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06 DESIGN STRUGGLES

Nov 28, 202525 min read

SUSTAINABLE DESIGN ON THE WORLD STAGE

The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design and Environmental Concerns, 1970–1990

Tania Messell

At a time when climate change is commonly regarded as a global challenge, and environmental concerns have been put forward on the agenda of international organizations more forcibly than ever 1, international design organizations have increasingly included sustainability as part of their policies and programs. The World Design Organization (WDO, formerly the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) and the International Council of Design (ico-D, formerly the International Council of Graphic Design Associations) have for instance become fierce advocators of design practices respectful of the environment.

By the 1980s and 1990s, these organizations, initially formed to strengthen the profession and promote its status to governments, industry, commerce, and the general public, had set out to play a more powerful role in the shared concerns of humanity, such as food, clean energy, health, and sustainability. 2 Notably, the WDO aligned its aims with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – drafted by 169 member states in 2015 – to help advance the SDGs and bolster sustainable design practices.3 On the other hand, whilst sustainability has become a central concern in contemporary design practices, a gap remains between environmental realities and the practices advanced by design education and the design industry.4 The profession has also been criticized for a lack of engagement with the underlying causes of environmental crisis, including its role in reproducing such conditions. This situation has extended to professional fora: in 2002 Victor Margolin suggested that “in those areas in which designers do have the autonomy for free discussion, notably conferences, journals, and in the college and university classroom, the proposals for change have been all too modest and have rarely come out strongly against the expansion model of economic growth.”5

Furthermore, the rhetoric of sustainability, sustainable design, and sustainable development has been condemned for preserving consumer capitalism and market imperatives. Advocates of eco-tech agenda such as dematerialization have been described as favoring a status quo economic approach to society, whilst ignoring the social and political dimensions of the problem.6 Concepts such as sustainable design in particular have been criticized for failing to recognize “the Western/globalized hegemonic being-in-the-world as inherently defuturing,”7 a structural injustice “inscribed within the world’s financial system, transnational politics, the international labor market, the global system of production, and the exchange of raw and manufactured commodities.”8 In this context, it is not surprising that, as Alice Twemlow writes, “most professional design organizations … strike an uneasy balance between design’s relationship to commerce and its role as provocateur and social conscience.”9 This chapter inquires into how international design organizations, branding themselves as global agents of betterment and promoting cross-border professional interests, have navigated such imperatives historically.

Whilst there is an increased interest in environmental histories of design,10 the position of international design organizations towards this topic remains relatively unexplored. Professional organizations have helped establish design as a fully-fledged profession through monitored membership, the formulation of professional standards of practice and codes of conduct, information exchange and promotional activities, amongst other undertakings.11 Their often extensive membership makes cross-border professional networks especially worth examining. As Jonathan Woodham notes: “Concerned with the furtherance of the professional status of designers around the world, the potential outreach of these organizations in terms of members and influence is enormous.”12 Drawing from these perspectives, this chapter will examine the environmental discourse and initiatives of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) in the 1970s and how they evolved subsequently. Established by designers from Europe and the United States in 1957 to raise the professional status of designers and establish international standards for the profession and design education, ICSID experienced a drastic geographical expansion from the 1960s onwards, when members from both fronts of the Cold War, alongside so-called “developing countries,”13 joined the organization.14 This growth took place alongside the diversification of the organization’s activities, which increasingly set out to reposition design amongst complex problems such as user rights, technological change, and pollution.15 But, as this chapter argues, whilst ICSID became interested in the responsibility of the designer towards the environment, the tension between professional concerns on the one hand and the aspiration of designers to contribute to a sustainable future on the other persisted throughout the following decades, due to the prevalence of industrial, economic, and professional imperatives.

Becoming a “United Nations” of Industrial Design

ICSID’s interest in ecology developed in the late 1960s and 1970s, when “the first great wave of environmentalism … emerged as a distinct social, political – and design – movement.”16 This period witnessed landmarks such as the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, the United Nations summit in 1972, and the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth reports (1968 and 1972 respectively), which, by underlining the planet’s limited capacity to sustain the rate of growth, caused far-reaching debates on the consequences of industrial societies and ways of avoiding global ecological disaster.17 As stated above, ICSID had already set out to promote socially-engaged approaches through a wide program of philanthropic initiatives aimed at the aid and health sectors. These efforts, which from the early 1970s were often initiated in close collaboration with governmental and non-governmental agencies, took place alongside the rise of an anthropological discourse within the design profession, as ICSID turned away from a discourse steeped in scientific operationalism to a more user-centered and grassroots understanding of human needs.18 As part of this shift, environmental concerns became increasingly heard within the organization. Several of ICSID’s council members were active in environmental issues in the 1970s, an interest which in turn was reflected in ICSID’s international congresses, which were organized by member societies in collaboration with ICSID’s Executive Boards. ICSID congresses held in London in 1969, in Kyoto in 1973, in Moscow in 1975, and in Dublin in 1977, touched upon the designer’s position towards environmental degradation in their overall themes and panels.19 ICSID had also given its support to the landmark symposium and exhibition “Design for Need: The Social Contribution of Design,” which was held at the Royal College of Art in London in 1976, where an international roster of designers, architects, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and alternative technology groups discussed design solutions for projects of social value, including resource preservation.20 In terms of alliances, from 1974 onwards ICSID also set out to grow closer to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and closely collaborated with Victor Papanek, author of the bestselling book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971), who throughout the 1970s advocated for socially and environmentally sound design practices within ICSID’s Working Group Developing Countries IV.21

However, an ambiguous understanding of environmental practices prevailed amongst ICSID’s development initiatives. Mostly overseen by Western designers, these activities advocated the use of local practices and foreign innovation, but pressed for technology transfers whilst often overseeing local attempts to coordinate institutional and professional responses to environmental degradation.22 As will be examined next, this ambiguity tainted ICSID’s other undertakings during this period. Although ICSID’s Executive Board was on numerous occasions admonished by UNEP and council members to develop activities concerning the designer’s role towards the protection of the natural environment, and to establish a working group on the latter,23 the organization failed to take on the topic further and to radically challenge the profession from within. The following sections will examine the reasons for this deep-seated ambivalence.

Antagonist Interests: Ties to Industry

As Woodham notes, the increase in the number of design organizations from the 1940s onwards reflected “the growing number of professionals in the field as well as their perceived need to campaign collectively for greater recognition of their value to business, commerce, and society.”24 The profession’s economic reliance on business and the manufacturing and retail sectors coexisted with a necessity to answer the commercial agendas of such employers, which subsequently tempered any social, environmental, and moral preoccupations.25 ICSID’s ambivalent vision of the designer’s role towards the environment could similarly have been the result of the organization’s repeated attempts to tie closer bonds with industry. Since its establishment, ICSID regarded the latter as a central source of recognition and funds, a situation that continued throughout the 1970s. Established in 1964, ICSID’s Working Group Professional Practice, which in 1973 included designers from France, Finland, Holland, Australia, Japan, Israel, and Poland, for instance, strove to promote the profession, strengthen design education, and forge closer links primarily with industry, by the 1970s.26 On the other hand, many of the organization’s promotional members had close-knit relations with industry, which often financed their activities. The introduction of a new kind of membership wed ICSID to industry in a more direct manner. In 1971 ICSID created the associate membership, to which government departments, research centers, universities, and companies could subscribe. This membership, which cost an annual fee of $1000 and which ICSID planned to offer to industrial concerns in capitalist, socialist, Western, and non-Western nations,27 allowed the latter to be informed of new trends and increase the visibility of their products through design awards.28 By the 1980s, this policy had led to the inclusion of companies such as Hewlett Packard, Sharp Corporation, and the Finnish state-owned oil company Neste Oyj,29 whose financial contributions constituted a precious support for ICSID.

Conversely, when ICSID set out to influence industry, little resulted from such initiatives, a situation which further prevented the implementation of environmentally friendly practices. In 1974, ICSID set up ICSID Industry Commission to better involve industry in the drafting of ICSID’s goals and to assist its campaign for funds, which ICSID continuously lacked. Presided over by Count René Boël, a Belgian industrialist and diplomat who acted as Patron of ICSID, the group aimed to establish a dialogue between designers and business concerns at the level of decision-making; reflect on the potential of design to solve problems of industrial production, user-needs, and pollution; and disseminate the findings within wider industrial spheres.30 Its first meeting, held in 1975, was attended by leading figures in industry such as Umberto Agnelli, managing director of Fiat; Renaud Gillet, managing director of Rhône-Poulenc; and Renzo Zori, Olivetti’s Director of the Division of Industrial Design. Aiming to develop pilot projects that were “good for society,”31 the specters of professional recognition and profit remained. Moreover, when two pilot studies were instigated for the Italian automobile manufacturer Fiat and the French chemical and pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc, the propositions only touched the redesign of working spaces, and the experience ended due to a lack of follow-up by both companies.32

As noted above, this ambivalence between social and environmental welfare and economic interests, alongside ICSID’s difficulty affecting industrial concerns, took place once again within the organization’s development activities. Whilst the promotion of ecologically sound practices and technology constituted a cornerstone of ICSID’s policies towards developing countries,33 and ICSID’s longstanding relation with UNIDO was grounded in a discourse based on cultural and technological diversity, the rhetoric of industrial development remained.34 This positioning reflected a wider interest in answering “basic need” in international development discourses, which at the time put the former at the forefront of industrial policies.35 Such changes, however, did not erase the development paradigm, which, having originated in North America and Europe, had by then, as Arturo Escobar notes, increasingly colonized “social reality.”36

Controlled versus Uncontrolled Growth

In line with the above discussion, a tension also prevailed between ICSID’s human-centered discourse on the one hand and the rhetoric of unchallenged economic growth on the other. As ICSID’s secretary-general, Belgian design promoter Josine des Cressonnières, stated in 1977, industry “is compelled to profit.” Drawing upon the Club of Rome’s reports and the endorsement of the New International Economic Order by the United Nations in 1974, she underlined that ICSID could nevertheless reveal that it would be possible to “work simultaneously for the common good and for the productive society [underlining in original].”37 Some individuals, however, had favored more radical alternatives.

For instance, during ICSID’s Third Seminar on Industrial Design Education in 1967, ICSID’s then-president, Argentinian designer and Ulm rector Tomás Maldonado, advanced the necessity of controlling industrial and economic growth, a statement which received the approval of practitioners from the US, UK, India, and Brazil. As he suggested:

We must think how it is possible to develop design for control. There is resistance in capitalistic Western countries to control, but in today’s reality chaotic growth is aided by designers to increase all populations, population of people, objects, information, etc. It is clear that this kind of growth does not have a very brilliant future.38

Maldonado was subsequently invited to orchestrate the contents of ICSID’s 1969 congress in London, “Design, Society, and the Future,” through which he advocated the need to reduce unbridled production and consumption. However, the rest of ICSID’s Executive Board and British organizers did not share this stance, and as with most of ICSID’s past and future congresses, the event saw the promotion of design as a flexible and innovative profession at the service of economic growth, which in this context took place parallel to debates tackling the designer’s social and environmental responsibilities.39

The contribution of design to financial prosperity also took shape in the council’s other initiatives. For instance, this discourse pervaded a seminar held at the Hernstein Management Centre of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce in 1977, titled “Group Dynamics Seminar for Top Managers and Designers.” Whilst the event aimed to gather designers and industrialists to discuss ways of developing products that answered social and environmental needs, it also focused on the benefits of design understanding to spur marketability and ultimately profit.40 This vision similarly prevailed in ICSID’s collaboration with the International Trade Centre (ITC) in 1973, when the council assisted the ITC in conceiving a guidebook aimed at developing countries, titled “Product Design and Packaging for Export,” which advised the former on how to increase sales.41 Thus, whilst the council did acknowledge the need to answer human and environmental needs, it also continuously promoted the capacity of design to spur competitiveness and economic growth.

Professional Imperatives

As shown in the following, ICSID’s ambivalence towards environmental responsibility also stemmed from the grassroots professional interests of a large section of its membership. Growing dissatisfaction over ICSID’s engagement with world issues had developed amongst its members, a tension which appeared most clearly during the council’s general assembly in Dublin in 1977. During this event, twenty-four council members, all of them professional bodies and representing half of ICSID’s membership, presented a “Seven-point Manifesto.”42 The text advocated ICSID to concentrate its efforts on alleviating the everyday problems of industrial designers by answering the longstanding lack of recognition by manufacturers and users and by developing design education through collaborative efforts between council members.43 The congress, “ICSID 10,” which marked ICSID’s tenth edition and twentieth anniversary, aimed to address the topics of development and identity “in a kaleidoscopic world.”44 However, in stark contrast to the event’s humanistic aims, the manifesto urged designers to develop products that favored efficiency and profitability in order to strengthen their relationship with industry, which they regarded as the profession’s main challenge.45 As one of the signatories stated, industry needed to be defended – “because whether we like it or not, we have to work for it. Industry produces products we all use. It is the way our society works.”46

The manifesto underlined how industry and public authorities could only be convinced of the value of industrial design if designers produced products that would sell better and that could be produced more efficiently. Most importantly, the signatories stated that whilst the recreation of harmony between man and nature … may be a goal in general, the creation of harmony between man and his tools or means, reproduced through industrial processes, is the goal and only justification of industrial design [underlining in original].47

The manifesto and its demands were ratified with a total of 111 votes, twenty-four against and with nine abstentions, reflecting its overwhelming support.48 As a result, ICSID’s Executive Board adopted the proposed redirection of ICSID policies towards a greater emphasis on practicing designers as opposed to social and environmental issues. The “Seven-point Manifesto” ushered in a new era within the organization in the 1980s, when it tended to focus on professional and commercial imperatives.

Conclusion: Post-1980

This chapter has revealed ICSID’s ambivalent stance towards the environment in the 1970s, which as it argues resulted from professional, promotional, and economic interests. In this context, the internationalization of design was accompanied by an alliance with a globalizing corporate nexus, which at times overshadowed environmental initiatives. In the following decades, ICSID’s engagement with sustainability was maintained in varying degrees. Whilst ICSID did attempt to include sustainability amongst its activities in the 1970s, these efforts slowed down in the 1980s, when its congresses became overtly concerned with the profession’s contribution to business, marketing, and design strategies for global markets49 – reflecting a wider turn towards “design for profit” in the mainstream design profession.50 This lack of interest resulted in a meeting of representatives of ICSID societies in 1989, where thirty participants from fifteen countries summoned ICSID to question the kind of design it was promoting and the designer’s responsibilities towards “humanity, society, and nature.”51 ICSID’s engagement with wider issues subsequently resumed in the 1990s and the 2000s. In 1998, ICSID participated in founding the “Design for the World” organization with the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) and the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers (IFI), with the support of the Barcelona Design Center, a collaboration which set out to spur the use of design in human-centered initiatives.52 In 2003, ICSID and Icograda in turn founded the International Design Alliance (IDA) to promote the design professions and “working together for a world that is balanced, inclusive, and sustainable.”53 This rhetoric persisted throughout the 2010s, when ICSID, renamed the World Design Organization (WDO), renewed its vows to contribute to a sustainable future. Grounded in a discourse of sustainable development, which has been criticized as preserving the status quo,54 the extent to which these initiatives have balanced environmentally responsible practices with diverse professional, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts, as well as recognized the structural and ecological inequalities underpinning the environmental crisis, would however warrant further examination.

Bibliography

Anker, Peder. From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2010.

Boehnert, Joanna. Design, Ecology, Politics: Towards the Ecocene. London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Clarke, Alison. “Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design.” Journal of History of Design 29, no. 1 (2015), 43–57.

Davidson, Julie. “Sustainable Development: Business as Usual or a New Way of Living?” Environmental Ethics 22, no. 1 (March 2000), 25–42.

Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Fallan, Kjetil, ed. The Culture of Nature in the History of Design. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.

—, and Finn Arne Jørgensen. “Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda.” Special Issue: Environmental Histories of Design. Journal of Design History 30, no. 2 (2017), 103–21.

Fry, Tony. Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008.

—. Design as Politics. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011.

Fuad-Luke, Alastair. Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World. London: Earthscan Routledge, 2009.

ICSID Archives. University of Brighton Design Archives, Brighton.

Kaiser, Wolfram, and Jan-Henrik Meyer, eds. International Organizations and Environmental Protection: Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2019.

Kramer, Mark R., Rishi Agarwal, and Aditi Srinivas. “Business as Usual Will Not Save the Planet,” Harvard Business Review, June 12, 2019. hbr.org/2019/06/business-asusual-will-not-save-the-planet (accessed July 22, 2019).

Lees-Maffei, Grace. “Introduction: Professionalization as a Focus in Interior Design History.” Journal of Design History 21, no. 1 (2008), 1–18.

Madge, Pauline. “Design, Ecology, Technology: A Historiographical Review.” Journal of Design History 6, no. 3 (1993), 149–66.

Margolin, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. —. “Design for Development: Towards a History.” Design Studies 28, no. 2 (2007), 111–15.

Messell, Tania. “Constructing a ‘United Nations of Industrial Design’: ICSID and the Professionalization of Design on the World Stage, 1957–1980.” Doctoral Thesis, University of Brighton, 2018.

—. “Globalization and Design Institutionalization: ICSID’s XIth Congress and the Formation of ALADI, 1979.” Journal of Design History 32, no. 1 (2019), 88–104.

—. “Contested Development: ICSID’s Design Aid and Environmental Policy in the 1970s.” In The Culture of Nature in the History of Design. Edited by Kjetil Fallan, 131–46. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.

Papanek, Victor. “For the Southern Half of the Globe.” Design Studies 4, no. 1 (1983), 61–64.

Pereira, Helder, and Coral Gillett. “Africa: Designing as Existence.” Design in the Borderlands. Edited by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry, 109–31. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

Raggi, Franco. “ICSID Dublino: Il designer va dallo psicanalista.” MODO no. 6 (January-February 1978), 21–24.

Seddon, Jill. “Mentioned, but Denied Significance: Women Designers and the”Professionalization” of Design in Britain, c. 1920–1951.” Gender & History 12, no. 2 (2000), 425–47.

Taylor, Damon. “A Brief History of (Un) Sustainable Design.” The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design. Edited by Jonathan Chapman. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.

Twemlow, Alice. “I Can’t Talk to You if You Say That: An Ideological Collision at the International Design Conference at Aspen, 1970.” Design and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009), 23–49.

WDO. “World Design Agenda 2017–2019.” wdo.org/resources/world-design-agenda/ (accessed January 6, 2019).

Woodham, Jonathan M. Twentieth-Century Design. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997.

—. “Local, National and Global: Redrawing the Design Historical Map.” Journal of Design History 18, no. 3 (2005), 257–67. —. A Dictionary of Modern Design. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. —, and Michael Thomson. “Cultural Diplomacy and Design in the Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Rhetoric or Reality?” Design and Culture 9, no. 2 (2017), 225–41.

Footnotes

  1. Wolfram Kaiser and Jan-Henrik Meyer, eds., International Organizations and Environmental Protection: Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2019). ↩

  2. Jonathan M. Woodham and Michael Thomson, “Cultural Diplomacy and Design in the Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Rhetoric or Reality?” Design and Culture 9, no. 2 (2017), 237. ↩

  3. WDO, “World Design Agenda 2017–2019,” wdo. org/resources/world-designagenda/ (accessed January 6, 2019). ↩

  4. Alastair Fuad-Luke, Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London: Earthscan Routledge, 2009), 49; Joanna Boehnert, Design, Ecology, Politics: Towards the Ecocene (London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2018), 8. ↩

  5. Victor Margolin, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 95. ↩

  6. Damon Taylor, “A Brief History of (Un)Sustainable Design,” in The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design, ed. Jonathan Chapman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 21. ↩

  7. Helder Pereira and Coral Gillett, “Africa: Designing as Existence,” in Design in the Borderlands, ed. Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 125. “Defuturing” has been described by Tony Fry as “a condition of mind and action that materially erodes (un-measurably) planetary finite time, thus it gathers and designates the negation of ‘the being of time,’ which is equally the taking away of our future.” Tony Fry, Design as Politics (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011), 21. ↩

  8. Tony Fry, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 42. ↩

  9. Alice Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk to You if You Say That: An Ideological Collision at the International Design Conference at Aspen, 1970,” Design and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009), 25–26. ↩

  10. The Design History Society’s annual conference of 2017, held at the University of Oslo, was on the theme of “Making and Unmaking the Environment.” See also Kjetil Fallan and Finn Arne Jørgensen, “Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda,” Journal of Design History 30, no. 2 (2017) and Kjetil Fallan, ed., The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). ↩

  11. Jill Seddon, “Mentioned, but Denied Significance: Women Designers and the ‘Professionalization’ of Design in Britain, c. 1920–1951,” Gender & History 12, no. 2 (2000), 427, 428; Grace Lees-Maffei, “Introduction: Professionalization as a Focus in Interior Design History,” Journal of Design History 21, no. 1 (2008), 5. ↩

  12. Jonathan Woodham, “Local, National and Global: Redrawing the Design Historical Map,” Journal of Design History 18, no. 3 (2005), 263. ↩

  13. This phrase will be used throughout this text since it was the term used by ICSID to describe nations on their way to industrialization and highlights the binary understanding that ICSID nurtured towards these nations at the time. ↩

  14. The ICSID’s Executive Boards nevertheless remained constituted by mostly Western designers during the period studied. This situation was replicated in the organization’s working groups, whilst the ICSID secretariat has consistently been located in Western countries. Tania Messell, “Constructing a ‘United Nations of Industrial Design’: ICSID and the Professionalization of Design on the World Stage, 1957–1980,” (doctoral thesis, University of Brighton, 2018). ↩

  15. Messell. “Constructing a ‘United Nations of Industrial Design.’” ↩

  16. Pauline Madge, “Design, Ecology, Technology: A Historiographical Review,” Journal of Design History 6, no. 3 (1993), 149. ↩

  17. Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2010), 101. ↩

  18. Alison Clarke, “Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design,” Journal of Design History 29, no. 1 (2016). ↩

  19. ICSID, “Congresses” boxes, ICD/2, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, Brighton. Throughout the chapter, all references preceded by the initials “ICD” indicate materials that are held at the ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, Brighton. ↩

  20. Madge, “Design, Ecology, Technology,” 158. ↩

  21. Messell, “Constructing a ‘United Nations of Industrial Design,’” 191. ↩

  22. Tania Messell, “Contested Development: ICSID’s Design Aid and Environmental Policy in the 1970s,” in T_he Culture of Nature in the History of Design_, ed. Kjetil Fallan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). ↩

  23. In 1971, Martin Kelm at the Zentralinstitut für Gestaltung in the GDR proposed that ICSID’s 1973 congress theme would be “Environment Protection and Design.” In 1972, Henri Viénot shared with Josine des Cressonnières the belief that ICSID needed to pursue activities on design and the natural environment, whilst Frank Dudas proposed in 1974 that several Interdesign workshops were to treat environmental issues. The same year Gui Bonsiepe proposed the creation of a working group on these topics. Correspondence from Martin Kelm to Henri Viénot, 1971, ICD/10/10/1; correspondence from Henri Viénot to Josine des Cressonnières, June 5, 1972, ICD/08/9/1; correspondence from Frank Dudas to ICSID, May 1974, ICD/08/4/1; correspondence from Gui Bonsiepe to Josine des Cressonnières, March 4, 1974, ICD/08/3/2. ↩

  24. Jonathan Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 175. ↩

  25. Woodham, 231. ↩

  26. ICSID, minutes general assembly, Tokyo, 1973, ICD/03/7/8, 71. ↩

  27. ICSID, minutes executive board meeting, Brussels, November 17–18, 1971, ICD/04/2, 12. ↩

  28. ICSID, “Why Become an ICSID Associate Member,” 1976, ICD/10/28/2; ICSID, “Application Form for Associate Membership,” 1973, ICD/10/28/3. ↩

  29. ICSID, “General Assemblies,” 1980–89 boxes, ICD/3. ↩

  30. ICSID, “Aim of the ICSID-Industry Commission,” 1970s, ICD/06/11. ↩

  31. ICSID, minutes Executive Board meeting, Brussels, December 11–12, 1971, ICD/04/2, 10. ↩

  32. ICSID, “ICSID-Industry Commission,” ICD/06/11. ↩

  33. Messell, “Contested Development,” 132. ↩

  34. Tania Messell, “Globalization and Design Institutionalization: ICSID’s XIth Congress and the Formation of ALADI, 1979,” Journal of Design History 32, no. 1 (2019), 91–93; Victor Papanek, “For the Southern Half of the Globe,” Design Studies 4, no. 1 (1983). ↩

  35. Matthias Schmeltzer, “A Club of the Rich to Help the Poor? The OECD, ‘Development,’ and the Hegemony of Donor Countries” in International Organizations and Development, 1945 to 1990, ed. Marc Frey et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). ↩

  36. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5. ↩

  37. Josine des Cressonnières, “Statement of Intent,” 1977, ICD/04/4, 2. ↩

  38. ICSID, Third Seminar on Industrial Design Education, Syracuse University, September 7–10, 1967, session 8, ICD/13/1/3, 3. ↩

  39. Messell, “Constructing a ‘United Nations of Industrial Design.’” ↩

  40. ICSID, “Hernstein’s Seminar (Austria, 1977)” file, ICD/07/6/2. ↩

  41. International Trade Centre UNCTAD/GATT, “Provisional Outline of the Trade Promotion Handbook: Product Design and Packaging for Export,” 1973, ICD/12/34. ↩

  42. ICSID, transcription of tapes, general assembly in Dublin, tape one, ICD/03/9/13, 4. ↩

  43. ICSID, minutes general assembly, Dublin, September 23–24, 1977, ICD/03/9/16, 8. ↩

  44. Kenji Ekuan, “ICSID 10 Congress (Closing Speech),” September 1977, ICD/02/3/5. ↩

  45. Franco Raggi, “ICSID Dublino: Il designer va dallo psicanalista,” MODO no. 6 (January–February 1978), 25. ↩

  46. ICSID, transcription of tapes, general assembly in Dublin, September 23–24, 1977, ICD/03/9/13. ↩

  47. ICSID, minutes 10th general assembly in Dublin, September 23–24, 1977, ICD/03/9/16, 8–9. ↩

  48. Ibid., 13. ↩

  49. ICSID, ICSID News, 1977–85, ICD/09/1/5; ICSID, ICSID News, 1986–89, ICD/09/1/6. ↩

  50. Madge, “Design, Ecology, Technology,” 159. ↩

  51. ICSID, “ICSID Seeks Deeper Cooperation,” ICSID News, no. 3 (1989), ICD/09/1/6, 3. ↩

  52. Jonathan Woodham, “Design for the World,” A Dictionary of Modern Design, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 220-21. ↩

  53. Jonathan Woodham, “International Design Alliance (IDA),” A Dictionary of Modern Design, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 356. ↩

  54. Julie Davidson, “Sustainable Development: Business as Usual or a New Way of Living?,” Environmental Ethics 22, no. 1 (March 2000), 25–42; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mark R. Kramer, Rishi Agarwal, Aditi Srinivas, “Business as Usual Will Not Save the Planet,” Harvard Business Review, June 12, 2019, hbr.org/2019/06/ business-as-usual-will-notsave-the-planet (accessed July 22, 2019). ↩