Industrialist Walter Paepcke was the principal force behind the establishment in Aspen of the International Design Conference, as well as the Music Festival, and Institute of Humanistic Studies.

The first Design Conference took place in the summer of 1951 as a forum for discussing the role of design in industry, with each of the first three conferences called "Design as a Function of Management." Participants included Josef Albers, Bucky Fuller and Max Bill.

By its first decade, the conference had developed into an annual exploration of every aspect of design in the broadest sense.

Designers of every professional discipline participate, as do writers, business people, scientists, artists and educators.

Participants have included designers like Charles Eames, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, Lou Kahn, Walter Dorwin Teague, George Nelson, Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, Richard Meier, Issey Miyake, Norman Foster, Bran Ferren, Ettore Sotsass, Milton Glaser and Peter Eisman; and businessmen like Stanley Marcus, Frank Stanton and Alfred Knopf.

IDCA's breadth is underscored by the continued participation of people who are, in the conventional sense, not designers at all—Ben Shahn, Robert Rauschenberg, David Byrne, Andy Goldsworthy, Jules Feiffer, Robert Lowell, James Earl Jones, John Cage, Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem, Gail Sheehy, Tom Peters, Brendan Gill, Dwight MacDonald, Susan Sontag, Cornell Capa, Duane Michals, Stephen Jay Gould, Philip Morrison, Murray Gell-Mann, Rene Dubos, Jonas Salk, Jacob Bronowski, Stewart Udall, Jim Fowler, Frank Stanton, Steven Jobs, Tom Sherak, Bill Bernbach, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders, Jerome Bruner, Mary Catherine Bateson, Marion Wright Edelman—and the list goes on.