Change through design
Victor Papanek
Design for the Real World
Human Ecology and Social Change
Paladin, 1974
In 1986, when I enrolled in the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts as a Visual Communication major, industrial design had just been introduced as a new field of study. I decided to take it, along with a few other people, and, if I remember correctly, there were 6 of us in the batch. Before industrial design, advertising was the only other field offered under Visual Communication.
Originally belonging to my aunt who specializes in public education, Victor Papanek’s (1927-1999) book “Design for the Real World” was the first industrial design book that I got long before I enrolled in UP, and it is also the only industrial design book that I kept long after. Somehow, the book must have influenced my decision to ’shift’ to industrial design rather than stay in the ‘default’ advertising course:
“There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly, only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second.” - from the Preface
Papanek’s case against design was so powerful, his language direct and unflinching in its accusations and criticisms, and I found these to be liberating especially within the conformist society that I was brought up in. Even within the university, known for its liberal climate, “Design for the Real World” (unfortunately) served as the only reasoned and informed criticism of the field of study that I was to become engaged in.
Only one other person shared my interest in this book, the late Prof. Honrado Fernandez, who - before the restrictions of intellectual property within schools - arranged to have the book photocopied and bound to share with all my classmates. Surely, even Papanek would have approved, himself an early advocate of “open source”:
“This book is written with the viewpoint that there is something basically wrong with the whole concept of patents and copyrights … I feel that ideas are plentiful and cheap, and it is wrong to make money from the needs of others. I have been very lucky in persuading many of my students to accept this view.” - from the Preface
Here, Papanek describes the case of a do-it-yourself project (a coffee table called Transite) he designed and had photos and drawings published in Sunset magazine in 1953. Surely enough, the project was “ripped off” by a southern California furniture company, Modern Color, Inc. That same year, the company sold 8,000 of those tables. Two decades later, Modern Color, Inc. had long gone bankrupt and Sunset magazine reprinted the project in a book. So, with the furniture company gone, people were still building the table for themselves.
Papanek, like other visionaries of his time, had an acuity for the danger and corruption that hounds society, and likewise the sharpness of language and thought to dissect and prescribe. Just as a rarity of our present time, is the reasoned idealism of people like Papanek, who believe that the other possible world - more benevolent and more sustainable - is achievable through positive action.
I am reading “Design for the Real World” again - along with a few other good books that Trevor and I managed to find in the “booksale”, the second hand book shops. I will be logging interesting things that I encounter in my reading and what I think of them. While I am doing this out of a renewed interest in the visions of people in the 60s and earlier, perhaps this is also something I need to do more out of the loneliness of the present time when there are fewer and fewer people to engage in real dialogues.
Papanek was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1927. He attended public school in England and emigrated to the U.S. where he studied design and architecture. Papanek worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949. He earned his Bachelor’s degree at Cooper Union in New York (1950) and did graduate studies in design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.A. 1955).
Papanek was interested in humankind as such and pursued an interest in anthropology, living and working for several years with Navajos, Inuit, and Balinese. Indeed, Papanek felt that when design is simply technical or merely style-oriented, it loses touch with what is truly needed by people. - From Wikipedia
The book at Amazon.com.