I can't talk to you if you say that: An ideological collision at the International Design Conference at Aspen, 1970

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe 1970 edition of the International Design Conference at Aspen was the occasion for an ideological collision between a youthful, environmentally focused subset of attendees, and members of the design elite who organized the conference. The design students and environmental activists who executed the protests created disturbances throughout the six-day event and then, in the conference's summary session, read aloud and forced the conference to vote on a series of resolutions intended to improve the conference's, and the design profession's, engagement with social, political and specifically environmental issues. The fact that the multi-pronged internal critique leveled by these disparate groups led to a recalibration of the Aspen design conference's content and structure—not just in 1971, which was the most emphatic embodiment of change, but also in subsequent conferences at least throughout the 1970s—makes this conference an interesting case study of a disruption to, and a paradigm shift in, established design practice and discourse.