05 DESIGN STRUGGLES

DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD

Contesting the Origins of the Social in Design

Alison J. Clarke

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them. … Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes. rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. … Today industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed.
—Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World [^1]

In 1971, an obscure book focusing on design’s social usefulness to humankind, penned by a previously unknown Austrian-American author, was translated from Swedish to English and published as Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Quickly emerging as a bestselling author, Victor Papanek, the design critic behind the 300-page, breathlessly delivered, hyperbolic treatise on the failings of the contemporary design profession, was invited to appear on a prime-time U.S. television chat show. Once installed in the broadcasting studio, cameras rolling, the maverick designer pulled out a prototype of one of his recent creations to demonstrate what socially responsible design might engender. Wielding a bright-blue concertinaed bedpan, designed to be pumped up with warm air beneath the hospital patient, the social designer elaborated on how his observations of the inhumanity of the conventional stainless steel contraption, during a recent visit to a clinic, had inspired its redesign:

I began to realize there was something inherently wrong with bedpans; because they are noisy, they clutter, they’re difficult to move around, disgusting to wash out and clean – and they are unbelievably chilly, and they’re expensive; they need a small room in each hospital floor just to be stored, and they cause back injuries. ¹

The flimsy inflatable plastic bedpan, one of a limited number of designs prototyped by Papanek, failed to reach production despite its showcasing on prime-time American TV. And yet, that was never really the intention behind his designs. Rather, the unlikely (and impractical) medical appliance formed part of a repertoire of product designs, from portable play environments for disabled children to dung-powered tin can radios for nonliterate communities, devised to contest the assumptions of Western corporate capitalism: agitprop interventions in a social design revolution whose legacy endures today.

The Origins of the Social in Design

Victor Papanek is commonly considered the pioneer of social design, and several decades on Design for the Real World (which has never fallen out of print) remains one of the most widely read critiques of design practice to this day. As social design, humanitarian design, design anthropology, transition design, and movements in decolonizing design take on increasing contemporary prescience, the work of iconic figures such as Papanek, still regularly referred to for its challenging of Western, corporate, patriarchal design paradigms, demands further critical scrutiny. Papanek himself emphasized to his students and reading public that: “As socially and morally involved designers, we must address ourselves to the needs of a world with its back to the wall while the hands on the clock point perpetually to one minute before twelve.”² Design for the Real World, although peppered with eccentric, hyperbolic statements and anachronistic observations (such as the prediction that video gaming will never “catch on”), remains, nearly half a century later, unerringly foresighted in its identification of design culture as an undertheorized mechanism of environmental and social destruction and a key terrain of political action.

Much present design discourse upholds a polarized model of design hatched in the broadly neo-Marxist 1970s paradigm that buoyed Papanek’s vitriolic critique: rehearsing a rhetoric that pits a morally and ethically virtuous design practice (sustainable, socially embedded, community-based, codesigned, etc.) against a model of designers as the handmaidens of a profit-driven corporate culture. Within this paradigm, figures such as Papanek emerge as the romanticized pioneers of a socially inculcated vision of design; an idyll lost to the globalized hegemony of twenty-first-century neoliberalism in which designers act merely as mediators of large-scale gentrification, the digital and analogue colonizers of previously authentic local settings, objects, practices, and social relations. Yet, this precariously ahistorical rendering of designers as “good” or “bad” downplays the complexity of design’s role within the political and moral economies that drive social change. In tracing and deconstructing the origins of social design through an examination of Papanek’s biography, design, and design criticism, this essay argues for the vital role of historical analysis, and historiographic understanding, in complexifying the past and future potentialities of design as a culture and practice.

Formations

A young Jewish refugee who launched his own design practice, Design Clinic, in New York shortly after World War II, Papanek was soon confronted by what he described as the “narrow market dialectics” that dictated the ethics of industrial design.³ After escaping the horrors of Nazi Vienna and meeting with the Futurama dreamscape of the New York World’s Fair in 1939, design at first proffered an overwhelming vision of optimistic progressivism and democracy. Paradoxically, Papanek soon discovered that its principal role lay in fuelling the all-consuming, undiscerning cacophony of American commercial culture, and with it, some of the more destructive aspects of humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire for stuff. And so began his search, as an outsider, for an alternative model of design that might heal society’s ills, remedy social inequality, and empower its users: “The designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the marketplace. But,” he reflected on considering his earliest forays into low-cost furnishing design in the 1940s,

this is still a narrow and parochial view. The designer’s responsibility must go far beyond these considerations. His social and moral judgment must be brought into play long before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment as to whether the products he is asked to design or redesign merit his attention at all. In other words, will his design be on the side of the social good or not?⁴

What began as a critique of the frivolities of a design culture ramped up to meet the demands of unbridled postwar consumer culture had, by the 1960s, culminated in a full-blown global campaign against a profession that wreaked irreversible ecological damage, endorsed neocolonial development, and perpetuated social inequality: with Design for the Real World its erstwhile manifesto.

Translated into over twenty languages, and taken up by a generation of designers and design students desperately seeking an alternative politics of design, Papanek’s work took on a life of its own – its clarion call weaponized in the dismantling of the beaux-arts hierarchies and modernist teachings of European design schools, and the opening out of design beyond the reductionist dualities of Western and non-Western.

As a designer and critic of international renown, Papanek consciously pitted himself against the ideologies of his modernist émigré forebears, who had viewed mass-produced, standardized industrial design through the lens of Western rationalism. Describing the Bauhaus style, in one of his earliest pieces of design criticism, as a “fascist negation of living that is now proven a lie,” he proposed in its place a humane, indigenized design approach imbued with anthropological sensitivity to the local, the vernacular, and an understanding of the broader cultural nuances of design’s power in undermining or solidifying social inclusion.⁵ In challenging design’s assumed role as the originator of frivolous fripperies in an age of overabundance, his ideas pivoted on the overarching theory that design was the key agent of social change, not merely a tool for stylization, aestheticization, or a driver for increased consumption. As an integral part of the social design agenda, he advocated non-Western tropes of design – from the material cultures of the Inuit to the Suku Bali – as holistic models of design whereby things are understood as inseparable from the social relations, customs, rituals, and histories in which they are embedded. The politics of design, in other words, relied on understanding the practice as a cultural rather than rational, problem-solving phenomenon.

Contexts

Design for the Real World, and the social remit it engendered, did not, of course, operate in a vacuum. In Europe, the radical Italian design group, Superstudio, which famously advocated “life without objects” as part of a self-consciously disaffected stance towards late capitalism, exercised a similar contemporary fascination with the vernacular and indigenous object.⁶ “Objects and tools represent a particular field of investigation; they lend themselves much better to being used as keys in the interpretation of complex relationships: objects are the direct witnesses of the creative drive,” recounted Superstudio designer Alessandro Poli, in describing the group’s “Extra-Urban Material Culture” initiative of 1973: a project aimed at collecting, recording, and analyzing handmade peasant tools prior to their disappearance through technological advance.⁷ Yet, unlike the Italian design radicals whose work was famously showcased in the 1972 MoMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, with a number of their catalogue contributions renouncing the practice of architecture and design altogether in faux flourishes of avant-gardist gestures,⁸ Papanek stood by an unerringly (and often unfashionably) pragmatic stance that earned him praise and criticism in equal measure. “In an environment that is screwed up visually, physically, and chemically, the best and simplest thing that architects, industrial designers, planners, etc., could do for humanity would be to stop working entirely,” he wrote several years before Superstudio’s high-profile rejection of architectural and design practice.⁹

Design for the Real World, which Papanek dedicated to his students “for what they have taught me,” was deliberately conceived as an antidote to inaction and what Papanek would later describe as the “romantic bourgeois Marxism” that had spread like an epidemic through design schools.¹⁰ “In all pollution designers are implicated at least partially,” he wrote towards the end of its preface, “but in this book I take a more affirmative view: it seems to me that we can go beyond not working at all, and work positively. Design can and must become a way in which young people can participate in changing society.”¹¹ Papanek harnessed the ideals of a new generation of designers, advocating the cross-fertilization of ideas through a hands-on pedagogic approach. Yet he was adept at borrowing from, as much as facilitating, his students – harnessing the social ambitions of student designers from a diversity of institutions, regions, and geopolitical contexts, ranging from the U.S. and Scandinavia through to Indonesia. Notably the curricula he devised included women as a specific social group excluded from mainstream design culture, with female students initiating projects such as contraceptive pill packaging for illiterate women. Despite these gestures, attuned to a newly feminist cohort, Papanek actively sought and maintained a patriarchal profile equivalent to the “heroic” male corporate designers he condemned in public. The inclusion of a spoof design job, dubbed the “Volita Project” – which involved the commissioning of a life-size animated plastic woman (in various finishes from snake-skin to leather) – in the first edition of Design for the Real World, was condemned by women readers and, much to his bemusement, removed by the publisher from future editions.¹²

Yet publication of the groundbreaking volume perfectly preempted, or coincided with, a maelstrom of interconnected events, interventions, and political crises that led to the foregrounding of environmentalism, postindustrial futures, postcolonial thinking, and degrowth economics: all of which threw into relief the politics of industrial design and its intertwined relation with Western capitalist, expansionist, and development politics.

In 1972, in Only One Earth (an unofficial report commissioned by the Secretary-General of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, as a precursor to the 1972 Stockholm Congress), British economist Barbara Ward and French-born American environmentalist René Dubois, identified the postwar consumer revolution – described as “a twenty-five-year boom … among the industrialized nations after 1945” – as the key environmental hazard of the twentieth century, “gobbling up resources and increasing requirements of materials and energy at an unprecedented rate.”¹³ This publication was one of many that emerged from a newly forming canon of environmental critique. But its specific mention of consumerism, and its conduit advertising, helped formalize Western consumer culture as a central tenet of environmental discourse. This critique highlighted the vicissitudes of an industrial development agenda, which simultaneously promoted manufacturing and consumer economies whilst bemoaning their deleterious impact on environmental and social structures.

This critique was further buoyed by the countercultural rhetoric and alternative economic theories of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, Wolfgang Haug’s neo-Marxist Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1971), identified design as a key driver of capitalism, accusing it of complicity in generating an insatiable desire for commodities which in turn resulted in the dissolution of authentic social relations. The publication of Haug’s book coincided with that of Design for the Real World, and though they addressed very different audiences, they both pointed to design as a central object for critical examination in sketching out alternative postindustrial economies and social life.

Most significantly, the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, served as a springboard from which emerged a broader discourse around design for development, one that sought to remedy the political dilemma over the local-global dichotomies of industrialization and its environmental consequences. Papanek had striven to address this same dilemma since the early 1960s, in his codesigns for so-called developing countries and communities, which included prototypes for an African TV set and even a low-cost, self-assembly revolver (for vermin control) for poor rural communities in the U.S. More specifically, the 1972 Stockholm conference laid the groundwork for future initiatives that purported to address the unchecked force of consumer desire: namely the collaboration of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the signing of the Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development in 1979. Both organizations were represented at the 1972 conference, and their collaboration five years later, in which Papanek played a critical role, would mark a turning point in the formalization of the design profession’s role in development policy, impacting on small-scale manufacture and craft economies in countries ranging from India to Mexico. Despite his involvement in these policy schemes, he was also an avid critic – engaging early on in the 1970s debate around decolonizing design, challenging top-down solutions to local conditions, and the use of copyright and patents.¹⁴

Trajectories

Design for the Real World quickly emerged as a classic of alternative culture. On the radical student bookshelf it was positioned between tomes such as Rachel Carson’s warning of imminent ecological disaster, Silent Spring (1962), and Teresa Hayter’s critique of the mechanisms of neocolonialism, Aid as Imperialism (1971). Papanek’s iconoclastic designs, provocative journalism, and unique pedagogic projects rattled a complacent corporate design establishment and the design avant-garde alike. His “real world” paradigm posited a model of design that served humanity – culturally and practically addressing the needs of the socially excluded rather than oiling the lucrative wheels of consumer corporations or stoking the egotism of individual designers. “Design and production talent have been wasted,” bemoaned Papanek in a typically acerbic think-piece in the design press, “on the concocting of such inane trivia as mink-covered toilet seats, electronic fingernail polish dryers, and baroque fly-swatters.”

Yet despite being adopted as part of the burgeoning politics of environmentalism, underpinned by the groundswell of countercultural activity, much of Papanek’s pioneering social design derived directly from the funding and policies of Cold War U.S. military design experimentation. His celebrated “Big Character” diagram, devised in a student workshop of 1968 that explored the role of design in forging environmental politics and social inclusivity, is a case in point. Although it shared the countercultural graphic aesthetics seen, for example, in Marshall Henrichs radical design for the poster box set Blueprint for Counter Education (1970), Papanek’s diagram – presented as a fold-out in Design for the Real World – sketched a model of design transdisciplinarity that had its origins in a bionics laboratory bankrolled in part by the U.S. military during Papanek’s tenure at Purdue University, Indiana, in the mid-1960s. During this same period, immediately prior to the publication of his groundbreaking social design treatise, he combined, seemingly without hesitation, his international lecturing as a design activist addressing students who opposed the Vietnam War and the complicity of U.S. chemical corporations, with stints as a design consultant for both Dow Chemicals and the U.S. military. The humanitarian design he promoted in the pages of Design for the Real World, such as the “TV for Africa,” was born of the politics of U.S. intervention in the “Third World,” reimagined and repackaged as a grassroots form of empowerment and social inclusion.¹⁵

Despite the canonization of Design for the Real World as an exemplar of social design thinking, even during the time of its first release the book and its message were met with some skepticism outside design circles. While it received acclaim in Europe, U.S. journalists were decidedly less enthralled by the designer’s airy intellectualizing. “We’re deep in the heart of Survivalsville,” began a profile article in the L.A. Times, “the consumer-advocate country where the world’s clock is always at 10 minutes to 12 and time is running out.”¹⁶ Refusing to take Papanek’s earnestness too seriously, the piece featured the “elegant, crisp man with the Austrian accent – looking like a fashion designer in his tailored knit shirt-suit” posing in an ergonomic recliner of his own design, one photo showing him sitting upright, the other slightly less dignified, fully reclined with feet pointing to the ceiling. The L.A. Times journalist cast aside the reverence Papanek was accustomed to, adopting instead a playful mockery toward the designer’s unerring social conviction and borderline pretentiousness:

You find him seated in his gray, Madison Avenuecome-to-college office surrounded by Marimekko bags (“In Finland it’s just a workers” hangout. But here they think it’s chic’), and black-and-white photos of Robert Kennedy and children of the Third World ghettos.¹⁷

Under the title “Down with Designers?,” America’s premier mainstream journal, Time, published a review of Papanek’s anti-consumer polemic. The review focused on the idealistic naivety of the author’s rhetoric, which, the reporter explained, “is so extreme at times that he calls corporation executives ‘criminals.’”¹⁸ Some critics, the review concluded, might indeed argue that it was Papanek himself, with his utopian vision of design, who had “lost contact with the real world.”¹⁹

One of Papanek’s iconic designs from this period, the “Tin Can Radio” – a DIY-assembly, dung-powered audio player made for distribution in rural Indonesian communities – epitomized a shift in design thinking, and has regularly been included in social design exhibitions as an early example of innovation within the genre. But even in the early 1970s, such artifacts and inventions were identified by some figures within design, including the Ulm School of Design alumnus Gui Bonsiepe, as a thinly disguised form of neocolonialism. In a full-blown critique published in the Italian design journal Casabella, Bonsiepe accused Papanek outright of collusion with the U.S. military, which, he argued, would appropriate the device as a cheap means of disseminating pro-American propaganda in largely nonliterate countries.²⁰

Contradictions of the “Real World” Manifesto

The innate contradictions of Papanek’s “real world” manifesto were born from the merger of Second World War experimentation with 1960s countercultural tropes – a phenomenon that historians, curators, and critical filmmakers over the last two decades have identified as underpinning the broader phenomenon of the so-called “Californian Ideology”: the neoliberal, techno-social utopianism enshrined in the Silicon Valley concept of innovation.²¹ As a self-proclaimed socially responsible designer, Papanek’s pedagogic style centered on an expanded idea of design as part-anthropological observation, parthumanitarian intervention. Design, according to Papanek, was far removed from the practice of merely stylizing and devising individual products and, as such, lent itself to a politically liberal agenda. Yet this seemingly progressive attack on the conservative, corporatized profession of industrial design actually relied on what U.S. historian Orit Halpern has described as a “growing ecological understanding that emerged from a history of experiments which transformed life itself during and after the Second World War.”²² It was this Cold War context, rather than the burgeoning countercultural ecological movement that led to Papanek, in Halpern’s words, “signpost[ing] this new-found epistemology of design by noting the future at stake in the mundane everyday decisions of industrial design [as] nothing short of survival of the species.”²³

Set against the backdrop of rising disquiet over U.S. consumer culture’s role in promulgating a postwar culture of obsolescence, as popularized by social commentator Vance Packard in The Waste Makers (1960), Papanek’s condemnation of mainstream designers as creators of a “whole new species of permanent garbage” crucially placed design practice at the center rather than periphery of social change. Much of his “real world” design manifesto, including his famed “Copenhagen Map” plotting the politics of design, arose directly from the ideologies and experiments funded by the U.S. government and military in the 1960s. Yet that same manifesto undeniably came to exert an agency of its own in the rewriting of the potentialities of a social agenda for design’s future; a trajectory that continues to be fraught with political ambiguities, as the “social” increasingly comes to stand in for “real world” politics in contemporary design.

Footnotes

1. Satesh Kumar, filmed interview with Victor Papanek, Schumacher College, 1991 (Victor Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna). ↩

2. Papanek, Design for the Real World, xxvi. ↩

3. Papanek, 44, 45. ↩

4. Papanek, 46. ↩

5. Victor Papanek, “What is Contemporary?,” La Mer 2 (August 1950), 25. ↩

6. See Peter Lang and William Menking, eds., Superstudio: Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira, 2003). ↩

7. Alessandro Poli, cited in Lang and Menking, Superstudio, 226. See Alison J. Clarke, “The Indigenous and the Autochthon,” in Global Tools: When Education Coincides with Life, 1973–1975, ed. Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini (Istanbul: Salt, 2019). ↩

8. See Ross Elfine, “Superstudio and the ‘Refusal to Work,’” Design and Culture 8, no. 1 (2016), 55–77. Elfine suggests that the radical Italians transformed the reality of mass-unemployment among 1970s Italian architects and planners into an avantgardist politicized stance of the “refusal to work” in a postindustrial, late-capitalist economy. ↩

9. Papanek, Design for the Real World, xxvi. ↩

10. See Chapter 9, “Pragmatism before Politics: Social Design Turns Nomadic,” in this volume. ↩

11. “Pragmatism before Politics.” ↩

12. See Alison J. Clarke, “Design and the New Environment: From Styrofoam Domes to the Volita Project,” in Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming 2021). ↩

13. Barbara Ward and René Dubois, Only One World: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972). ↩

14. See Alison J. Clarke, “Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design,” Journal of Design History 29, no. 1 (2016), 43–57. ↩

15. See Alison J. Clarke, “Bionics and Creative Problem-Solving: The Making of a Post-War Designer,” in Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World. ↩

16. Alan Cartnal, “Dean’s Aim to Clean Up L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1972. ↩

17. Cartnal, “Dean’s Aim to Clean Up L.A.” ↩

18. Unknown author, “Down with Designers?,” Time, February 21, 1972, 47. ↩

19. “Down with Designers?” ↩

20. Gui Bonsiepe, “Design e sottosviluppo,” Casabella 385 (January 1974), 42–45. ↩

21. This trajectory from Second World War experimentation in cybernetic science, military, and information technologies, and its merger with the 1960s counterculture movement was established in the 1990s with essays such as Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s widely cited “The California Ideology” (Science as Culture 6, no. 1 [January 1996], 44–72) and is now an established historical tenet of the period. Where Barbrook and Cameron’s essay traced the politics of the “long-predicted convergence of the media, computing, and telecommunications into hypermedia” back to a loose network driven by the notion of romantic individualism on the West Coast of the United States, director Adam Curtis’s critical film series of 2011, All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, further traces the “cult” of the belief in humanity’s liberation through computers back through early colonializing theories of racial divide, and the brand of libertarianism embraced by Silicon Valley, inspired by Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ideas. U.S. historians, including Felicity D. Scott, Fred Turner, and Orit Halpern, have written extensively on the intertwining of counterculture and Cold War design and technology, and the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2016) curated by Andrew Blauvelt, traced the countercultural fascination with technologies born of World War II experimentation, from plastics through to computing technologies. ↩

22. Orit Halpern, “The Planetary Test,” in Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design, ed. Mateo Kries, Amelie Klein, and Alison J. Clarke (Rhein am Weil: Vitra Design Museum, 2018), 288–99, 290 cited here. ↩

23. Halpern, “The Planetary Test,” 290. ↩