DesignAnthropology: Cold War Industrial Design & Development

Over the last decade, contemporary global corporations and humanitarian non-profits alike have embraced a mode of practice termed design anthropology. An amalgamation of ethnographic and behavioural research combined with design strategy, this user-based method has taken up a central role in neo-liberal economies, bringing together disparate stakeholders under the auspices of social innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet as these strategists keenly expand their enterprises deep into the indigenous communities of so- called developing economies, the question of asymmetric power relations and cultural ownership arises. Despite its seemingly progressive, user-centred approach, as a potent amalgamation of social science, design and data strategy, design anthropology is emerging as an unaccountable force behind global economic, social and political policy-making. This project is the first to critically analyse this phenomenon, by exploring aspects of its origins in the controversial Cold War development policies applied to post-war decolonising nations. Leading post-development anthropologists have argued that industrial design stood at the forefront of the negotiation and materialization of transnational legacies of decolonisation and modernisation. While contemporary post- colonial theory has exposed the role of Modernist schemes in forging Western expansionism, designs crucial agency as the principal driver of development policy in the twentieth century is absent from this discourse. This project will examine the ways in which, from the mid-1950s through to the late 1970s, social science uniquely cojoined with design, transforming industrial design from a practice dominated by industrial rationalism to one with an overt social and political agenda applied to decolonising nations of the Global South. Based on extensive original archival research, it questions how we might understand the legacies of technological schemes enacted under the rubric of humanitarianism and development.

No additional funding sources recorded.