Alison Clarke

Alison Clarke
Presented with the Morningside Academy for Design and HTC Forum
Part of the MIT Spring 2025 Architecture Lecture Series. 
 

Please Note:  This lecture will be held in person in 4-270

Lectures are free and open to the public. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.

• Abstract: When in the late 1960s a radical pan-Scandinavian design movement initiated a full-blown attack on the ‘architectural damage’ wrought by Modernist welfare architects, their localized grassroots activism appeared far removed from the formal machinations of Cold War geopolitics. Yet the influential environmental design discourse they helped promulgate was inextricably tied to the U.S. government-sponsored transdisciplinary experiments in industrial design, engineering and social science that had sprung up in institutes across the U.S., from MIT to Purdue University. As the influential post-development anthropologist Arturo Escobar has argued, design acted as a crucial (yet routinely overlooked) mechanism of Cold War development policy and its discontents. Based on original archival research, this talk explores how a distinct genre of transdisciplinary design became instrumentalized in U.S. development agendas across the Global South, examining its residual legacy in contemporary user-based corporate design practice.
  HTC Forum is made possible with support from Thomas Beicher (phd, 2004)

As a design historian and social anthropologist, Alison J. Clarke’s research deals with the intersection of these disciplines, specifically in terms of their shared focus on the politics of material culture and social relations. Her most recent monograph Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press, 2021) explores the controversial origins of social design, casting a critical perspective on the origins of a movement that has claimed to promote social justice through people-centred approaches. Her present book and research project Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World (MIT Press) explores the blurred historical boundaries between design practice and anthropology as well as the social consequences of the uptake of this melding by the contemporary corporate sector. Clarke’s research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Austrian Science Fund, and Arts and Humanities Research Council, among others.