Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change

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Victor Papanek

Academy Chicago Publishers, Chicago, 2009, 1984 (revised 2nd edition); originally published 1971, English

Design, General

ISBN: 9780897331531

From the Publisher. Translated into 23 languages since it first appeared in 1971, Design for the Real World has become the world's most widely read book on design and is a required text in many design and architectural schools. Victor Papanek's lively and instructive guide shows how design can reduce pollution, overcrowding, starvation, obsolescence and other modern ills. He leads us away from "fetish objects for a wasteful society" toward a new age of morally and environmentally responsible design. Professor Papanek was a highly distinguished designer, educator, lecturer and writer, widely acknowledged for his visionary ideas on design theory. He was Professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas at the time of his death in 1998.

On 4 book lists

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Gijs Bakker

On Gijs Bakker’s Book List

Papanek came into my life when design became important to me in the early 1970s.

Tim Brown

On Tim Brown’s Book List

I read this 1971 book in design school and it convinced me that design had a higher purpose than simply creating the latest consumer product.

Alice Rawsthorn

On Alice Rawsthorn’s Book List

Victor Papanek didn’t think much of designers—industrial designers especially. “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them,” he wrote in the opening line of Design for the Real World. “And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second.” . . . View the complete text

Zoë Ryan

On Zoë Ryan’s Book List

Victor Papanek’s belief that designers should not purely mine the realm of design discourse for inspiration, but should create work that responds to the contemporary sociological, psychological, or ecological environment seems more relevant than ever in today’s challenging times.

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