It’s time for the fourth confessions of a design geek #designbookclub. So far, we’ve read Eden by Tim Smit (you can read the full transcript here), The Craftsman by Richard Sennett (you can read the transcript here), and Design Like You Give A Damn by Architecture for Humanity’s Cameron Sinclair (you can read the full transcript here) – and this month we’re reading Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.
In nominating this book for the Aram Gallery’s 50th anniversary library, design doyenne Barbara Chandler said: “This was the book that changed my life. It was an attack on the social irrelevance of most manufactured goods, and a plea for designs that truly do good. And a call-to- revolution, because ‘only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics.’ I read it in the 1970s, when I was furnishing editor of Ideal Home magazine. I became convinced my job was promoting things people did not need and probably could not afford. I gave it up. Later I travelled to Denmark to hear Papanek lecture. Subsequent economic necessity has sucked me back into the design/consumer merry-go-round, but I was thrilled to find Design for the Real World celebrated at the Royal College of Art in 2012 with ‘an exhibition of inclusive and people-centred design projects.’ Read it. Do it.”
Among the author’s convictions are that “There are few professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them… Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered shoe horns and mink carpeting for bathrooms and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell these gadgets to millions of people. 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. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world every year, by creating a whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. And the skills needed in these activities are carefully taught to young people.”
He argues that all designers should spend one-tenth of their time working on solutions to the some of the world’s problems. Citing the Finnish word ‘kymmenykset,’ which means the same thing as the medieval church concept of ‘tithe,’ he suggests that each of us spend four hours in every forty, one working day in every fortnight, or one year in every decade as a sabbatical “designing for the many, instead of designing for money.” Given the popularity of schemes such as 3M’s ’15{ff546b69e23b1524d799f96c6ba7a638e1f677053b0a2a1568b05315fd5f8fc7} time‘ and Google’s ’20{ff546b69e23b1524d799f96c6ba7a638e1f677053b0a2a1568b05315fd5f8fc7} time’ where employees can spend a proportion of their working week on personal projects, or writing agency Stranger’s Feeding concept where team members get 10 hours a month to do something creative and totally unrelated to their current client work, perhaps this is the next iteration? It’s certainly food for thought.
Join us on twitter via the hashtag #designbookclub at 9pm on Thursday 07 April to discuss this book – and make a note of the next book club too: we’ll be discussing Adrian Forty’s Objects of Desire at 9pm GMT (4pm EST) on Thursday 05 May. Please feel free to suggest future books in the comments suggested below. Looking forward to seeing you on twitter in 07 April.
