• 1 Most research literature dates the beginning to 1982: Sabine Lebesque and Helene Fentener van Vlis (...)
• 2 “Developing countries” is the term used by Schaur and Friedman. The underlying premise, the concep (...)

1The production of self-help manuals presenting planning, building and survival knowledge is one form of architecture’s various involvements in the politics of foreign aid. The subject of this paper are manuals by the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance (CCSK). The CCSK was founded in 1982-831 by architects Yona Friedman and Eda Schaur. Friedman (1923-2019), born in Hungary, lived first in Israel and then in France, from 1956 onwards. Schaur (born 1945) was a Yugoslavian (Slovenian)-born architect who had worked in Germany and Austria. The CCSK received funding from the United Nations University (UNU) and collaborated with the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) and its Committee on Science and Technology in Developing Countries (COSTED). The manuals were made available for individuals or organizations in “developing countries”2 and were distributed globally, with a particular focus on India. The manuals were in the form of comic strips, often three to four pages long with two columns of six panels each and short, explanatory captions in the right margin.

• 3 Ilan Kapoor, The Postcolonial Politics of Development, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2008 (Po (...)
• 4 Arindam Dutta, “Computing Alibis. Third World Teratologies,” Perspecta, vol. 40, 2008, p. 55. URL: (...)
• 5 Andrea Bocco and Laura Trovato, “A Catalogue of Humane Technology,” in Andrea Bocco (ed.), Roofs. (...)

2Self-help manuals maintain a complex link to expertise. The foreign experts who write them believe that people have the ability to help themselves and are endowed with a sort of hidden expertise, yet at the same time, these experts construct the need to provide guidance in order to activate the people’s expertise. Self-help manuals thus carry a basic mechanism of development aid—be it knowledge transfer, technical assistance or financial aid—that first identifies a problem and then tries to solve it: “The one construction (a lack) opportunely leads to the other (a rescue mission).”3 However, in development aid, as Arindam Dutta points out in the case study of the Ford Foundation’s urban planning project for Calcutta between 1961 and 1974, expertise is not opposed to a lack of expertise. Instead, there are different forms of expertise. In the Ford Foundation’s case, the “foreign expert” was not facing a “native informant” but an expert from the Indian Statistical Institute.4 This paper asks how different forms of expertise were acknowledged, constructed and challenged in the CCSK manuals. In order to position the CCSK historically within development politics focusing on self-help, I will first look at the conception and establishment of the CCSK, mainly through sources produced by the CCSK and its collaborating partners, thus offering a narrative from their perspective. The history of the CCSK is well researched in Andrea Bocco and Laura Trovato’s “A Catalogue of Humane Technology” (2020).5 The overview of the CCSK given in this paper is based on my own historical research, which is essentially in line with the research of Bocco and Trovato, and highlights some new findings, especially with regard to the institutional environment; i.e., who supported the CCSK financially, scientifically, politically and in terms of dissemination. My research is mainly based on publicly available reports from international organizations and CCSK material I found in various collections and libraries, with the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives at Harvard Library and the German National Library of Science and Technology in Hanover being among the most helpful. Likewise, when I conducted an interview with Eda Schaur in January 2021, she also provided me with CCSK material.

• 6 M. Ijlal Muzaffar, The Periphery Within. Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World, Ph (...)
• 7 Ginger Nolan, Savage Mind to Savage Machine. Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design, Minneapo (...)

3The focus on the CCSK’s concept of self-education and the exchange of expertise will offer a transition to the second part, in which I will situate Schaur and Friedman’s work within the discourse on self-help in general and on “appropriate technology” and the role of communication media and visualization techniques in particular. This selective rather than comprehensive contextualization concentrates on how the CCSK positioned itself on central issues of development aid, bearing out Ijlal Muzaffar’s main thesis that architecture participated in shaping key questions and assumptions of the development discourse.6 As key issues I selected the role of the individual and the state—especially in light of Ginger Nolan’s recent characterization of the CCSK as “suffused with the inchoate logic of a neoliberal technohumanitarian project”7—, the evaluation of industrialization and other forms of technology and the possibility of a universal language that transcends cultural and educational differences.

• 8 Schaur was not mentioned in: Yona Friedman, “Why a Communication Centre,” Journal of Extension Sys (...)
• 9 Yona Friedman, “Immediate Education for Survival,” Paris: UNESCO, 1978. URL: https://unesdoc.unesc (...)
• 10 Yona Friedman, “Immediate Education for Survival,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 3.
• 11 Ibid.

4Both Schaur and Friedman have had encounters with “developing countries” prior to the CCSK. For many reasons, there is a tendency to portray Friedman and his preliminary work in this regard as more influential than Schaur. Firstly, the existing literature on him is extensive. He received a lot of media attention. Finally, some of his reports on the CCSK neglected to mention Schaur.8 Friedman is well known for his 1958 concept of mobile architecture and his designs for “spatial cities”—megastructures with multiple levels whose structures can be filled with modules that could be rearranged at will. This adaptable city had to be decided by its inhabitants, a concept Friedman called self-planning. The CCSK project proposal and funding request from 1983 (fig. 1) drew extensively on Friedman’s 1978 pilot project “Immediate Education for Survival” and the related article “Research and Immediate Education.”9 This project for the Division of Scientific Research and Higher Education of UNESCO contained two manuals, “Cooking with the Sun” and “Water From the Sky,” and promoted the incorporation of “modern scientific knowledge into the repertoire of ancient skills”10 in countries with scarce financial resources. The term “immediate” was most likely purposefully chosen as it emphasized the urgency to act, thus underlining the existence of a problem. At the same time, it suggested that education is near at hand, providing accessible practical knowledge that would lead to independent inventions. Immediate Education was presented as a “university in the street” with the manual or the wall journal as a communication vehicle between the scientist and the “men-in-the-street.”11 This was the pilot project for the CCSK, which Friedman founded a few years later together with Schaur.

• 12 Sabine Lebesque and Helene Fentener van Vlissingen (eds.), Yona Friedman, op. cit. (note 1), p. 12 (...)
• 13 The research project from 1981 to 1987 was entitled “Lightweight Constructions with Traditional Ma (...)
• 14 Ateya Khorakiwala, “Architecture’s Scaffolds,” e-flux, November 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/archi (...)
• 15 Andrea Bocco and Laura Trovato, “A Catalogue of Humane Technology,” op. cit. (note 3), p. 425. See (...)
• 16 Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke.
• 17 Sonderforschungsbereich 64 “Weitgespannte Flächentragwerke”: Jahresbericht from 1973/1974 to 1982 (...)
• 18 Sonderforschungsbereich 230 “Natürliche Konstruktionen. Leichtbau in Architektur und Natur,” sub-p (...)
• 19 Eda Schaur, Ungeplante Siedlungen = Non-Planned Settlements, Stuttgart: Krämer, 1992 (Mitteilungen (...)
• 20 Eda Schaur, “Let the Wind Work for You,” Invention Intelligence, vol. 20, no. 5-6, 1985, p. 195-19 (...)
• 21 Eda Schaur, Interview, 21.01.2021. Friedman participated as a speaker in the conferences in 1974 ( (...)
• 22 Eda Schaur, Interview, 21.01.2021.
• 23 Sabine Lebesque and Helene Fentener van Vlissingen (eds.), Yona Friedman, op. cit. (note 1), p. 12 (...)

5Schaur’s influence on the work and scope of the CCSK was essential. She was far more familiar with India than Friedman, who had traveled occasionally to India mainly for UNESCO seminars.12 Schaur, on the other hand, was a constant visiting researcher and teacher at the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, where from 1976 to 1987 she investigated lightweight constructions with traditional building materials.13 Her focus was especially on bamboo, a politically charged material that, as Ateya Khorakiwala explains, embodied in India’s post-independence development economy “the ingenuity of the vernacular, the material of a cottage industry with the possibility of producing a large-scale modernity from the small-scale of the village artisan.”14 Bocco and Trovato characterise Schaur’s working method as experimenting with grid shell structures made of bamboo strips using built models and involving students and local craftsmen.15 After her architecture studies at the Technische Hochschule in Graz (1964-1971), Schaur conducted research at the Stuttgart Institute for Lightweight Structures16 (IL) from 1972 to 1995 as part of the research projects on “Wide-Spanned Surface Structures”17 and on “Natural Structures–Lightweight Structures in Architecture and Nature.”18 In the scope of the latter she wrote her dissertation on “Non-Planned Settlements” in which she attempted to “discover the properties and features of the structures of those settlements which have been created by man in a largely autonomous manner and without any comprehensive planning”19 by comparing different settlements in Africa, Asia and Europe. Schaur thus shared with Friedman an interest in self-planning. She brought a profound technical expertise to the CCSK that becomes evident in manuals she designed, such as “Let the Wind Work for You” or “Water Pipes From Bamboo,” which are characterized by technical construction details.20 Schaur and Friedman met in the 1970s at IL-conferences, where he presented his ideas on user self-planning.21 After having established the CCSK, Schaur remained with an 80%-position in Stuttgart, continued teaching and researching in Ahmedabad, and worked mainly unpaid for the CCSK at Friedman’s office in Paris,22 while Friedman continued to work on competition entries alongside his work with the CCSK.23 The 1983 project proposal listed Friedman as coordinator and Schaur as deputy coordinator, which is probably why she was rarely mentioned as Friedman’s equal partner in the CCSK project.

• 24 Besides the mentioned 137 manuals, there are 45 new manuals in Invention Intelligence, 19 in Roofs(...)
• 25 “It Is Your Town – Know How to Protect It” 1975 (Manual H.38); “A Better Life in Towns” 1980 (Manu (...)
• 26 Yona Friedman, Comment habiter la terre/How to Settle on Earth, Paris: Ministère de la qualité de (...)
• 27 “We Have Many Deserts Don’t Make New Ones” 1977 (Manual H.1).
• 28 “L’Habitat c’est l’affaire de tous mais particulièrement la votre” 1977 (Manuals H.23, 32-34, 37, (...)
• 29 Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Yona Friedman Papers, 2008.M.51. Amandine Romanet, “Archite (...)
• 30 His Dossier de personnel at Paris, UNESCO Archives is currently not accessible. Manuel Orazi, who (...)
• 31 Institut Coopératif de l’École Moderne – Pédagogie Freinet, Mayon Pfeiffer, “Yona Friedman,” BT2, (...)
• 32 Yona Friedman, “No-Cost Housing,” Paris, UNESCO, 16.08.1977. URL: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark: (...)

6The 1983 project proposal was supplemented by a catalogue of 137 already available manuals of which 105 were in English, 31 in French and one in German. The total number of manuals designed by the CCSK is difficult to assess. In total I collected around 200 manuals related to the CCSK, without counting translations.24 The manuals covered not only topics such as housing and construction, but also protection against natural disasters, water management, farming and food preservation, energy generation, dealing with illnesses, and social cooperation. The project proposal listed manuals that Friedman had produced for the Council of Europe since 1975,25 for the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in 1976 (Habitat I),26 for the UN Conference on Desertification in 197727 and for UNESCO since 1977.28 Friedman had already begun producing manuals for French institutions in 1973, such as “Le langage de l’autoplanification. Manuel des enseignants,” for teachers who wish to educate children about architecture, and “C’est mon manuel car je veux savoir dessiner ma maison” on how city dwellers can plan their houses and their cities themselves.29 These early manuals were aimed at the population of industrialized countries, while the first manuals for the UN, published in the book How to Settle on Earth for Habitat I, were aimed at the world’s population in general and at “developing countries” in particular. Unfortunately, there has been little detailed research on Friedman’s work for UNESCO.30 In 1977, he was “UNESCO’s chief rapporteur for the Arab countries on the habitat of the poorest”31 and did a study mission to Sudan, Yemen, Egypt, and Jordan. His report proposed “a new term, ‘no-cost housing,’ which implies minimum cost for governments and ‘no-cost’ to inhabitants, thanks to self-help programmes.”32 He explained that self-help had been a reliable strategy of poor people in the past—the hidden expertise—and had to be rediscovered by them. The state—as well as the foreign expert—could not impose it, but a “long educational process” could render the idea of self-help respectable and desirable again—thus the need for his manuals, which he started to publish for UNESCO in that very same year. The CCSK built on these earlier manuals.

• 33 “Guide to Authors”, Invention Intelligence, vol. 16, no. 1, 1981, p. 1.
• 34 The series started with Friedman as author; he had already published the article “Research and Imm (...)

7Even before the CCSK was established, the Indian journal Invention Intelligence published Friedman’s manuals. The journal—probably the most important disseminator of the manuals—is still published by the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) of the Indian government. Beginning in 1965, the journal’s aim was to foster “inventivity, innovation and entrepreneurship among the Indian people” and to promote the “development and commercial exploitation of indigenous technology for economic uplift of the country.”33 It published mainly Indian “success stories” and ideas for “development technology,” NRDC reports, patent reviews and do-it-yourself instructions for devices. The incorporation of a series by European authors seems to have been rather an exception. Invention Intelligence printed 90 manuals in almost every monthly issue from 1981 to 1991 forming the series “Immediate Education for Survival” (fig. 2)34

• 35 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 7.
• 36 Eda Schaur, Interview, 21.01.2021.
• 37 It remains unclear how this came about. Various people at UNU wrote me that they do not have an ac (...)
• 38 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 8.
• 39 UN. Secretary-General, “United Nations University. Report of the Secretary-General. Addendum,” A/9 (...)
• 40 The reports do not give reasons why the UNU stopped funding. United Nations University, Report of (...)
• 41 United Nations University, Report of the Council of the United Nations University (January-Decembe (...)
• 42 United Nations University, Report of the Council of the United Nations University (January-Decembe (...)

9An institutional perspective—a focus less present in Bocco and Trovato’s research on the CCSK—sheds light on the interplay between different organizations and political powers supporting the CCSK. In 1983, in order to establish the CCSK as an “international programme,”35 Schaur and Friedman requested funding from UNU as part of the program activities of the Global Learning Division (GLD). The UNU was supposed to sponsor, assist in negotiations with national governments and international organizations, receive funds on behalf of the CCSK, and together with ICSU, advise experts and consultants on specific topics. Schaur and Friedman requested a two-year budget of 250,000 USD for salaries, consultant fees, technical expenses, travel expenses and overhead costs. Schaur recalls an annual budget of 60,000 USD,36 which means that, if she remembers correctly, the CCSK received half of the requested funding. As can be read in the project proposal, funding for the first year was already secured from UNU,37 UNESCO, and the European Economic Community—probably as a result of Friedman’s earlier and continuous work for UNESCO and the Council of Europe—and the governments of France and the US—both countries in which Friedman was active.38 The UNU’s objective since its establishment in 1972 under the joint sponsorship of UN and UNESCO is to engage “in research, post-graduate training and dissemination of knowledge in furtherance of the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” with the help of training centers and programs located in both “developed and developing countries.”39 The UNU reports for 1984 to 198840 listed the CCSK as a center offering new methods of sharing scientific knowledge “at the mass level [that] is of crucial concern, particularly in the developing countries,”41 especially because “disadvantaged, illiterate people rarely have access to scientific knowledge that can be put to use in their daily lives.”42 It seems that the UNU funded the CCSK as a project that enabled the dissemination of knowledge outside the boundaries of classical educational institutions, in line with Friedman’s earlier concept of a “university in the street.”

• 43 Eda Schaur, Interview, 21.01.2021.
• 44 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 8.
• 45 United Nations University, Report of the Council of the United Nations University, A/10031(SUPP), (...)

10The question of the CCSK’s location was crucial for its sponsoring partners. Speaking in retrospect, Schaur said that the CCSK was supposed to be located in Madras (today Chennai) in India, but due to the relatively low funding from UNU, it remained in Paris, which coincides with the contact address given in articles and manuals.43 Nevertheless, the UNU reports stated that the CCSK was based at COSTED in Madras. COSTED, established in 1966 as a committee of the ICSU, worked closely with UNESCO on the issue of “capacity-building” in science and technology in “developing countries.” Given the fact that COSTED proposed in-kind contributions of premises, telephone, and secretarial facilities to the CCSK,44 I suppose that the conception and production of manuals took place in Paris and the COSTED office served as local contact address. For the UNU reports, however, it certainly was more important to locate the CCSK in India than in France. The UNU stressed that the associated research institutions should be equally located in “developed and developing countries,”45 probably to avoid the impression of an epistemological hegemony of the “First World.”

• 46 S. Radhakrishna, Science, Technology and Global Problems. Views from the Developing World, Oxford: (...)
• 47 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 8.
• 48 Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance, Some Letters We Received, Paris, 1 (...)

11The staff list in the 1983 project proposal highlighted the integration of local experts. With the exception of the former Beninese politician and intellectual Albert Tévoédjrè, at that time Director of the International Institute for Labor Studies in Geneva, the Special Advisory Panel was composed of Indian politicians, researchers and activists: Inder Gujral, at that time former Minister of Communication, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union and member of the Indian National Congress Party; Badiuddin Khan, consultant on publishing at NRDC who fostered the publication of the manuals in Invention Intelligence; S. Krishnaswamy, Director of the Institute for Biology in Madurai; S. Prakash, advisor to the National Council of Village Arts in New Delhi; S. Radhakrishna, Secretary General to COSTED at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and co-editor of Science, Technology and Global Problems. Views from the Developing World (1980);46 A. Shastri, consultant on water quality at IIT Madras and Romesh Thapar, journalist and member of the (Marxist) Communist Party of India. This list showed that the CCSK was supported by a group of influential personalities who were active in India either in the field of communication and media, politically in the center or on the left, as scientists or in the field of development aid. Additional support came from Rathindra Nath Roy, who was listed as “chief consultant”47 and who took over the communication and coordination with the Indian governmental representatives.48 The CCSK thus operated from Paris and collaborated with Indian scientists, communication experts, and consultants who made the dissemination of the manuals in India possible in the first place.

• 49 Yona Friedman, Pro Domo, op. cit. (note 8), p. 18. Yona Friedman and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yona Frie (...)
• 50 Diego Maiorano, “Mrs. Gandhi’s Final Term and the Remaking of the Congress (I)’s Social Base,” Ind (...)
• 51 Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place. State-Building and Late Industrialization in India, Princeton, NJ; (...)
• 52 Ibid., p. 214.
• 53 In 1976, during the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, India became a “sovereig (...)
• 54 Partha Chatterjee, I Am the People. Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today, New York, NY: Columb (...)
• 55 Diego Maiorano, “Continuity amid Change in India’s Political Economy from 1980 to 2004,” Economic (...)

12Friedman reported retrospectively that in 1980, he met Indira Gandhi, and with her political support he managed to launch the CCSK.49 At that time, it was her third term as Indian Prime Minister (1980-1984), which was characterized by publicly emphasized poverty reduction measures alongside the implementation of free-market economic policies.50 The liberalization process had already been set in motion during the interregnum of Lal Bahadur Shastri (1965-1966) and grew rapidly later in the 1990s.51 In the beginning of Gandhi’s first term (1966-1971), she continued Shastri’s reforms by opening the country to greater foreign investment and diminishing the influence of state planning, which had been a central aspect of the governing of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister after India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947 and its declaration as a democratic republic in 1951. Nehru had opted for a strong developmental state that intervened and regulated the private sector to guide modernization through industrialization.52 Gandhi’s politics in the 1970s and her second term (1971-1977) changed towards a self-proclaimed “socialism”53 including the nationalization of banks, greater state control of the economy, protectionist policies, an expanding public sector, and agricultural self-sufficiency through the Green Revolution.54 After Gandhi regained power in 1980, the “socialist” program was gradually abandoned (although it continued nominally), giving way to “economic policies that favoured the corporate sector and the middle-class.”55 The CCSK seems to fit in well with Gandhi’s politics. The concept of tackling poverty by encouraging self-help, which meant less financial investment by the government, probably suited her focus on eradicating poverty while reducing state interventions.

• 56 Eda Schaur, Interview, 21.01.2021.
• 57 CCSK, Some Letters We Received, op. cit. (note 48), p. 4, 10, 15, 18.
• 58 Ibid., p. 22.
• 59 Ibid., p. 2.
• 60 Ibid., p. 16.
• 61 Letters of interest from India also included Hindustan Lever Limited, Consortium on Rural Technolo (...)

13The CCSK depended also for dissemination on international and local institutions. The actual distribution of the manuals was not part of CCSK’s work, since Friedman assumed they would spread on their own.56 To make local actors aware enough of the free manuals to disseminate them, they had to be constantly publicized within development aid networks. A curated collection of letters published by the CCSK in 1986 were intended to attest to its success (fig. 4). Even though their authenticity is not in question, the letters are free from critical comments on the CCSK’s work. The CCSK tried to prove that the manuals reached and were welcomed by people in selecting letters from individuals in Nepal and India thanking the CCSK for its manuals and offering to translate them into local languages.57 The CCSK received letters of response to requests for cooperation and expressions of interest from Algeria, Brazil, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria and members of the Peace Corps stationed in Antigua and the Philippines, which positioned the CCSK as a global player in development aid. However, the main dissemination area was India. In April 1984, the NRDC sent five Hindi-translations of CCSK manuals to Friedman.58 In a letter from August 1986 the Directorate of Adult Education in the Ministry of Human Resource Development informed the CCSK that the first booklet of manuals was published in Hindi and five more will follow in the fall of 1986.59 The National Council for Science and Technology Communication of the Indian government showed interest in the manuals for their Integrated Rural Development Programme.60 It was thus mainly governmental institutions, rather than private organizations, which were supporting the CCSK in India.61

• 62 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 1.
• 63 Ibid., p. 2.
• 64 CCSK, Some Letters We Received, op. cit. (note 48), p. 10. The name is difficult to decipher.
• 65 Ibid., p. 5.

14Aside from the institutional perspective, the CCSK’s aim was to help people help themselves by providing “appropriate techniques for survival” in the form of capacity building for autonomous change and innovation through elementary courses in practical science (fig. 5). The CCSK repeatedly highlighted the concept of self-education: “people are not simply pupils, they are educators themselves, self-educators.”62 They argued against instructing predefined solutions, aiming instead at empowering inventions that come from the local community: “It is they who will make the actual invention once they have learned to understand and use basic scientific principles.”63 The lack of instructions led to enquiries such as a letter in which an Indian praised the proposed fire stove but asked for more precise dimensions in order to be able to build one.64 The CCSK’s approach to leave out details was not common, as a letter by the Developing Countries Farm Radio Network (DCFRN) in Canada, in response to a request for cooperation by Friedman, shows: “As I see it, the individual items in the manuals provide an excellent general awareness medium for our common clientele. DCFRN items, on the other hand tend to provide information at the next stage of the communication process with considerably more detail.”65 The CCSK, in contrast, was built on a form of distributed expertise, where they provided conceptual knowledge, while the users invented the devices themselves.

• 66 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 6.
• 67 Gopal Rao, “Making Water Drinkable,” Invention Intelligence, vol. 19, no. 7-8, 1984, p. 303-305.
• 68 Sabyasachi Chatterjee, “Changing Role of Science Clubs in Communication Science,” Global Media Jou (...)
• 69 P. B. Dhanish, Letter to the editor, Invention Intelligence, vol. 22, no. 7, 1987, p. 254.

15Schaur and Friedman’s focus on different forms of expertise was reflected in the manuals’ production method envisaged in their 1983 project proposal. In theory, the first step was the production of a “prototype manual.” These were then to be taken up by individuals or organizations with the freedom to make changes and translate them into local languages. In a third step, the resulting “contextual manuals” were to be tested in practice in order to obtain comments. Based on this feedback, the final version was produced which would then be disseminated. The CCSK clarified that it would not act “as a control body”66 of the manuals. Rather, everyone was encouraged to create manuals on topics of their choice. It is difficult to determine whether this modus operandi was actually carried out this way. In the series in Invention Intelligence, there is one locally produced manual, “Making Water Drinkable” (1984), attributed to Gopal Rao of India’s Amra Kajan Science Club (fig. 6).67 Science clubs have been a major contributor to science communication in India especially from the 1970s onward, with, according to Sabyasachi Chatterjee, the “popularization of science,” the “spread of scientific temper” and the “use of science and technology for the welfare of the common people”68 as their goals. Presumably, Invention Intelligence was a common source for science clubs. In the July 1987 issue, a reader, P. B. Dhanish from the Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development project in Calicut, corrected the CCSK manual “Energy: What Is It and How Is It Used?” (printed in the March 1987 issue) by differentiating work, power and energy using physics definitions that are in clear contrast to the simple captions of the CCSK manual, which equated energy and work.69 The CCSK’s simplifications were thus challenged by the scientific expertise of the readers.

• 70 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 4.
• 71 Stacy Leigh Pigg, “Inventing Social Categories through Place. Social Representations and Developme (...)
• 72 Andrea Bocco and Laura Trovato, “A Catalogue of Humane Technology,” op. cit. (note 3), p. 406, 418

16The educational process was conceived as an exchange between different experts, scientists and users, and between industrialized and “developing countries”: “If certain type[s] of knowledge originating in the industrialized countries can be useful for people in developing countries, the opposite would also be true: much information emanating from developing countries would be important for people in the industrialized regions.”70 The project proposal listed four different knowledge transfers: (1) from researchers in industrialized countries to users in “developing countries”; (2) from researchers and practitioners in “developing countries” to users in industrialized countries; (3) from ordinary people in both industrialized and “developing countries” to researchers; and (4) from researchers and practitioners in “developing countries” to other “developing countries.” In reality, the knowledge transfer from industrialized to “developing countries” seems to have been more dominant and although autonomous production of manuals was encouraged, the transfer of knowledge produced in “developing countries” to industrialized countries tended to remain an unfulfilled intention. Schaur and Friedman did not assume practitioners and users in “developing countries” to be “people who don’t understand.”71 They valued their expertise and ingenuity, but it seems that they rarely listened to them and engaged in mutual exchange—perhaps Schaur as a researcher and teacher in Ahmedabad for over a decade did listen more than Friedman who, as Bocco and Trovato describe, was not very interested in engaging with those who used the CCSK manuals and could give feedback.72 This is noteworthy since the opportunity to engage more with and learn from the users was certainly within their scope of action.

• 73 CCSK, Why a Communication Centre? A Programme, op. cit. (note 1), p. 5.
• 74 Cf. his idea of a “simple encyclopedia” in Yona Friedman, Utopies réalisables, Paris: Éditions de (...)
• 75 For more details on the museum and the planned extension, see Andrea Bocco and Laura Trovato, “A C (...)

17The exchanges were conceived to be implemented through training courses for students who “could learn different popularization techniques by working with the Centre for a limited period and would upon return to their own countries make it possible to establish national centres for the communication of scientific knowledge.”73 However, these centres never became reality. Nor did the collection of final manuals into a “Popular Encyclopedia”74 and of contextual manuals as a “unique archive of ethnological documents, showing particular local approaches to problems and their expression” ever materialize. The conduction of experiments with the construction of the Museum of Simple Technology as a real-size model (fig. 7) did come to fruition. This museum, erected in 1987 on the campus of the Anna University in Madras, was the only CCSK building project realized in a “developing country.” It was accomplished thanks to an interaction with the local population. Financed by UNESCO and UNU, local basket weavers together with Schaur and Friedman constructed for a month a cluster of 13 open and closed modules with brick walls, timber post constructions and bamboo domes. The construction of the roofs not only corresponded to the CCSK manual “Bamboo Domes With Suspended Mat Cover”; the whole museum served as an exhibition hall for the manuals, which were pasted on the inner walls and painted on the outer walls (fig. 8). An extension of the museum was planned, but never realized, and the built part was dismantled after two years.75

• 76 Yona Friedman, Pro Domo, op. cit. (note 8), p. 19.
• 77 Open letter from UN-Habitat, 09.06.2003, New York, UN Archives, S-1093-0042-01-00008.
• 78 Yona Friedman, Pro Domo, op. cit. (note 8), p. 22. In 1989, Schaur and Friedman designed competiti (...)
• 79 Eda Schaur, “Building Methods of Living Nature,” in Rudolf Finsterwalder (ed.), Form Follows Natur (...)
• 80 Eda Schaur (ed.), Intelligent Bauen. Aspekte einer anderen Baukultur = Building with Intelligence. (...)
• 81 Schaur edited the book Konstruktion und Gestaltung. Neue Formwelten für Architektur (2013) in whic (...)

18It is difficult to define when exactly the CCSK ceased operations. The UNU report for 1989 did not mention the CCSK anymore and Friedman wrote retrospectively that at the end of 1987 he was forced to close it because of a lack of funding.76 In 1991, both Schaur and Friedman won the Grand Prize of the Osaka International Design Competition for the manuals on roofs, which were published as two editions in the UNESCO series Human Settlements and Sociocultural Environments in 1990 and 1991. One year later, on the occasion of the World Habitat Day, Friedman won the World Habitat Award, a prize initiated by the UK-based NGO Building and Social Housing Foundation to “recognize innovative, sustainable and replicable human settlements projects throughout the world.”77 Thus, Schaur and Friedman received some recognition for their work. In the 1990s, Friedman continued to work on different roof and panel structures, tested in several art exhibitions, and started to conceptualize a theory of the “erratic universe,” eventually leaving the development aid context.78 Schaur became a professor at the University of Innsbruck in 1995 and continued to work on natural structures.79 She edited Building with Intelligence. Aspects of a Different Building Culture (1995), the proceedings of a conference with Friedman, the German scene of architects involved in developing aid and the Indian architects Sanjay Prakash and Balkrishna V. Doshi as speakers.80 Their exchange with India thus continued, at least for some time.81

• 82 Yona Friedman, “Why a Communication Centre,” op. cit. (note 8), p. 64.
• 83 Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts. ‘Aided Self-Help Housing’, 1939-1954,” Habitat Intern (...)
• 84 “Report of the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Vancouver, Canada, 31 May-11 June 1 (...)
• 85 John F. C. Turner, Housing by People, New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1976, p. xiii.
• 86 Ibid., p. xiv.
• 87 Colin Ward, “Preface,” in ibid. (note 85), p. xxxiii.
• 88 John F. C. Turner, Housing by People, op. cit. (note 85), p. xxiii.
• 89 Ibid., p. xiv. Cf. Manual “Making Your House?” [H.23], Invention Intelligence, vol. 17. no. 11, 19 (...)
• 90 John F. C. Turner, Housing by People, op. cit. (note 85), p. xv. As demonstrated by US owner-build (...)

19How can the CCSK be positioned historically within development politics focusing on self-help in conjunction with human settlements? In two articles explaining the CCSK, authored by Friedman in 1985 and 1986, a common justification for self-help was given by foregrounding the cost efficiency of this approach. In countries where the government did not have sufficient funds for the improvement of living conditions through welfare programs, the solution was self-help.82 Aided self-help housing, “site-and-service” schemes and “core housing”—ideas suggesting that future inhabitants build at least part of their house themselves—gained importance in the development aid context starting in the 1940s, especially because they offered a way to tackle housing problems at minimum cost.83 The Habitat I report assumed that the improvement of human settlements—both “an instrument and object of development”—could only, but not solely, be achieved through “guided programmes of self-help and community action,” using especially “locally existing know-how and unskilled labour in countries with abundant manpower.”84 A well-known example for promoting self-help was John F. C. Turner’s Housing by People (1976), written for Habitat I, in which the architect defined self-help as “autonomy in building environments” and “self-determination at the local level.”85 According to Turner, self-help should not be limited to do-it-yourself (DIY) or group construction, while decision-making is taken over by the state or business corporations, as this “can actually reduce autonomy by making excessive demands on personal time and energy.”86 Instead, people should be in control.87 For Turner, self-help presented a cheaper solution than state housing projects and offered self-helpers “the pride of achievement, the self-confidence and self-respect, or the delight in creativity.”88 Friedman’s ideas were very similar to Turner’s concepts, a difference being that Turner based his argument on his field studies in Peru, the US, and the UK and research literature, whereas Friedman tended to write his books without giving much scientific evidence. Neither advocated the complete withdrawal of the state, but saw its role as providing access to resources, such as land and building materials, and protecting people from profit-oriented companies.89 Both rejected consumerism, large hierarchical structures, dependence-generating technologies and non-renewable resources and presented the lifestyle of the poor as an alternative way to generate wealth out of scarcity both in industrialized and “developing countries.”90

• 91 Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green. The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism, Lawre (...)
• 92 “Statement of the Habitat Forum to the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Vancouver, (...)
• 93 Ginger Nolan, Savage Mind to Savage Machine, op. cit. (note 7), p. 118.
• 94 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 2.
• 95 Wendy Brown, Edgework. Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics, Oxford; Princeton, NJ: Princeton (...)
• 96 Yona Friedman, L’Architecture de survie, op. cit. (note 90), p. 134-135.
• 97 Yona Friedman, “No-Cost Housing,” op. cit. (note 32), p. 9.
• 98 Yona Friedman, L’Architecture de survie, op. cit. (note 90), p. 14. Yona Friedman, “The Quaternary (...)
• 99 Yona Friedman, “The quaternary sector,” op. cit. (note 90), p. 46.

20Self-help was not a concept crafted for the “developing world.” It goes back to a long history of pragmatist thinking in the 19^th century, “to a practical, problem-solving, tool-using, environment-transforming strain,”91 and pointing to the idea that individuals can be the agent of change of their living conditions, eventually leading to personal development and self-improvement—an early example being Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859). Self-help and the participation of future users ranged from the realization of greater autonomy and agency, as propagated by Turner, to forms of (self-)exploitation. This tension was well known as can be seen in the report of the Habitat Forum 1976 stating that “the notion of participation is often abused in order to disguise the real causes of the problem, and to permit the maintenance of low income levels and to load the settler with many non-remunerative tasks.”92 In this respect, Nolan interprets Friedman as a promoter of a “neoliberalism avant la lettre.”93 Indeed, neoliberalism as a form of right-wing libertarianism which propagates “private property rights, free markets, and free trade”94 and a society in which every individual tries to increase their economic value through self-improvement and opportunism in order to win in a meritocratic system,95 includes notions of self-help, which is proposed as a remedy for those who do not win, thus concealing structural inequalities. Differences with neoliberal thinking lay in Friedman’s critique of certain aspects of capitalism. For instance, he advocated shared property based on usage instead of private property;96 he criticized land speculation and suggested the state taxes “unused land which is ‘waiting to make a profit.’”97 He was also critical of the meritocratic belief that people are poor because they are lazy or incompetent, and he pointed to the accumulation of capital by exploiting “developing countries” as the source of global inequalities, promoting a halt to international trade.98 Two economic policies Friedman advocated aligned him with neoliberal thinking, although his goal was to support a subsistence economy, his ideal, not a neoliberal one. He felt that states should authorize “wild sales,” defined as “free sale on the street without any permit or other formality,” and non-union craftmanship or illicit work, liberating people “from all formal authorizations.”99 The result of such policies would be a loss of market control and tax income—on the part of the state—as well as dismantling labor rights. Friedman’s underlying belief was that countries are ungovernable by state regulation alone. In this sense, he envisioned a form of self-organization based on subsistence, barter, and self-help.

• 100 Cf. Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency. Other Ways of Doing Architectu (...)
• 101 See ICEM – Pédagogie Freinet, Mayon Pfeiffer, “Yona Friedman,” op. cit. (note 31), p. 20-21. Manue (...)
• 102 Nikolaas John Habraken, Support. An Alternative to Mass Housing, London: Architectural Press, 1972 (...)
• 103 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects. A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architect (...)
• 104 Ginger Nolan, “Folders, Patterns, and Villages. Pastoral Technics and the Center for Environmental (...)

21Self-help manuals on housing are also part of a general empowerment of users and the democratization of expert knowledge. How planning and building could be taught to non-professionals so that they themselves can design their built environment had been a question since the 1960s, when ideas of participation, collaborative design, and community planning were explored.100 Friedman devoted several publications to self-planning, having realized one architectural project planned by users, the Lycée David d’Angers, in the city of Angers (1977-1981).101 Other examples are N. John Habraken’s 1960s concept of a support structure which can be filled with self-built infills or Walter Segal’s self-build housing system of the 1970s and 1980s, to name just a few.102 Self-help was often promoted with reference to the traditional self-built environment and vernacular architecture in “developing countries,” as can be seen in Bernard Rudofsky’s publications such as Architecture without Architects. A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (1964) or Lloyd Kahn’s Shelter (1973).103 Christopher Alexander developed his Pattern Language—a means for people to design their own homes—partly through encounters with Indian villagers in the Gujarat region in the 1960s104 which showcases how participatory practices emerged through the engagement with “developing countries.” Thus, architects promoting self-help in industrialized countries looked to long-established self-help strategies in “developing countries” as a reference, while at the same time architects as foreign experts proposed self-help as the “new” solution to the “problems” of “developing countries.”

• 105 Catherine D. Smith, Productive Matters. The DIY Architecture Manuals of Ant Farm and Paolo Soleri, (...)
• 106 Ken Isaacs, How to Build Your Own Living Structures, New York, NY: Harmony Books, 1974. See Andrea (...)
• 107 Paolo Soleri and Scott M. Davis, Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting for Sculpture, Models and Constructi (...)
• 108 Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green, op. cit. (note 91), p. 29.
• 109 E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, New York, NY: Ha (...)
• 110 Ibid., p. 195.

22The above-mentioned preoccupations with self-help in industrialized countries were linked to the idea of DIY, and here, interesting intersections between the CCSK and discourses on alternative or self-manufacturing technologies emerge. The US-American countercultural movements in particular, with magazines like the Whole Earth Catalog or architecture groups like Ant Farm, detached the concept of DIY from the realm of suburban families by associating it with self-sufficient lifestyles, anti-consumerism, and sustainability and “spreading how-to-knowledge” through manuals.105 Examples were Ken Isaacs’ How to Build Your Own Living Structures (1974),106 mainly dealing with furniture and micro-houses, and Paolo Soleri and Scott M. Davis’ manual Paolo Soleri’s Earth Casting for Sculpture, Models and Construction (1984).107 The countercultural activists were inclined towards promoters of “appropriate technology,” which since the 1960s focused on the potentials of pre-industrial technological solutions and “low-tech small-scale interventions.”108 Influential in this regard were the Intermediate Technology Development Group, founded in 1966, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973), in which the economist and ecologist called for intermediate technology that is “vastly superior to the primitive technology of bygone ages but at the same time much simpler, cheaper, and freer than the super-technology of the rich. One can also call it self-help technology, or democratic or people’s technology—tech[n]ology to which everybody can gain admittance and which is not reserved to those already rich and powerful.”109 Schumacher’s ideas overlapped substantially with the CCSK’s in that he propagated decentralized politics and warned against the adoption of Western-style industrialization in “developing countries,” emphasizing instead self-reliance and self-help.110

• 111 Yona Friedman, “Immediate Education for Survival,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 211.
• 112 Manual “Simple Technology Might Be What You Need” [H.20], Invention Intelligence, vol. 17, no. 9-1 (...)
• 113 Yona Friedman, “Immediate Education for Survival,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 211.
• 114 Cf. “Each of these technologies is as good as the other.”: Manual “Simple Technology Might Be What (...)
• 115 Charles Taylor (ed.), Science Education and Information Transfer, Oxford: Pergamon Press for ICSU (...)
• 116 Cf. Yona Friedman, L’Architecture de survie, op. cit. (note 90), p. 209-213.
• 117 Ginger Nolan, Savage Mind to Savage Machine, op. cit. (note 7), p. 4, 117.

23Schaur and Friedman’s view on technology shared a lot with the concept of “appropriate technology.” They stressed the combination of traditional and modern knowledge to foster the invention of “a new popular technology.” For example, a solar stove “could be the improvement of the traditional clay stove in certain regions, once the villagers get some knowledge of the principles of physics used in solar contraptions.”111 For Schaur and Friedman, people in “developing countries” were “highly skilled technicians of simple technology,”112 being defined as “technology whose terms and principles are traditionally known by the local population”113 (fig. 9). The CCSK intended to enhance the value of existent skills and elevate the supposed local expertise to an equal level with “sophisticated technology” of industrialized countries.114 Addressing differences in technology concepts is liable to establish a hierarchy of knowledge in which industrialized technology is assimilated with progress, whereas the other is considered to be “simple.” For instance, in Science Education and Information Transfer (1987), the section “Low-Tech” was changed to “Easily Available Technology” to reduce the derogatory effect.115 Schaur and Friedman could have avoided the juxtaposition of simple and sophisticated by naming them easily available and industrial technologies. But in their conceptual landscape, the term “simple,” like the term “poor,” had no pejorative implications; instead, it connoted autonomy, self-sufficiency, and individual creativity.116 Nolan points out that this can be read as a racialized binary between the (white) engineer, who has a planned set of materials and design, and the (non-white) creative and resilient bricoleur, as found in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée sauvage (1962).117 In fact, this racialized dichotomy was part of the implicit ideological basis of development discourses, which portrayed the foreign experts as those with a plan and the “others” as those with “problems” that could be solved by activating their capacity to help themselves. Schaur and Friedman reflected critically on this conception and were part of it at the same time.

• 118 Manual “Cooking with the Sun” [F.6], Invention Intelligence, vol. 16, no. 5, 1981, p. 212-216.
• 119 Manual “Which Materials Could Serve You Best?” [H.21], Invention Intelligence, vol. 17, no. 8, 198 (...)
• 120 Yona Friedman, L’Architecture de survie. op. cit. (note 90), p. 14.
• 121 Ibid., p. 15. Translation by author.
• 122 Ibid., p. 119.

24In several manuals Schaur and Friedman presented the expertise and ingenuity of users as being just as valuable as research undertaken in industrialized countries. In “Cooking with the Sun,” the CCSK encouraged users to experiment with the positioning of the curved mirror, a metallized clay bowl that uses the reflection of the sun’s rays to heat food: “You will find, also by trying, how the shape of the mirror influences the location of the hot spot. You are becoming a scientist”118 (fig. 10). A panel presented a village with a billboard on which is written “Village Solar Lab” and the last part urged the users to share their research results: “You should teach your discoveries to other villagers, but also to educated people from the city and from other regions. They are not the only scientists, you too, you are one, and it might be you who makes the important discovery” (fig. 11). In another manual, Schaur and Friedman emphasized the value of creation from few materials because the abundance of resources makes production easier but not better.119 This wealth created under scarcity connected to what Friedman called a “philosophy of poverty” in L’Architecture de survie (1978). In the face of an ecological crisis caused by the finite nature of resources, slum dwellers proved for Friedman the solution for humanity’s survival, because they are used to scarcity and know how to adapt in an egalitarian way through community decision-making.120 Even though Friedman did not intend “to idealise the slum, or the poor,”121 he recommended that people in industrialized countries learn from how inhabitants of slums brave poverty and organize themselves, claiming that indigenous survival architecture is perfect.122 In terms of resources, Friedman foresaw a global impoverishment for which the “simple technology” of “developing countries” presented an answer. Despite his claim not to idealize, his characterization of poor people living in slums was arguably a form of romanticization to some extent. In his books, Friedman constructed the people of “developing countries” as the more sustainable others, thus making them a model for an alternative way of life in industrialized countries where alternative movements were already experimenting with self-help techniques. Thus self-help was framed as a mutual learning process between industrialized and “developing countries.”

• 123 “Report of the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements,” op. cit. (note 84), p. 42.
• 124 Ibid., p. 74.
• 125 Austin Whillier and S. J. Richards, “Hot Water from the Sun,” Ekistics, vol. 7, no. 41, 1959, p. 2 (...)
• 126 Indian Ministry of Works, Housing and Supply, “Rural Housing. A Draft Manual,” Ekistics, vol. 6, n (...)
• 127 Johan van Lengen, Manual del arquitecto descalzo, Mexico City: Editorial Concepto, 1982. See Andre (...)
• 128 See https://proyecteyconstruyabien.com/. Accessed 12 April 2023. See also Andrea Bocco and Laura T (...)
• 129 A lot of self-help manuals primarily targeted government staff, supervisors and experts, as did th (...)

25Self-help necessitated education and solutions that are “simple to understand, adapt and apply.”123 Besides the Museum of Simple Technology, the CCSK chose not hands-on education through demonstration projects or construction prototypes, but a less direct way of education through manuals and wall journals, for which no in-person interaction with the local population was required. In order to make educational material more intelligible to non-professionals, Habitat I recommended “abundant illustration, by describing the problem connected with different alternatives and by using a language which laymen can understand.”124 The targeting of users by means of schematic drawings and absence of details and the covering of a wide range of topics held together by the notion of survival made the CCSK manuals quite unique. There was an abundance of manuals using detailed technical drawings and conveying—similar to the CCSK—survival-related techniques, one example being the manual “Hot Water from the Sun” (1959) from South Africa’s Committee for Scientific and Industrial Research.125 An example for a focus on housing is Rural Housing. A Draft Manual produced in the 1950s by the Indian Ministry of Works, Housing and Supply as “an attempt to suggest typical village layouts and houses which can be built,” while taking care “to estimate the costs of the house type designs as low as possible, stressing aided self-help housing.”126 Here, the drawings were architectural plans and sections accompanied by an axonometry of a rural house before and after improvements. The worldwide popular Manual del arquitecto descalzo by Johan van Lengen, produced in the 1980s for the Mexican Secretariat of Human Settlements and Public Works, contained a wealth of architectural design knowledge, but no survival techniques, and more detailed and typical architectural drawings than the CCSK manuals.127 There were influential manuals which also used comic-strips, such as Jaime Nisnovich’s 1980s Manual práctico de construcción with detailed drawings and elaborate instructions focusing mainly on construction knowledge.128 These are only a few examples of a vast production of manuals for the development aid context since at least the 1950s focusing on self-help and addressed to—at least partly—the users themselves.129

• 130 Yona Friedman, “Why a Communication Centre,” op. cit. (note 8), p. 65.
• 131 Cornelia Escher, Zukunft entwerfen. Architektonische Konzepte des GEAM (Groupe d’Études d’Architec (...)
• 132 Historical handbooks before the 19^th century often portrayed processes in one image with various f (...)
• 133 Sonia Izquierdo Esteban, “Self-Assembling Architecture. User Graphic Manuals,” in Carlos L. Marcos(...)

26The CCSK manuals were promoted as conveying knowledge in a way that could be understood by “the poorest, often illiterate people”130 in “developing countries”—an important requirement for communication media in the context of development aid. At the same time, Friedman’s manuals for industrialized countries used the same abstract drawing style (fig. 12). Therefore, the emphasis on simple visualization techniques as a response to illiteracy seems to have been partly a rhetorical figure to secure support from development aid institutions. The visualization technique was related to critiques of professional norms and explorations of non-expert looking alternatives to traditional architectural drawings in the 1960s.131 The manuals used comic strips to divide the process into several steps presented in successive panels, creating a sequence based on the aesthetic cohesion of the individual images. This gave the impression that one person—the self-builder—could do the work themself.132 The sequential structure taken from comics was a common feature of DIY, although they typically contained more detailed instructions than the CCSK manuals.133

• 134 For “Pictogrammes de la genèse” (1975) see Collection FRAC Centre, 010 024 001 a–e. For “Pictogram (...)
• 135 For instance, Charles K. Bliss’ Semantography project since the 1940s, http://www.semantography-bl (...)
• 136 Cf. “The manuals are highly simplified communication supports, with many drawings simple enough to (...)
• 137 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies. The Key Concepts, London; (...)
• 138 Marie Neurath and Robin Kinross, The Transformer. Principles of Making Isotype Charts, London: Hyp (...)
• 139 The Isotype Institute was founded in 1942 by Marie and Otto Neurath in the UK. Marie Reidemeister (...)
• 140 Marie Neurath, “Isotype,” Instructional science, vol. 3, no. 2, 1974, p. 147. Cited in Eric Kindel (...)
• 141 The CCSK manual “Planning Your House” was based on Friedman’s manual “C’est mon manuel car je veux (...)

27The CCSK used abstract representations which were connected to Friedman’s interest in universal pictorial languages, as expressed in his “Pictogrammes de la genèse” (1975) and “Pictogrammes. Lexique. L’ami de la beauté” (1977), in which he catalogued his own pictograms and their meanings.134 In pursuing this interest, he can be associated with the widespread dream of a universal visual language in the 20^th century.135 It was based on the premise that pictograms could overcome cultural and educational differences,136 although this premise often engendered imperialist and culturalist notions by promoting a certain standard as universal and assuming a “universal ‘(cultured)’ reader.”137 Universal languages tended to struggle with differences in reading and understanding representations and contain stereotypes. A good example is the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), developed since the 1920s as nonverbal signs that transcend language barriers and reading problems to systematize statistical figures, especially for educational exhibitions.138 In the early 1950s, the former Western State of Nigeria commissioned the Isotype Institute139 to produce manuals on diverse topics for literacy and education campaigns. The graphic designer Marie Neurath’s experiences in Nigeria made it necessary to adapt the Isotypes to local conventions: “Becoming citizens of the world we gradually recognised that our symbolism was often international for western man only. More than before I recognised this when I had to work out ways of informing the Nigerian people about health, education, agriculture, voting etc., in visual terms. Man, woman, house, plants, markets, trees... all had to be drawn in a different way to be understandable in that country. Also the approach, the speed of information, the colour scheme, the ways to catch the attention—all had to be different.”140 This led to the inclusion of new isotypes such as savanna trees or dark-skinned people in traditional clothes. The CCSK drawings are less detailed than the Isotypes as people are depicted as stick figures, which makes it impossible to show skin color or special clothing—even though traditional female tasks are represented by stick figures with skirts. While remaining very abstract, the CCSK also occasionally adapted its manuals to local conventions by including vernacular-looking buildings, for instance (fig. 13).141

• 142 Felicity Scott, “‘Foreigners in Filmmaking,’” in Aggregate (ed.), Architecture in Development, op. (...)
• 143 Charles Taylor, “Transfer with Easily Available Technology,” in Science Education and Information (...)
• 144 Ibid., p. 34.
• 145 Edward W. Ploman, “Global Learning: A Challenge,” in ibid., p. 75.
• 146 Ploman saw the CCSK’s success in the fact “that some local groups have adopted this methodology an (...)

28As Felicity Scott and Olga Touloumi recently highlighted, communication media played an important role within development politics, since films and television, exhibitions, photographs and radio broadcasts created, challenged, and established expertise and its global dissemination as development.142 Especially in the context of networks promoting science and technology in “developing countries,” communication skills were reckoned to be an essential prerequisite for any form of knowledge transfer, and thus for the development project itself. For instance, the Bangalore Conference on “Science and Technology Education and Future Human Needs” in August 1985, organized by the Committee on the Teaching of Science of ICSU, asked: “how can scientists ensure that the results of their research are effectively communicated to lay audiences?”143 It called for collaboration between scientists and communication experts. The work of the CCSK was presented in this occasion as exemplary for effective science and technology education and as a contribution to literacy, since “often in a village situation a child will read out the captions and adults will begin to learn the words that go with each picture.”144 Edward W. Ploman, Vice-Rector of the GLD and the CCSK’s main contact person from UNU, stressed the importance of the CCSK manuals when explaining UNU’s concept of global learning at the conference. The GLD aimed to foster “learning about global issues and processes” and to understand “learning processes globally,” defining development as something “we learn rather than just do.”145 Ploman highlighted the CCSK’s focus on mutual learning and global knowledge transfer.146 The manuals were thus framed as a medium to establish development as a global learning process.