Victor Papanek and Ethical Design

The most important figure in the history of ethical design is Victor Papanek (1927-1999), who was a design theorist working in the 1960s. Papanek was born in Austria, but he studied in New York. He was heavily critical of the design profession and argued that designers should follow codes of ethics in their own work.

He was a strong advocate of socially and ecologically responsible design and asked how designers could serve the “real needs” of human beings. His most important published work was Design For The Real World (1971), which emphasizes the social and moral responsibilities of designers. It opens with the statement, ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them’.  This was a very controversial remark. He goes on to say:

Before (in the “good old days”) if a person liked killing people, he had to become a general, purchase a coal mine, or else study nuclear physics. Today industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis.

This is obviously very contentious language and industrial designers were understandably offended by it, viewing it as an attack on their integrity. Papanek was ridiculed by established designers for many years. In fact, Design For The Real World was turned down by 12 publishers before it was eventually published. But it has since been translated into 23 languages, which arguably makes it the most widely read book on design in history. The book did appeal to radical young designers.

Papanek believed that conventional design was governed by marketing strategies and profit ratios and he disapproved of products that were unsafe or essentially useless. He wrote: “Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer.”

According to Papanek, a lot of designers were preoccupied with aesthetics, which he regarded as shallow and superficial. He wrote, “Because in any reasonably conducted home, alarm-clocks seldom travel through the air at speeds approaching five hundred miles per hour, streamlining is out of place.” He was thinking of things like Raymond Loewy’s streamlined pencil sharpener, which looks like a jet engine. This is an inanimate object, but it has an illogical, aerodynamic style to make it sell.

Papanek wrote: “Only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics.” He urged designers to ask themselves: “Am I on the side of social good, or will the object that I design be an addition to the catalogue of unnecessary fetish objects?”  By contrast, he urged designers to develop solutions to the problems of people living in the third world, as well as vulnerable groups like children, the disabled and the elderly – people who were often forgotten by the design profession. He was determined to lead by example. As a designer, he worked for the United Nations and Unesco and designed a cheap television set for use in Africa that cost less than $10 (1969). This could be produced within the limits of local possibilities and was distributed by Unesco. He hoped it would revolutionize education in the third world.