Victor Papanek

Victor Joseph Papanek (22 November 1923 – 10 January 1998) was an Austrian-American designer and educator who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. He disapproved of manufactured products that were unsafe, showy, maladapted, or essentially useless. His products, writings, and lectures were collectively considered an example and inspired many designers. Papanek was a philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to social and ecological considerations. He wrote that "design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself)."Papanek has taught at universities and art colleges throughout his life and has won many important design awards. He has done a lot of design work for UNESCO, the World Health Organization (WHO) and many third world countries, which can be called "world citizens". Papanek is diligent in writing, and his most important works include "Designing for the Real World", "Designing for People's Scales", and "Green Law". Among them, "Design for the Real World" has the greatest impact, and the book has been translated into more than 24 languages.

Victor Joseph Papanek
Born(1923-11-22)22 November 1923[1]
Vienna, Austria
Died10 January 1998(1998-01-10) (aged 74)
Lawrence, Kansas U.S.
Alma materCooper Union;
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OccupationJ.L. Constant Professor of Architecture and Design
Known forDesign

Early life

Papanek was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923.[2][3][4] He attended public school in England and immigrated to the US in 1930s, where he studied design and architecture.[5][6] Papanek studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in Arizona in the 1940.[5] 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.

Papanek believes that if the design is only based on art, craft and style, people's real needs will be excluded. In his view, taking into account the aesthetic value or feel of a product is just a subset of the designer's responsibilities. Since then, he has designed many products for UNESCO and the world health organization. His interest in design is all-encompassing, often considering its consequences for people and the environment. He also believed that many American designs had some drawbacks, including many safety risks and unreasonable factors.

Career

"One of my first jobs after leaving school was to design a table radio," Papanek wrote in Design for the Real World. "This was shroud design: the design of external covering of the mechanical and electrical guts. It was my first, and I hope my last, encounter with appearance design, styling, or design ‘cosmetics’." And further, he opined: "Only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics."

In the same book, Papanek wrote: "Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer."

Victor Papanek taught at the Ontario College of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, Purdue University, the California Institute of the Arts (where he was dean), head of the Department of Product Design in the School of Design at North Carolina State College[7] and other places in North America. He headed the design department in the Kansas City Art Institute from 1976 to 1981. In 1981, he became the J.L. Constant Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas. He also worked, taught, and consulted in Sweden, England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Finland and Australia.

Papanek created product designs for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Volvo of Sweden contracted him to design a taxi for the disabled.

With his interest in all aspects of design and how they affected people and the environment, Papanek felt that much of what was manufactured in the U.S. was inconvenient, often frivolous and even unsafe.

He worked with a design team that prototyped an educational television set that could be utilized in the developing countries of Africa and produced in Japan for $9.00 per set (cost in 1970 dollars). His designed products also included a remarkable transistor radio, made from ordinary metal food cans and powered by a burning candle, that was designed to actually be produced cheaply in developing countries. His design skills also took him into projects like an innovative method for dispersing seeds and fertilizer for reforestation in difficult-to-access land, as well as working with a design team on a human-powered vehicle capable of conveying a half-ton load, and another team to design a very early three-wheeled, wide-tired all-terrain vehicle.

As Papanek traveled around the world, he gave lectures about his ideas for ecologically sound design and designs to serve the poor, the disabled, the elderly and other minority segments of society. He wrote or co-wrote eight books. How could the designer, who must (like others) make a living actually serve ‘real needs’ of human beings? “I have tried to demonstrate that by freely giving 10 percent of his time, talents, and skills the designer can help.” In other words, a willingness to volunteer.[8]

Papanek received numerous awards, including a Distinguished Designer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. The following year he received the IKEA Foundation International Award.

He died in Lawrence, Kansas, aged 74.

Important work

 
"Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change"(1971)The most important book by American design theorist Victor Papanek. In this controversial book at the time, Papanek put forward his new view on the purpose of design, that is, design should serve the people; design should not only serve healthy people but also must consider serving the disabled. The problem of the use of the earth ’s limited resources should be seriously considered, and the design should serve the protection of the limited resources of the planet we live on.

Victor Papanek had a direct impact on the trend of green design. He first proposed the concept of design ethics, that is, what are we designing for? In the tumultuous wave of the "pop" design movement, some people began to seriously raise the issue of "design purpose" from the perspective of design theory. This is an essential starting point for modern design ethics and modern design purpose theory. It is precisely because of this starting point that more in-depth development of design theory has emerged in the future.

In Victor's view, even a classic design may become continuously improved due to new materials, new technologies, new processes, and new concepts produced in the new era. However, it is precisely this design idea that is too precise and meticulous. The design value it contains is too grand. The design must display higher values in addition to aesthetics and function, that is: design is a continuous evolution of human beings to the self-world. This view is regarded by the highly consumerist business world as an "unconventional" utopian fantasy. This has created a weird phenomenon. Designers think they can change the world. Victor also thinks that design can change the world. But the world has not been completely changed. The reason is that designers are trying to change the world on a wrong path, and the real world is ignored by everyone. There may be many reasons for the above situation. The original responsibility may be from the defects of design education: The disadvantage of design school seems to be that the professional skills are taught too much, thus neglecting those trends that are closely related to design, such as society and environment. , Economy and changing pop culture. It is the technicalism that has led designers to gradually become professional technicians of the type known as "artists" by exterior decorators and the public. And, even for skills, today's design schools are also on a conservative and moderate route. Bauhaus, composition and Swiss internationalism. Even students are required to work on hand-made, posters, prints, screen printing, etc., completely forgetting that after 2000 is a new era of touch screen and online data processing. This is the era of CSS, HTML5, and dynamic interactive programs. Learning to use compasses and hammers is meaningless to designers of this era. Victor said: “⋯⋯ Learning must be a fanatical experience ⋯⋯ Because learning is change. Education is a program in which the environment changes the learner and the learner changes the environment.” This is called completeness. Integrated design means that the designer should not excessively pursue the depth of design skills, but should focus on the breadth of design connotation (and design responsibility). After all, the design work is to communicate with people and connect with each other and the current society. Dependent. Nowadays, many of the issues about design responsibility that Victor explained in the 70 ′s have been solved in the new millennium. He attributed the public policies and resources that many designers cannot reach to the radical attitude of design responsibility. It cannot be resolved for a long time. Although many problems in the old world have been solved, new problems are still emerging. Every generation of designers is facing new problems of each generation. New problems of each generation of designers still need to be prompted by radical views to improve. In this sense, Victor ’s attitude still has reference value, even in the academic world. Said that he described an "unreal" real world.


Bibliography

Books authored by Papanek
  • Papanek, Victor (1971). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, New York, Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-47036-2.
  • Papanek, Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1973). Nomadic Furniture: How to Build and Where to Buy Lightweight Furniture That Folds, Collapses, Stacks, Knocks-Down, Inflates or Can be Thrown Away and Re-Cycled, New York, Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-70228-X.
  • Papanek, Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1974). Nomadic Furniture 2, New York, Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-70638-2.
  • Papanek, Victor & Hennessey, Jim (1977). How Things Don't Work, New York, Pantheon Books. ISBN 0-394-49251-X.
  • Papanek, Victor (1983). Design for Human Scale, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-27616-8.
  • Papanek, Victor (1995). The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World, New York, Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-27846-6.


Book about Papanek
  • Gowan, Al (2015). Victor Papanek: Path of a Design Prophet, Merrimack Media, Cambridge Massachusetts, ISBN 978-1-939166-72-2
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References
  1. "Viktor Papanek". en.isabart.org. Retrieved 2020-07-03.
  2. "Victor Papanek - Announcements". www.e-flux.com. September 24, 2018. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
  3. "Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design Opens at Vitra Design Museum". 24700. CalArts. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
  4. "Victor J. Papanek im Vitra Design Museum Weil am Rhein". www.architekturzeitung.com (in German). Archived from the original on December 6, 2018. Retrieved December 6, 2018.
  5. Rawsthorn, Alice (2011-05-15). "Victor Papanek: An Early Champion of Good Sense". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
  6. "Victor Papanek". Industrial Designers Society of America - IDSA. 2010-01-16. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
  7. "Product Design Department Head Victor Papanek and seven students who designed fully assembled Mini-Camp - 0003526". NCSU Libraries' Rare and Unique Digital Collections, D. H. Hill Library, North Carolina State College. 1964. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
  8. Papanek, Victor (1972). Design for the real world; human ecology and social change. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-394-47036-8. OCLC 238293.
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