This rare 1974 issue of Casabella was definitely worth finding - if only for the blistering three-page attack that Gui Bonsiepe waged on Victor Papanek's vision of design humanitarianism for the underdeveloped world! pic.twitter.com/gNymysxLp0
— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) June 28, 2021
But even in the early 1970s, some critics, among them Ulm School of Design alumnus Gui Bonsiepe, saw these designs as a thinly disguised form of neocolonialism. In a full-blown critique published in Casabella, Bonsiepe accused Papanek outright of collusion with the U.S. military, which, he argued, would appropriate the device as a cheap means of disseminating pro-American propaganda throughout largely non-literate countries. (Papanek, like Fuller, had in fact received limited financial support from the U.S. Army.)