The Way North: Merging Ideology and Methodology on the Road to Ecological Design

Abstract

The road to ecological design is a particularly prominent discursive formation in the transformation of Nordic design cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter argues that a key characteristic of this formation was the close and reciprocal interrelations between ideology and methodology, as practitioners, critics, educators, students, and activists awoken by the ecological crisis struggled to find new answers to the questions of what design should be, and how it should be practiced. Examples are taken from the fields of design education and design activism, where the interaction between ideology and methodology has been especially strong. Both education and activism are ideologically charged and methodologically explicit, and therefore lend themselves to analysis of the relation between the two modes of thought. These examples demonstrate that the dynamic relation between the why and the how was integral to the shaping of ecological design as it made its way north.