Design for Development: Towards a History
This paper was presented at the Design Research Society ‘WonderGround’ Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, November 2006.
Design for development is not a new concept. Since the 1960s, it has been introduced sporadically to the development process, although it is yet to earn itself a permanent place in that process. The idea of development has a relatively short history. The tripartite structure of First World, Second World, and Third World, which dominated development thought after World War II, was based on a Cold War ideology that identified capitalism as the favoured economic system. The First World consisted of the Western industrialized capitalist nations; the Second World comprised the centralized command economies in the Communist countries, while the Third World was made up mainly of new nations that had previously been colonies of First World countries and had achieved independence often through revolutions and wars of liberation. The ideological underpinnings of this asymmetric structure politicized the three groups, tainting the transfer of aid and technical assistance with propagandistic overtones.
1. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Communist regimes in 1989, the three-world structure lost its ideological meaning. So did the term ‘Third World,’ which sadly came to codify formany a condition of poverty and hopelessness that did not sufficiently recognize the potential of these countries for development. Meanwhile, some nations previously grouped in the Third World category experienced sufficiently high levels of economic growth that advanced them to the status of newly industrialized countries (NICs).
Despite these changes, development remained focused primarily on economic advancement but, given the ideological context of development planning in the postwar years, it was development according to the models of the most industrialized countries. As part of this process the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank provided huge loans to less developed countries for major infrastructure projects such as dams, highways, and large industrial enterprises. To complement these projects, international and national bilateral aid agencies introduced social projects related to agriculture, health, and occasionally small-scale manufacturing.
A shift in the development paradigm took place beginning in the 1980s when a series of international commissions both inside and outside the United Nations expanded the definition of development to include its ability to create human well being and not just an economic infrastructure. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) adopted the idea of human development, which considered issues of culture, social equality, health, nutrition, and education among others. In 1987, the UN-sponsored World Commission on Environment and Development, also known as the Brundtland Commission, introduced a new term ‘sustainable development’ in its report, Our Common Future. The Commission’s concern with the ‘needs of the world’s poor’ shifted the fundamental argument for development from the construction of largescale industrial projects to ameliorating poverty. It also gave strong emphasis to the state of the environment, supporting ‘the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs’ (Our Common Future, p 43). The emphasis on the social and cultural factors of development was further amplified in 1995 when the World Commission on Culture and Development, a group established by UNESCO, introduced its own report, Our Creative Diversity.
2. Where, then, does design fit into this broad picture? To answer this question, I want to begin with the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design and Development (National Institute of Design, 1979), which resulted from a meeting in January 1979 to discuss the promotion of industrial design in developing countries. Starting with this document will provide a very different trajectory of the design for development movement than the one that most often begins with Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. The Ahmedabad conference, hosted by India’s National Institute of Design, resulted from a memorandum that was signed in April 1977 between the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). It is significant that ICSID’s original UN partner was UNIDO rather than the UNDP because it reinforces the fact that the UN originally understood design to be part of the process of industrial development rather than a partner in the humanitarian effort to alleviate poverty. Of course the two goals are connected but at a certain point, particularly after Papanek published the English language edition of his book in 1972, design for development became associated primarily with low technology projects that addressed community survival needs more than they contributed to national development strategies.
Papanek, in fact, had set up a binary opposition in Design for the Real World between the irresponsible and wasteful products for which designers in the First World were responsible and the more meaningful products that he and his students designed for Third World use. The product he sometimes cited as an example of design for a Third World country was a tin can radio powered by candle wax. He referred to it as a ‘transitional device,’ claiming that it led unsophisticated people to eventually adopt Panasonic, Philips, and other industrially produced radios.
A year after Papanek’s book was published, and perhaps because of it, ICSID formed a working group to discuss ways in which designers could help alleviate problems of the Third World. Known as Working Group 4: Developing Countries, it was led by Paul Hogan of the Irish Export Board and included among its members Papanek, Knut Iran from Philips, Jorg Glasenapp, Goroslav Kepper, and Amrik Kalsi, a Kenyan who was the only member from a developing country. According to Papanek, the group met every few months for almost three years. In his brief description of the group’s work, he noted that the group’s sensitivity to cultural needs was in opposition to the ‘high-tech bias of design expansionism felt to be desirable by some in ICSID (Papanek, 1986, p 46). One of the group’s proposals was for an ‘international design school for the southern half of the globe’ (Papanek, 1983, p 41). A principal objective of the school, as Papanek noted in a 1983 article, was to address the realities of peripheral countries, which were best characterized by ‘labour-intensive, small-scale economics.’ (Papanek, 1983, p 41).
Papanek’s characterization of peripheral country realities could not have been more different from the objectives of the Ahmedabad Declaration in 1979. It was in the spirit of an aggressive call by the developing countries to restructure the world economy that the Amhedabad conference was held and the declaration was produced. It rightly recognized that design could make a valuable contribution to a nation’s economic development and that ‘design methodology is inadequately known and insufficiently used as an economic resource’ (Ahmedabad Declaration, p 1). While the declaration acknowledged that design in developing countries had to utilise ‘indigenous skills, materials and traditions,’ it also stated that design had to absorb ‘the extraordinary power that science and technology can make available to it’ (Ahmedabad Declaration, p 1). The commitment to science and technology and the development of close links with industry was a significant complement to Papanek’s and Schumacher’s community-oriented ideas about development, while it also shifted ICSID’s approach to developing countries from Working Group 4’s interest in community development to a statement of support for UNIDO’s goals of industrial production.
Of all the theorists writing about design for development since the Ahmedabad Declaration, Gui Bonsiepe is the only one who has honoured the spirit of that document. In 1991 he prepared a chapter on design in developing countries for the three-volume History of Industrial Design, published by Electa in Milan. Bonsiepe aligned design clearly with industry, claiming that ‘a wellgrounded and comprehensive history of industrial design on the periphery of modern civilization cannot be written until historians have built up a picture of industrial development with all its ramifications into the domains of business, commerce, science, technology, and, above all, the everyday life of society’ (Bonsiepe, 1991, p 242).
In his subsequent writings, Bonsiepe has continued to work within a centre/periphery model that foregrounds a disparate relationship of power and privilege between the developed and developing countries and demonstrates that design has an important role to play in the industrial development of peripheral countries. To organise historical data, Bonsiepe created a matrix that crossed six domains of design e management, practice, policy, education, research, and discourse e with five stages of development. The stages of practice evolve from a situation where self-taught artists are working outside industry (a place where Papanek felt comfortable) to a search for services that
characterize industrial design and finally to designers working in industrial enterprises. Among the other activities that Bonsiepe envisioned in the fifth stage of development are multidisciplinary development teams; international symposia, congresses, and competitions; demanding educational courses in well-equipped schools, design as an object of scientific study, and the publication of books that deal with design practice as well as its history and theory. In effect, Bonsiepe’s final stage looks exactly like the design activity in a country of the developed world. The implication of his matrix is that design and its milieu can and should mature just as a nation’s economy, administration, and services develop (Bonsiepe, 1991, p 255). Bonsiepe’s claim for design’s role in a nation’s planning and development process follows fairly closely the recommendations of the Ahmedabad Declaration. However, as in the declaration, which urges designers to work with a range of organisations from heavy industries to smallscale craft cooperatives, Bonsiepe has never rejected small-scale industries in favour of a linear move towards industrial production.
The matrix that Bonsiepe proposed for the advancement of design thinking and design in developing countries has been made more complicated in recent years by the global practices of multinational companies like Nike and Honda that design their products in the industrially developed countries and then manufacture them in lower-wage countries like China, Thailand, Romania, or Bangladesh. Manufacturing facilities have been separated from the design process, giving the countries where global products are manufactured experience with production but not with design.
In some cases, this has changed as countries that began by organising low-wage production for foreign companies, understood that if they were to develop their local industries, they would need their own designers. Japan was perhaps the first country to understand this and began in the late 19th century Meiji era to train its own designers for industry. During the 1950s, the Japanese learned to manufacture their own electronic products, adopting American technologies such as the transistor before American companies did. By the 1960s, the Japanese had just about defeated the American television industry, went on to market many original electronic devices, and began to
produce automobiles that were of higher quality than most of their American counterparts. South Korea also began to follow suit and by 1967 produced its own automobile, the Hyundai. Now India and China are also growing as industrial producers.
3. If we compare Gui Bonsiepe’s characterization of design in the developing world with Papanek’s, it is evident that Bonsiepe’s five-stage model offers far more opportunities for design intervention in different sectors of the economy, recognizing, as did the Ahmedabad Declaration, that design can and should play multiple roles in the development process. Bonsiepe presented a comprehensive model of development that was much wider than the current focus on basic needs. Granted that Bonsiepe derived his design examples from peripheral countries e primarily Brazil and India e that already had strong manufacturing sectors, his matrix can nonetheless be applied to any developing country, even one that is mired in the most basic conditions of poverty.
Bonsiepe did not claim that every country has the potential to rapidly alter its current role in the global economy but he did suggest that this is possible. In writings after 1991, he has put a strong emphasis on the difference between those countries that have historically exported raw materials and imported finished goods, a situation that still characterizes large parts of the developing world, and those that produce finished goods for their own consumption and for foreign export. Clearly, the latter are the ones that maintain the asymmetric advantage and Bonsiepe has consistently urged developing countries to include design in their manufacturing sectors.
Within the family of United Nations’ organisations, design has most often been connected with the UNDP and hardly with UNIDO, despite the latter organisation’s co-sponsorship of the Ahmedabad conference in 1979. National development agencies such as USAID, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), or Britain’s Department for International Development also make little use of design as an integral part of their aid programmes. Similarly the thousands of non-governmental organisations lack an understanding of what designers do, and neither can they envision what design can contribute to their programmes and concerns.
Among the multinational corporations that participate in the development process by building manufacturing facilities in less developed countries, there is scant interest in cultivating local design professions, given that design can be done anywhere and the corporations have no incentive to work with designers who may lack the sophistication and technical know-how of design professionals in developed countries.
There are several reasons for this lack of design involvement. First, design is insufficiently understood among the myriad organisations involved in the development process, particularly in its less advanced stages. Second, and more important, is that if design begins to contribute to the success of large national enterprises, it may upset even further the asymmetric trade advantages of the developed countries. The examples of Japan and South Korea should become models for more countries and aid organisations should help to strengthen larger enterprises as well as the SMEs and the small-scale cooperatives. It is also true that the impact of some multinational corporations is so great in the countries where they operate that it would be extremely difficult to compete with them without some changes in trade legislation. Lastly, design is barely considered in the development theories on which governments and outside funding agencies base their policies.
4. What then is to be done? First, development theory has to better integrate multiple factors of trade, technology transfer, and cultural expansion that affect the conditions for development. While debt relief and funds dedicated to the eradication of poverty are essential, what is also needed is a strengthening of the national economies in developing nations that can help them better compete in global markets. Design for development needs to broaden its brief from an emphasis on poverty alleviation to include the strategic creation of products for export. The world music industry offers an excellent example of how musicians from developed countries can launch highly successful careers and become successful international performers. One good example related to design is fashion where traditional craftsmanship can be easily combined with a strong value-added design component to create high-quality goods for an international market.
My call in this paper is to rethink the scope of design for development so that it can address the needs of developing countries in the most effective ways. The Ahmedabad Declaration urged interventions that ranged from consulting on small-scale enterprises to the most sophisticated transfers of science and technology. In subsequent years neither ICSID nor UNIDO followed through on this vision and a far more restricted view of design for development, buttressed principally by Victor Papanek and E.F. Schumacher, came to dominate the design and development discourse. It is time to revisit the Ahmedabad Declaration along with the more comprehensive multi-stage model of Gui Bonsiepe to address the full range of complex factors that determine the possibilities of design for development within the global economy.
References
Bonsiepe, G (1991) Developing countries: awareness of design and the peripheral condition, history of industrial design: 1919-1990 the dominion of design, Electa, Milan
National Institute of Design (1979) Ahmedabad declaration on industrial design for development: major recommendations for the promotion of industrial design for development, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad
Papanek, V (1986) Design in developing countries
1950e1985: a summing-up’, Art Libraries Journal Vol 11 No 2
Papanek, V (1983) For the southern half of the globe’ , Design Studies Vol 4 No 1
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our common future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York
