Alison J. Clarke: I would say that I’m first and foremost a design historian. I did my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in design history, and my PhD is in social anthropology. As undergraduate design history students we read Victor Papanek’s book (Design for the Real World (1971)), but we were a new generation that was critical of this idealism of the 1970s. We thought it was hippie nonsense because somehow we’d been let down by a generation of social utopianism and Papanek somehow exemplified this kind of social naivety. We were living in the brash 80s where design was all about superstar designers like Philippe Starck. Design was important in the 1980s. It had become a political tool of the right, for example, Margaret Thatcher, and was used both in advertising, propaganda and policy. On the other hand, later reading it, the book does preempt what was going to happen in the 1980s. It’s this lost dream that design will have a social purpose. Unfortunately, the kind of horror stories that Papanek describes about commercialism and designers wasting their time creating new, sexy commodities is what happened in the 1980s. I was captivated by what was a kind of anti-book back then. However, Papanek was somehow a cliché by that point and social design was seen as a failed project. 

Later I was put in the position of looking after the archive of someone that I’d been quite cynical about earlier. But I quickly became fascinated with him because he was interested in anthropology and material culture. What I appreciated about Papanek’s approach was that it wasn’t about design and style. It was about people and things.

I felt like this was the one book that brought design students and practitioners together across generations. I find students still reading it and saying that it is radical. I think they are fascinated that there was this era in which people did have radical ideas about what design could do that weren’t modernist visions. They were anti-modernist visions with people at the forefront.

AJC: I think there are two ways of looking at this. Firstly, it is important to look at Papanek as a conduit for student activist work during the late 60s and early 70s. A lot of ideas come from his students. When I said I was reluctant to be in control of Papanek’s archive, that’s because the idea of advocating for a white male design theorist or designer was the absolute antithesis of any ambition I ever had as an undergraduate or postgraduate. Our generation was all about getting away from the great white men. If we do not look at Papanek just as an individual man and consider the book Design for the Real World, then we see a clear move away from stylised and streamlined objects. It is all to do with his response as an educator to what he was seeing around him. He was facilitating what his students were advocating.

An interesting thing about writing his biography was seeing how over the 20th century he changed in accordance with what was going on in the design schools around him. That kind of ugly design he became an advocate for is pretty clunky and analogue. That was when design students turned against creating objects and were trying to do something much more complex. In my book (Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World 2021), I write about Finland and how many of his ideas come from the Nordic region and students’ work there. 

Another crucial aspect is that Papanek was an Austrian-American emigre. He escaped the Nazi Anschluss in Austria. They left with his mother late in 1939 and he arrived when the New York World’s Fair was on. Imagine going from Nazi Vienna to New York, seeing representations of hero designers in a new democratic capitalist world. I think at the beginning he might have been invested in that dream. But then he started to think about a social alternative to the streamlining and almost certainly based on his experience of shifting from being an affluent bourgeois in Vienna to living in a Jewish youth hostel in New York. Papanek set up his design studio called the Design Clinic in 1942. The fact that it’s called a clinic is very much about him trying to solve problems and his designs don’t attempt to be commercial. 

It is fascinating that he did have this vision of a social design because it would have been much easier to go with the flow, work in Raymond Loewy’s office and just do what everyone else around was doing, yet he decided to follow a different trajectory. I guess it was courageous; however, it was informed by the people around him, by the mid-60s and his visits to Finland.

AJC: One of Papanek’s first jobs was in Ontario (Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada) as a design instructor. He sees an opportunity to create an industrial design programme that is not only about creating medical instruments but has an expanded view of design and involves people thinking critically about future trajectories of health care. However, the programme in Ontario was funded by Cold War initiatives. By the early 1960s, Papanek ended up being invited to Finland along with Buckminster Fuller. These two suddenly appear in a succession of events in the mid-60s. They are being financed to represent a progressive view of US design. There was a Soviet-run youth festival in Helsinki in 1962 and three years later there was a design event with Papanek and Buckminster Fuller. 

I have interviewed American visual artists who suddenly found themselves in Finland with full sponsorship because they were being used ideologically within the Cold War discourse. It does not mean they knew where the funding came from. The Finnish, the Scandinavian students that Papanek met, influenced his ideas and he was then promoting them back in the United States. It is complex because a lot of the social design funding came from military sources when he was, for example, at Purdue University. I discovered letters from the US military sponsoring a postgraduate group and some obscure local newspaper clippings that showed that Papanek was also consulting for Dow Chemicals. He was giving lectures in Finland about the horrors of the Vietnam War while he was consulting with Dow Chemicals, where Agent Orange was created. There is a darker side to the story. 

Papanek created, for example, a humanitarian inflatable shelter, which could also be used for military purposes. Whereas Buckminster Fuller was very much exposed for his military work in Afghanistan, Papanek managed to retain purity during his lifetime. I did an FBI search and there is a file on Buckminster Fuller but I did not get anything with Papanek. The Dow Chemical’s connection is damaging enough. However, we need to keep in mind that everyone was getting military sponsorship if they worked in experimental design. This notion of social and transdisciplinary design was completely a Cold War project. It was about trying to do what the Soviet powers could not create, a type of design that thought beyond technology and encouraged design students to think in future trajectories and read humanities.

The transdisciplinary map that appears in Papanek’s book is wonderful. It’s part of the big character poster of all those connections, part of the Cold War experimental project.

AJC: Design for the Real World was first published in Swedish but I strongly contend that the most important cultural influence was Finland in that book. It would make perfect sense that it worked for Estonia because it is informed by the Nordic discourse around design during that period. The younger generation needed something new. 

Finnish design was used politically in world fairs and expositions. It was the younger generation sponsored by Cold War initiatives that were trying to create the vision of a new designer for a new society that was not just capitalist. It is not an American book, even though Papanek was essentially American. It is kind of fascinating where his cultural allegiances were as an emigre.

I think it is still an inspirational book to read because he is right in so much of it but you also have to understand it as a historical document. It is about climate change, environmental destruction and the role of design in that. Everything is still completely true and it is written at a time when people are talking about stopping design altogether, like the Italian radicals for example. 

Has design changed? Yes, this book is informed by the late Cold War and industrial politics and then it moves into an era where it is about a crisis in post-industrial design: a point at which there isn’t just this linear relationship between objects being made, getting advertised, and people consuming them. When Papanek writes it is the beginning of the dominance of information technologies emerging. Now design is more dispersed, amorphic and you could not write that book. The book has an anchor in something analogue. The idea that you could create a refrigerator and it is going to change the lives of people in an African country is disturbing today because it is very much this development model. Perhaps the attraction of the book is about the moment at which change feels very possible.

Now the book appeals to the idea of circular design and social design. We do need transdisciplinary people and that is what has happened in design schools. My only concern about that expansion is the deskilling element because Papanek was talking at a time when designers did have skills and programmes that skilled them.