1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
4 The Alternative Design Movement
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In the early 1970s a growing consciousness of the distance between Western conspicous consumption and underdevelopment in the Third World encouraged a number of designers to rethink the social and moral functions of design. Perceptions of the world as a global village gave designers a different idea of their role than as the adjuncts of manufacturing industry. Victor Papanek's 1971 book Design for the Real World was one stimulus behind this movement to re-direct design into the service of the underprivileged, whether the impoverished of the Third World or the old and infirm in the West.
Papanek argued that for too long designers had been concerned with little more than creating “toys for adults”. He proposed a number of areas in which designers could contribute to relieving hardship in underdeveloped countries, among them “communication systems, simple educational devices, water filtration, and immunization and inoculation equipment.”
By the mid 1970s a number of Third World design schools had taken responsibility for working not only on goods aimed at western export markets but also on projects which directly helped their own population. At the National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad in India, students worked on a symbol system for contraceptive education; an artificial limb which allowed disabled people to pursue their accustomed lifestyle, and on a range of other goods designed specifically for an Indian market. However, such work remained marginal to mainstream design and failed to undermine the main economic function of design in the century, as the guarantor of added value for goods aimed at a mass society.
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