In the course of the last fifty years, there has been a slow, but continuous and decisive, transformation of the Iranian family.

In its traditional form, the Iranian family shows three basic characteristics: a certain inbreeding between relatives, a sense of masculine primacy, and a special attachment to the land where the father was born. The woman enjoys no social, professional or political freedom, while the male, the only breadwinner and the only one entrusted with any responsibility, is considered master after God. To belong to a kinship group, a lineage, represents for him an attachment to a respected, well-defined trunk, which guarantees the life and continuity of the family and grants him a place in society. Among the nomads, as well as in the villages, we see the family as the unit of production and of consumption. At the same time, in the cities, the family is not only the unit of consumption, but in the work of craftsmen (which is flourishing in the urban centers) we still see retained the familial aspect. This rule finds its origins not only in Moslem law and in the post-Islamic history of Iran, but also in the traditions and religions of ancient Persia.

Any serious study of the literary and artistic forms of expression found in the continent of Africa south of the Sahara must open with a look at the traditional forms of expression. It is these forms of which the various intellectual movements in Africa are becoming increasingly aware, a trend exemplified by the Festival of Negro Arts organised a few years back at Dakar.

Our capacity to foresee the lengthy life and the prospective techniques which are available to us has not essentially altered in the last 25 years, at a time when the field of possibles has been considerably widened by the exponential growth of our material and intellectual out-puts. Furthermore, as scientific revolutions, in the sense in which T. Kuhn intends this term, are becoming increasingly frequent and are affecting very different areas, one has leave to count upon the continuation of this widening process in the field of possibles, despite the constraint imposed by the finite quantity of identified and identifiable resources, at least on the scale of our planet. In other words, we do not think that this accelerated destruction of the environment (which is the main feature of our industrial civilisation) is beyond control, and that one should consequently preach—as various Jeremiah prophets are doing—a planetary Neo-Malthusianism extending to all the resources and expressed by the thinly veiled rejection of the right to industrialise for those countries still waiting to join the ‘rich man's club.’ But suddenly our ascendancy over the ever more diversified future grows slighter and slighter, because the prospective is stamping its feet; and this is a paradoxical and troubling consequence of the acceleration of the history in which we have to live. The widening of the field of possibles implies, moreover, an increase of choices. These choices are being made constantly, sometimes explicitly, but mostly implicitly: large options are sliced up by decisions of a minor order, and this obscures but does not lessen their significance.

Among the elements in our contemporary civilisation which stand out because of their novelty in comparison with past epochs one must definitely remember the vast field which goes by the name of “industrial design,” which is also connected with the field of graphics (in its various incarnations of advertising graphics, traffic signals, lettering, etc.). Actually the advent of an industrialised society such as our own has brought with it the presence of an “industrial aesthetics,” of a will and an instinctive need to “aestheticise,” to make the “natural” world more pleasant and acceptable since today it is almost turned upside down and subverted by the products of a technological civilisation.