Victor Papanek

Victor Papanek , also Viktor Papanek , (born November 22, 1923 in Vienna , † January 10, 1998 in Lawrence (Kansas) ) was an Austrian - American designer and design philosopher.

Papanek was a strong advocate of the socially and environmentally sustainable design of products, tools and infrastructural facilities. His book Design for the real world. Instructions for a humane ecology and social change , published for the first time in 1971 and updated in 1984, is one of the most important works in the field of design, hit the nerve of the socially agitated 1970s and 1980s with its culture and consumer criticism and is currently being discussed Sustainability still relevant.

Life

Papanek was born in Vienna between the wars, he went to school in England and emigrated to the USA in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946 and studied design and architecture and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949 . "I would rather be the best Papanek than a third-class Wright." With these words, Wright's student Victor Papanek acknowledged the collaboration with the great architect, who taught Frank Lloyd Wright too much on his person. But despite this rumbling departure, Wright's influence on his younger colleague was to remain strong, as a utopian and designer who dealt with the relationship between modernity and nature and the environment. He graduated from Cooper Union in New York with a bachelor's degree in 1950 and completed his postgraduate degree in design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he received his MA in 1955.

Papanek was interested in humanity as such and also worked as an anthropologist . For several years he lived and worked with the Navajo Indians, the Inuit and the indigenous people of Bali .

Victor Papanek has taught at the Ontario College of Art & Design , the Rhode Island School of Design , Purdue University , the California Institute of the Arts, and several other locations in North America. He directed the design course at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1976 to 1981. In 1981 he became JL Constant Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas . He worked and taught in England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Finland and Australia.

A collection of his work is now in the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris .

Work is underway in Vienna to set up the Victor Papanek Archive and Research Center. After the designer's estate was brought to Vienna, the University of Applied Arts decided to set up a Victor Papanek Foundation. They consider it important there to promote design from the perspective of social responsibility.

Main work

Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World is one of the most widely read design books of all time internationally. The book is based on the awakening of an alternative concept of design against the backdrop of emerging post-Fordism and the New Social Movements. In addition to broad criticism of culture and consumption, Papanek takes up social and ecological principles for a participatory, decentralized and democratized design practice. Increased by the current debate on issues of climate and environmental protection, Papanek's work is becoming increasingly important. Hardly any recommended reading list in the field of social and critical design can currently do without his writings.

First published in Swedish in 1970, it has been translated into over 20 languages. Although the provocative book led, among other things, to the temporary exclusion from the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) - Papanek was later an honorary member - it brought him his international breakthrough. Numerous appointments at institutions such as the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen or the Manchester Polytechnic of Art and Design followed. Papanek was dissatisfied with the German translation, which is now out of print. Shortly before his death in January 1998, a new translation, chartered by Papanek, began, the publication of which was interrupted by the death of the author. The annotated new translation was published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his death, supplemented by a first scientifically proven biography of Victor Papanek.

Teaching

KISS: Keep it simple, stupid

It gets particularly exciting when he in his main work “Design for the real world. Instructions for a humane ecology and social change ”, as well as their own designs, designs by established designers and students are also discussed. When making the selection, he is not concerned with whose design has prevailed or which of the students has made a name for itself. Regardless of this, he is only concerned with whether drafts comply with the “ KISS principle ” (“Keep it Simple, Stupid”) and the guideline “Form follows user” (the form depends on the user) in addition to meeting social requirements .

Lack of "handiness"

Essentially, Papanek advocates a “more manageable relationship” between design and reality. He criticizes the fact that objects are usually too expensive, badly designed and that instead of responding to human needs, they usually respond to market economy interests: "Design must become an innovative, creative and interdisciplinary instrument that meets the real needs of people," writes Papanek. "It has to be more research-oriented, and we must no longer mess up our planet with poorly designed objects and buildings."

Much of what the industry produces in terms of product design doesn't even work. And so we would no longer have intuitive access to many objects. In favor of opulent marketing campaigns, what Heidegger once called "at hand" is disappearing: namely, that things literally go to hand and that one's own existence in the real world is opened up through practical handling.

Design for minorities and the poor

Against this background, it is not surprising that Papanek speaks out in favor of “design for minorities”, design for the special needs of children, the elderly, migrants, the disabled or the poor. As an example, he cites a design by Stephen Lynch who, while studying at Purdue University in Indiana, designed a kind of seat for restless children that could be used in eight unusual ways.

This example makes it clear that Papanek was essentially not concerned with “the beautiful shape”, but with the ecological effect, at least if one understands ecology in the classical sense as “the doctrine of the relationships between living beings and their environment”. This was the first definition of the term "ecology" by the biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel in 1866. In the broader sense, ecology means, in Papanek's sense, that everything is connected with everything. Papanek also traced the connections in his own designs, for example in his famous “tin-can radio” for UNESCO , a tin can with a transistor , operated only with paraffin and a wick (an example of an adapted technology ).

In his own way, Papanek secures the sympathies of his readership when he writes that “sooner or later we will all become members of a group with special needs”, that we all need “clean water and clean air”, and then get out of it to conclude that "if we combine all of these 'special' needs", we would recognize that they shouldn't be considered special, but normal and self-evident.

The design theorist demanded that the design of the future should research the redefinitions of cultural conditions, the social requirements of the context and the resulting human needs, because this is the only way to open up freedom.

reception

With his polemical and popular scientific - often satirical and funny - style Papanek has not only made friends: "There are professions that cause more damage than that of industrial designer, but many are not," is the first sentence of the book. He continues: "It is a sign of our times that grown-ups are sitting down and seriously designing electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-encrusted shoe horns and mink carpets for bathrooms, and then working out complicated strategies on how to make them and sell them to millions of people."

Papanek did not type these lines himself, he dictated them, and you can well imagine how he talks in a rage about designers developing sexy toasters, diapers for budgies or heated footstools.

Papanek had different ideas about what designers should do: come up with things that make everyday life easier for people in developing countries - and that can be produced there under the appropriate conditions. A famous example is the radio can, consisting of an old tin can and a transistor. Instead of batteries or electricity, it is operated with paraffin and a wick. Production cost in 1966: nine cents.

With ideas like this, Papanek also met with criticism, which is often suppressed today. The former lecturer at the Ulm School of Design , Gui Bonsiepe, analyzed Papanek's theses in detail in the article “Bombast aus Pappe” in the magazine form (issue 61/1973, pp. 13-16). Bonsiepe criticized u. a. “The cheap radio for the third world” is “saturated with the ideology of the simple savage, which is fed with the simpeltechnologie specially developed for him in the metropolis.” Bonsiepe pointed out in detail a number of distorting translation errors in the first German edition of “Design for the Real World ”, which appeared in 1972 under the title“ Das Papanek Konzept ”.

Work is currently underway in Vienna to set up the Victor Papanek Archive and Research Center . Angewandte launched the Victor Papanek Foundation on November 9th, 2011 after the designer's estate was brought to Vienna.

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein to March 10, 2019 presented on 29 September 2018, the first major retrospective of the work of the designer with the exhibition "Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design".

Works

• Victor Papanek: Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Pantheon Books, New York 1971, ISBN 0-394-47036-2 .
• Victor Papanek, Jim Hennessey: 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. Pantheon Books, New York 1973, ISBN 0-394-70228-X .
• Victor Papanek, Jim Hennessey: Nomadic Furniture 2. Pantheon Books, New York 1974, ISBN 0-394-70638-2 .
• Victor Papanek, Jim Hennessey: How things don't work. Pantheon Books, New York 1977, ISBN 0-394-49251-X .
• Victor Papanek: Design for Human Scale. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York 1983, ISBN 0-442-27616-8 .
• Victor Papanek: The Green Imperative: Natural Design for the Real World. Thames and Hudson, New York 1995, ISBN 0-500-27846-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Victor Papanek: The designer as a missionary. In: DiePresse.com. June 20, 2009. Retrieved February 12, 2018 . 
2. ↑ thegap.at
3. ↑ Gui Bonsiepe: Bombast made of cardboard. In: form. Edition 61, 1973, p. 13. ( form.de ( Memento from July 31, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ))
4. ↑ F. Pumhösl, T. Geisler, M. Fineder, G. Bast (Eds.): Victor Papanek: Design for the real world. Instructions for a humane ecology and social change. ( archiv.kultur-punkt.ch ( Memento from April 9, 2017 in the Internet Archive ))
5. ↑ dieangewandte.at
6. ↑ papanek.org
7. ↑ thegap.at
8. ^ Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design. Accessed October 2, 2018 (German).