The Future of Design for Development: Three Questions

Abstract

The seedlings for design aimed at improving human well-being and meet-ing basic needs (Design for Development, or DfD) trace back at least to the Marshall Plan. According to Fathers (2004), DfD has seen three waves of interest: Reconstruction, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, fol-lowing the destruction of World War II; Alternative Actions, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, which questioned previous approaches to pro-viding aid and offered new ones like Appropriate/Immediate Technology; and Mixed Responses, from the early 1980s to the present, which has seen the broadest level of interest on a large scale. Victor Papanek (1984) and E. F. Schumacher (1973), leading thinkers in DfD with Design for the Real World and Intermediate Technology, respectively, fall squarely into the Alternative Actions wave, joining other movements related to DfD such as

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