OVERCOMING THE MENTAL BARRIER:
SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY IN DESIGN FROM A NEWLY INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRY PERSPECTIVE

It has been widely accepted that designers as with other professional groups will increasingly face social and environmental problems in the 21st Century such as poverty, diminishing energy sources and climate change. This is valid for all countries developed and developing alike. To deal with such problems, there have been various attempts by designers to develop alternative approaches and design solutions coming primarily from the developed countries. The movement of social responsibility in design starting from Victor Papanek in the late 1960s, the concepts of product service system and sustainable design and finally the open source movement have been among such alternative approaches.

Despite the impact of social and environmental problems has been experienced more intensively in developing countries, the design communities in such countries seem not to embrace these initiatives as it would have been expected. In this paper, we will discuss possible reasons for such reluctance by focusing on the case of Turkey as one of the Newly Industrialized Countries where a “modernist development paradigm” has been followed. The paper will argue that the particular development experience that the country has gone through also resulted in a particular understanding of the role of design as merely an agent of industrial development. This kind of understanding can be defined as a major source of a mental barrier in dealing with and generating alternative concepts in design in countries like Turkey.

The paper suggests that to overcome this mental barrier, there is a need for a design community able to follow the latest thinking and developments in the field of design while there is also a need for this community to interpret these in the light of the local requirements and generate new approaches and concepts. In this sense, new developmentalism and entrepreneurship will be reviewed as alternative concepts to guide the designers.

Keywords: Social responsibility in design, development, Newly Industrialized Countries, Turkey.