Victor Papanek was a pioneer of social and sustainable design, rooted not in consumerism but in political awareness. The Vitra design museum in Germany dedicates a major retrospective to him.
An exhibition at the Vitra design museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, celebrates the intellectual legacy of Victor Papanek, designer, author and activist who, from the 1960s onwards, was the first to address the major themes of sustainable and social design. Victor Papanek: the politics of design can be visited until 10 March 2019. Papanek's most influential book, Design for the real world, published in 1971, has been translated into 23 languages and remains the most widely read design book in the world. In it, the author calls for inclusion, social justice and sustainability — themes of great relevance today that have become indispensable prerequisites for design practice in the fields of design and architecture. Ideas such as the fight against the useless product were ahead of their time, as was his mission to lay the foundations for sensitive, responsible design in a world lacking in resources and energy.
Austrian by birth, Papanek fled to the United States in 1939 in the face of Nazi persecution. After embarking on a career as an industrial designer, in the 1960s he developed a critique of consumerism that would make him famous the world over. This stance was also reflected in his projects, which he often developed together with his students or collaborators, including televisions and radios for African countries, electric vehicles, the Fingermajig — an object designed to stimulate the sense of touch (1965–1970) — and the 1973 Living cubes series, pieces of furniture that can be assembled by the user and adapted to their needs.
He lectured at universities around the world, inspiring generations of students, and tirelessly promoted a broader social debate on design through mass communication tools such as television. In 1961 he began moderating a television series broadcast across the United States, which contributed greatly to spreading the principles of social design.
In addition to Design for the real world, he also wrote How things do not work (1977) and Design for human scale (1983), which cemented his reputation as a pioneer of alternative design.
To reach a broad general audience, Papanek always used simple, clear language with a healthy dose of humour, with the aim of critiquing blind faith in consumerism and instead spreading the ideas of the generation of 1968 in addressing the practical questions of everyday life. Together with James Hennessey, in the mid-1970s he created Nomadic furniture 1 and 2, the first manuals with diagrams and drawings for building lightweight, low-cost furniture — a do-it-yourself approach with deep political and social significance that positioned itself against the rampant consumerism of those years.
Their vision of home design calls for everything to be lightweight, foldable, inflatable, lowerable and stackable. The manuals offer simple instructions for making beds, chairs, sofas, stools and tables using inexpensive and recycled materials. Ideas that stimulate creativity, allow people to save money, and that managed to propose a practical, mindful approach at a time when environmental awareness had not yet developed to the degree it has today.
Read also: What is nomadic design
Through his work, Papanek was the first to speak of design as a political tool — a concept considered revolutionary at the time, but now generally accepted: design is not simply a matter of giving shape to something, but is an instrument of transformation that must take social and ethical viewpoints into account.
The main themes of his intellectual output, developed above all during the 1970s — beyond the critique of consumerism that underpins all his research — are commitment to social minorities and to the needs of what was then known as the Third World, ecology, sustainability, and creation and production that make minimal use of available resources. Today's debates on topics such as social design and design thinking are fundamentally still grounded in his visionary and innovative ideas.
The exhibition Victor Papanek: the politics of design at the Vitra design museum, near Basel, offers an in-depth look at the life and work of the visionary designer. Particularly noteworthy is the section featuring around twenty carefully selected contemporary projects by designers such as Catherine Sarah Young, Forensic Architecture, Jim Chuchu, Tomás Saraceno, Gabriel Ann Maher, the Brazilian collective Flui Coletivo and Questto I No, which bring his ideas into the twenty-first century by engaging with complex themes such as climate change, gender identity fluidity, consumer behaviour and the economic realities of migration.
The exhibition was realised in collaboration with the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona, the Victor J. Papanek Foundation, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and is funded by the German federal cultural foundation.
The exhibition runs until 10 March 2019 at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. It is open every day from 10am to 6pm and admission costs €11.