In 1970, the conference program conducted by William Houseman was called Environment by design. In response to IDCA’s invitation, the French delegation, led by designer Roger Tallon, would take a position in a declaration written by Jean Baudrillard. The French delegation’s declaration, along with student and environmental activists’ reactions and demonstrations that took place during the conference would constitute a turning point for the Aspen meetings.
Back in France, the journalist Gilles de Bure, who had accompanied the official delegation, relates his Aspen 1970 experience in an article entitled Les sommets d’Aspen.

In 1970, Eli Noyes and his friend Claudia Weill made a film which was produced by their production company, Cyclops Films. The conferences and debates show a confrontation between different conceptions of what design is. The organizers of the Aspen meetings are renowned designers who work for industry. In this context, environmental activists and students mostly from Berkeley, California protested. For them, design was a political commitment and carried social and environmental responsibility for designers.

At the invitation of the Ecole des beaux-arts de Bordeaux in the context of the seminar design et environnement organized by Jeanne Quéheillard and Annette Nève, the artist Martin Beck was interviewed on February 2, 2010 by art critic Peio Aguirre. Referring to Martin Beck’s exhibition Panel 2: “Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…” which brings the 1970 Aspen Design Conference back into question, the interview approaches Beck’s working methods and questions related to perceptions of the past and of history, historicism, cultural references, the history of design and postmodernism.