Irrelevant at Best, or Else Complicit
Abstraction, Porch Shadows, by Paul Strand, 1917. [The J. Paul Getty Museum]
It was not an optimistic time. In the United States, President John F. Kennedy and civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been shot dead in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Bodies piled up, too, in Vietnam. The year 1968 had brought a global surge of energy and solidarity: the growth of social movements, of struggles against dictatorships and authoritarian rule, of resistance even in the face of violent repression. But 1969 saw a massive global let-down. Coalitional hopes sagged nearly worldwide, replaced by feelings of chaos, dread, and hopelessness.
“Design,” whatever that might be, no longer looked to anyone like the answer to any of the world’s problems. At the 1969 International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) — the same conference that in 1961 had been themed “Man / Problem Solver,” that had emphasized the designer’s “great social responsibility” to help build “a new society with new institutions,” that had celebrated design’s capacity to “‘blast off’ for richer worlds” — the atmosphere had turned somber. The 1969 conference was titled “The Rest of Our Lives.” The industrial designer George Nelson bemoaned, in his conference talk, the difficulty of escape from “the perverted offspring of the American dream” — the dream itself having been brought about, Nelson said, in part by blind faith in technology. The conference’s overall mood, one commentator observed later, reflected “the despair the participants felt at the crumbling of American ideals.”
The 1970 conference, titled “Environment by Design,” was even darker. Three days in, the American architect Carl Koch declared from the podium that “Our national leadership is unspeakable. The government’s sense of priorities is criminally askew. Our cities are rotting visibly before our eyes.” By a few days later, the program of organized talks had disintegrated.
People gathered ad hoc in the conference tent to connect with one another and express ideas about the current crisis. A group of French participants read a screed against design itself, written for the occasion by Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard’s statement lambasted the conference’s environmentalist theme as disingenuous (“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes”), even as it acknowledged, “The real problem is far beyond Aspen — it is the entire theory of Design and Environment itself, which constitutes a generalized Utopia; Utopia produced by a Capitalist system.” (Utopia, here, seems to imply the most self-delusional kind of fantasy.)
The final hours of the conference, IDCA president Eliot Noyes wrote afterward, underlined “the relative irrelevance of the design subject in the minds of many who were attending.” At the subsequent board meeting, Noyes resigned as president, and the board resolved to search for a radically new form for the 1971 conference, if the conference were to be held again at all. Both the conferees and the board, Noyes reflected, now harbored “serious doubt as to whether at this moment in our national history and our state of emotional disrepair a conference on design can or should be held at all.” Focusing on design seemed irrelevant at best, or else complicit, deplorable, malign.
The whole concept of design was also under attack from those outside design’s professional bounds. In 1971, the German philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug published Kritik der Warenästhetik (later translated into English as A Critique of Commodity Aesthetics), a Marxist-cum-Freudian manifesto that described designers as the “handmaidens” of capitalism. Design, Haug contended, was an engine of the appetite-generating “illusion industry” of media and advertising, as well as of the broader consumer capitalist system behind them, all of which were organized around driving consumption and thereby producing profits.
Haug, like the Frankfurt School before him, charged the modern culture industries and the commodities they produced with the manipulation of human beings. But Haug added a meaningful nuance to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s thesis: he showed that manipulating people was only possible because design and its peer disciplines colluded with those people’s pursuit of self-interest, which was continuous, intelligent, and fully intentional. Even “manipulative phenomena” like design, as Haug put it elsewhere, still spoke “the language of real needs.”
So what to make of design? Was it a necessary evil, or a poison to be eradicated? Neither: it was that poison’s dangerously sweet taste. Or, to use Haug’s own metaphor, design was like the Red Cross in wartime. “It tends some wounds, but not the worst, inflicted by capitalism,” Haug wrote. “Its function is cosmetic, and thus prolongs the life of capitalism by making it occasionally somewhat more attractive and by boosting morale, just as the Red Cross prolongs war. Thus design, by its particular artifice, supports the general disfigurement.”
1971 was also the year the Austrian American designer Victor Papanek published Design for the Real World. It has since become one of the most widely read design books in history; it has been published all over the world, has been translated into over twenty languages, and (as of 2024) has never fallen out of print. It’s a manifesto against what design had become. And it’s a passionate brief for what Papanek believed design could be.
As of 1971, Victor Papanek was dean of the newly formed School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). And he had begun to develop his own methodology for a design practice focused, he believed, on solving for real human beings’ real needs.
Papanek preached design’s “unique capacity for addressing human issues,” as he put it in the magazine Industrial Design, and its “value beyond the purely commercial imperative.” His philosophy of “DESIGN FOR THE NEEDS OF MAN” was a set of seven “main areas for creative attack”:
1. Design for Backward and Underdeveloped Areas of the World.
2. Design for Poverty Areas such as: Northern Big City Ghettos & Slums, White Southern Appalachia, Indian Reservations in the Southwest and Migratory Farm Workers.
3. Design for Medicine, Surgery, Dentistry, Psychiatry & Hospitals.
4. Design for Scientific Research and Biological Work.
5. Design of Teaching, Training and Exercising Devices for the Disabled, the Retarded, the Handi-capped and the Subnormal, the Disadvantaged.
6. Design for Non-Terran and Deep Space Environments, Design for Sub-Oceanic Environments.
7. Design for “Breakthrough,” through new concepts.
That designers should organize their work around addressing human beings’ real-world needs, however clumsily taxonomized—rather than around aesthetics, or function, or the profit imperative—was the message of Design for the Real World. First published in Swedish in 1970, it found global success when published in English in 1971, taking its place among other leftist English-language jeremiads of the time: Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973).
Papanek’s book attributes a lot of agency to design: “In an age of mass production when everything must be planned and designed,” he writes, “design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself ).” But the book doesn’t celebrate that agency. Instead, it charges designers, and the broader economies of production within which they operate, with wasting and abusing their power.
Take the process of creating and distributing a new secretarial chair. In a “market-oriented, profit-directed system such as that in the United States,” such a new chair almost invariably “is designed because a furniture manufacturer feels that there may be a profit in putting a new chair on the market,” rather than because there is any empirical evidence that a particular population’s sitting needs are not being met. The design team is simply “told that a new chair is needed, and what particular price structure it should fit into.” The team may consult resources in ergonomics or human factors, but inevitably they will find that the information available about their potential “users” is sorely lacking. So they design another generic chair, made neither to fit a specific population nor to solve a new problem. After some perfunctory testing, the chair hits the market, where, invariably, someone other than the secretary decides whether to buy it for her use. Some money is made. No one’s life improves. But the manufacturer is satisfied: “If it sells, swell.”
What should designers do instead? “A great deal of research,” Papanek replied. Designers should ask “big,” “transnational” questions: “What is an ideal human social system? … What are optimal conditions for human society on earth?” They should inquire into their potential users’ “living patterns, sexual mores, world mobility, codes of behavior, primitive and sophisticated religions and philosophies, and much more.” And they should learn about other cultures’ ways of prioritizing and addressing needs. They should undertake “in-depth study” of such “diverse social organizations” as the “American Plains Indians, the Mundugumor of the Lower Sepik River basin; the priest-cultures of the Inca, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec; the Pueblo cultures of the Hopi; the social structuring surrounding the priest-goddess in Crete; the mountain-dwelling Arapesh; child care in Periclean Greece; Samoa of the late 19th century, Nazi Germany, and modern-day Sweden”; et cetera, et cetera.
Papanek’s commitment to identifying needs by learning about the lives of specific users—largely those from non-Western cultures—might be called an “ethnographic” impulse: a drive to study groups of people (usually groups other than one’s own) and to document their cultures, customs, habits, and differences from an assumed norm. The ethnographic impulse played out not only in Papanek’s bloc-buster book but also in his self-curation and self-presentation. He built a personal library, his biographer notes, containing hundreds of volumes of anthropological research and writing. Beginning in the 1960s, Papanek invited reporters into his home to photograph or draw him and his wife (whoever she was at the time) and their decor: Navajo weavings, Buddhist figures, Inuit masks and ritual artifacts, Balinese masks, other objects of vernacular culture.
Papanek also endeavored, through this period, to document his alleged ethnographic capital as a set of professional credentials. In the “biographical data” sheet (something like a curriculum vitae) that he presented to CalArts in 1970, Papanek wrote that he
a. had traveled widely throughout Europe, Thailand, Bali, Java, Cambodia, Japan, etc.
b. spent nearly 6 months (with the Governor’s permission) living in a Hopi Indian pueblo
c. spent several months with an Alaskan Eskimo tribe and nearly five years in Canada
d. spent part of 5 summers in an art-and-craft centered milieu in the Southern Appalachians
e. received various grants that took me to Lapland, Sweden and Finland during the summer of 1966; Finland and Russia during the summer of 1967; and will take me to Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway during the summer of 1968
His biographer calls several of these items—particularly those suggesting that Papanek had carried out fieldwork with Hopi and Alaskan Eskimo tribes—“fallacious.” But that didn’t stop Papanek from repeating them across documents and forums.
Excerpted adapted from The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History by Maggie Gram. Copyright © 2025 by Maggie Gram. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
