The future of design for development: Three questions

The seedlings for design aimed at improving human well-being and meeting 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, following the destruction of World War II; Alternative Actions, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, which questioned previous approaches to providing 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 Appropriate Technology, Design for the Underserved, and Socially Responsible Design, among others (Rybczynski, 1991; Ho, 2003).

In my opinion, the Mixed Responses wave led to a new phase starting in the late 1990s that was dened by globalization. It is now possible to connect—if not bring together in real-time—users, designers, donors, researchers, students, and other stakeholders who are geographically spread throughout the planet. New ªelds, including human-computer interface for design (HCI4D), are emerging or have already become part of the development dialogue. This is an exciting time.