teaching, framed the underlying craft in more philosophical terms. Every design process, he argued, starts the same way regardless of medium: "sparks of possibility... these what-ifs," followed by getting an idea into some rough tangible form fast, a sketch, a word typed into a phone, before rounds of refinement, trial, and error.

Asked whether design can go out of style, Mills reached for architecture's oldest maxim. Louis Sullivan, the 19th-century architect often credited as the father of the skyscraper, coined the phrase "form ever follows function" in an 1896 essay for Lippincott's Magazine, arguing that a building's shape should be dictated by its purpose rather than decorative habit. Frank Lloyd Wright, who apprenticed under Sullivan, later pushed the idea further, insisting form and function "should be one, joined... in a spiritual union." Mills sided closer to Wright on air: styles cycle, he said, pointing to the ongoing "vintage" revival and the renewed appetite for grainy film photography, but the underlying problem-solving doesn't expire. His example was the bicycle: an unwieldy penny-farthing eventually became today's carbon-fiber road bikes, a near-total change in form built around one unchanging insight, that a human body and two wheels can be balanced into motion.

The Throughline

Three different design careers came up on the episode: oil paint, ceramics, campus signage. All arrived at the same conclusion: good design isn't decoration bolted onto a finished idea, it's the mechanism that decides whether an idea reaches anyone at all. A refugee camp's well only gets funded if a stranger in Manhattan trusts a logo enough to hand over $20 at the door. A classroom only gets found if the sign outside it does its one job well. Lattice's closing argument, borrowed from Berman but tested against her own life, is that ICS's design students are being handed real leverage before they've even graduated high school. The only open question, as she frames it, is what they choose to point it at.

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