Victor Papanek And His Philosophy of Socially Responsible Design And Why We Need To Make Room For It In The Current World Order

“Design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself).”

— Victor Papanek

We have become a paradoxical generation, there has never been a more vast amount of items which are being sold and manufactured, yet we seem to care immensely about the environment and ecologically conscious products. We have the ambition to cure the world, yet we want to look great while doing it. This is a contradiction that many of designers have to deal with - should we design for art and beauty or should we design for practical use? Is there a way to combine the two, in order to please the need for aesthetics through socially and environmentally responsible design? 

Victor Papanek was a pioneer in sustainable design in the 1960s, rejecting consumerism and basing his design on political awareness. Born on November 22nd in 1923 in Vienna, Austria, in the 1930s he emigrated to the United States where he later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his life he became not only one of the most respected (to this day) and innovative designers, but also a brilliant educator at very respected institutions such as Purdue University, California Institute of the Arts and University of Kansas. 

Always fascinated with anthropology, Papanek travelled and worked with Navajo, Inuit, and Balinese in order to grasp the needs of different peoples in order for his design to match with needs instead of remaining style-oriented. He was also an art and design consultant for the World Health Organization, as well as UNESCO on many projects. Having had a unique approach to his work, he quickly realized that focusing on the aesthetic part of any object is often favored yet is actually pointless, as it takes away from the real importance of inventions.

One of his view challenging inventions was the 9 cent radio which was easy to implement and spread in Third World countries, some other ones were bicycle‐wheeled muscle-powered load‐carrying vehicles, TV receivers for $9 and hand‐operated machines to make pipe for new irrigation systems in underdeveloped regions. The list goes on, but even though his ideas were innovative, what is really worth discussing is the philosophy behind the man.

When asked to identify our current society, sustainable or conscious would defiantly not be one of the first words to come up in the description. The truth is that we would need to change our thinking as a whole to truly support Papanek’s idea of sensible and responsible design and usage. Unfortunately, most people today have overdeveloped egos which are more concerned with image than with logic. We can’t argue that beauty is obsolete within our lives, but by flooding ourselves with objects, we are really just contradicting ourselves. 

Just think for a moment how many functioning items could you discard from your collection, which of them are really useful, which of them play a role in your life and which actually please you aesthetically enough to satisfy at least that need. What is being produced currently in a lot of ways I would call white noise, repetitive design, which surprisingly no longer is considered a “knock-off” or fraud if you may, because we’ve grown accustomed to cheaper versions of what luxurious designers release for the lucky few percent of consumers. Things without purpose and without any fresh outlook either. If we’re not really going forward and we refuse to take lessons from the people before us (like Papanek did) then what are we really doing here?

Then there comes up the conversation of “saving” the world. We seem to know so well what countries in need want, but what was actually proven time and time again, among others by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, is that we only think we know what others need. It can be argued that by listening and trying to understand we can help this issue, but we need to be honest with each other whether that’s truly the case. Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation have been developing toilets which can filter out drinkable water, but by the end of the Inside Bill’s Brain episode you actually find out that it’s too expensive to manufacture and implement. So what’s really the point? My feeling is that even though our generation has started to notice the importance of sustainability, we are still very much unconscious of our incorrect mindset as humanity. 

A conversation about Papanek immediately becomes a conversation about society, as he provoked and critiqued it’s approach towards design and the culture of materialism, something which may have been revolutionary a few decades ago, but shouldn’t really still be shocking, and yet in my opinion it truly is. As our generation has become more materialistic and consumption-focused than ever we seem to not have learned anything from Papanek. An environmental conversation is one thing, but the psychological argument for stopping the need to constantly consume new stuff is another. Not to mention it has already spilled into our psyche of treating people as disposable objects which we can switch for a new mode when the time comes. 

So what are the lessons for us here? You can decide for yourself how deep the argument goes. Should we choose to focus on quality rather than quantity? Yes. Should we support conscious design which doesn’t hurt the environment (if not improves) and impresses with practicality? Yes. Would it be best if it satisfied our need for beauty and aesthetics? Of course. Should we change the way we look at everyday objects? Should we try to understand what different parts of the world need? Should we be careful about the way our society is being shaped? Do we need to stop treating this argument as controversial environmentalist “noise” and accept our approach is flawed because the world is in real trouble? YES.

Convinced or not, we cannot argue with the fact that design shapes environments, it is after all what we surround ourselves with. Papanek’s politics are applicable today, as the time has clearly come to become more inclusive and self-conscious, in both tangible and intangible aspects of our societies.