ABSTRACT
The 1970s witnessed the marked interests of international and national relief circles in the contribution of design to disaster relief and conditions of displacement, circumstances which resulted in collaborations between design and large humanitarian organizations. This chapter sheds light on such interconnections by examining the initiatives pursued by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), the League of Red Cross Societies and the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization (UNDRO) throughout the decade. As the chapter argues, while ICSID aligned in part with growing calls for decentralized and participatory aid responses, disaster relief also assisted the Council in promoting design as an expert-driven problem-solving activity responding not only to human needs, but also to the technical and economic imperatives of relief organizations. Disasters and their aftermaths became moreover conceived as opportunities to spur speculative design practices, in line with a Modernist discourse of tabula rasa, which further preserved a binary understanding of Western expertise on the one hand, and distant disaster struck populations on the other. With design being currently harnessed on a wide scale by humanitarian actors, the chapter contributes to tracing long-standing and shared rationalities as they have intersected between design and relief spheres historically.
