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Boas’s own work emphasized studies of individual cultures, each based on its unique history. He held that the anthropologist’s primary assignment was to describe the particular characteristics of a given culture with a view toward reconstructing the historical events that led to its present structure. Implicit in this approach was the notion that resolving hypotheses regarding evolutionary development and the influence of one culture on another should be secondary to the careful and exhaustive study of particular societies.

Over the last 40 years, many approaches to design have been put forward by various researchers, designers and engineers, both in academia and industry, on how design ought to and might be carried out. These proposals on design have tended towards what has come to be regarded as design philosophies, design models and design methods. The thesis of this paper is to discuss various aspects of generic research in design, within the above classifications in the light of the work that has been done in the last four decades. Discussions will focus on various definitions of design, design theory and methodology, the nature and variety of design problems, design classifications, philosophies, models, methods and systems.

Worsening socioeconomic conditions in the Third World have underscored the urgency of implementing a development path that de-emphasizes growth and technological monoculture. The technological orientation of this development paradigm has been variously called intermediate, progressive, alternative, light-capital, labor-intensive, indigenous, appropriate, low-cost, community, soft, radical, liberatory, and convivial technology. However, appropriate technology, for reasons to be addressed later, has emerged as the allembracing rubric representing the viewpoints associated with all the other terms.

From Gandhi's perspective, any concern with goods requires mass production, but concern with people necessitates production by the masses. The Charkha (spinning wheel) was Gandhi's ideal appropriate technology device, and he saw in it a symbol of freedom, self-reliance, and a technical means that was right for India. The idea of technology discriminately enriching a minority of people at the expense of the majority or putting masses of people out of work to increase profit was in Gandhi's view counterproductive and unacceptable. However, Gandhi was not uncompromising in his rejection of large-scale, capital-intensive industrial enterprises. Modern-sector industrial development, in Gandhi's view, should supplement and reinforce the development of small-scale industries and agriculture in the hinterland.

The rationale was that with appropriate technology the chances of its acceptance by those for whom it was intended would be greatly improved.