Design Anthropology: US Cold War Development Politics in the Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World

• In Event: Material Culture Caucus Panel: Crafting Empire: Material Culture Perspectives on the Objects of Colonial Relation

Abstract

Initiatives for generating new modes of material culture operated as key mechanisms of Cold War United States development policy, applied to local manufacturing contexts from Puerto Rico to Pakistan. In expanding empire, US governmental agencies generated a potent method of research and practice that saw industrial designers dropped into “the field”; tasked with gathering information regarding the potentialities of indigenous making and vernacular crafts across the Global South and beyond. Government appointed industrial designers utilized quasi-anthropological methods in seeking to “Westernize” local crafts with the broader objective of implementing “design as a political force” for development agendas. Re-branded in the 21st century as design anthropology, this “force” has arguably come to operate as the invisible hand behind multiple facets of global life from health care provision, through to governance and data harnessing. Focusing on its mid-twentieth century origins, this paper explores the geo-political interventions that saw corporate industrial designers parachuted into incongruously low-tech environments across a range of recently decolonized “developing nations.” As proto-design anthropologists they operated as a new breed of diplomats-cum-propogandists disseminating what was described as a “penetrating program” of American regeneration policies with material culture as its focus. This initiative coined a new brand of practice that melded social science methodologies with a corporatized vision of the ways in which indigenous cultures could be recolonized for the project of Western expansionism; the legacy of which arguably resides within present day design anthropological initiatives. An amalgamation of ethnographic and behavioural research combined with design strategy, design anthropology claims to bring together disparate stakeholders under the auspices of social innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet as strategists keenly expand their enterprises deep into the indigenous communities, the question of asymmetric power relations and cultural sovereignty and ownership arises. This paper concludes by questioning just how progressive and “user-centred” contemporary design anthropology practice is in a late-Empire context.

Author

• Alison J. Clarke, University of Applied Arts Vienna