EMILY: DESIGN FOR THE REAL WORLD

Designer and educator Victor Papanek (1927-1999) was 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 spur by 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.


There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them , argued Victor Papanek at the start of his ecological critique of design. In creating products that are often unnecessary, highly packaged, disposable and energy intensive in their production and use, industrial designers have better served the interests of corporate profitability than they have the planet. This is, of course, understandable: the profits pay their salaries. Defined by an economic system that requires unconstrained growth and continually regenerated desire, consumer-led design is no longer about meeting needs, rather it seeks to create and constantly to stimulate human desires.

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.