Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design

摘要

From the late 1960s to the close of the 1970s, anthropology and the social sciences coalesced with industrial design, transforming design from a practice whose aesthetic discourse was largely dominated by industrial rationalism, to one of critical intervention with a social agenda. First emerging as a grassroots 'alternative design' movement influenced by workers' unions, design student activists and user-based research methodologies, the coming together of social science (more specifically anthropology) and design by the late 1970s evolved into formal policy within the international industrial design profession. Incorporating previously unexplored documentation of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), this article examines the crucial dispersion of anthropology within design, and its culmination in the 'Ahmedabad Declaration' in 1979. Launched at an ICSID/UNIDO congress under the title 'Design and Development', this formalized the emergence of a specific genre of 'development design' based on quasi-anthropological paradigms. The author considers how the informal 'alternative design' movement was incorporated into industrial design's role in 1970s entente Cold War politics; highlighting how anthropological methodologies and considerations were key to securing the design profession's prominence in newly emerging development policies and 'soft power' structures.