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.