Interview with Victor Papanek, 1988

Interview with Victor Papanek
Sara Bedrosian

From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek:
Victor Papanek (1927 - 1999) was a designer and educator who became 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 (and, by extension, society and himself)."

Published in January/February 1988 issue of Art Papers, Atlanta, GA

Anthropologist, architect, industrial designer and author of world renown, Victor Papanek is a rare combination of practical specialist and far-seeing intuitive generalist. He has designed and consulted for UNESCO, the World Health Organization, Volvo, and the governments of countries around the world. Born in Vienna, he has lived and worked all over the world, including a year spent living and designing in a bamboo house in Bali. A student of Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin and Taliesin West, Papanek was also a friend and colleague of Buckminster F7uller, who wrote the preface to Papanek’s first book, Design for the Real World. Papanek is currently J. L. Constant Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas.

Sara Bedrosian: You have said, “People cannot participate in something that they don’t know exists.” With that in mind, would you give your own personal definition of an industrial designer?

Victor Papanek: In my book, I’ve defined design as a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order, which is a very broad definition. Industrial or product design usually means the design of things that are produced by industry, in a large-scale production operation, for people to buy. I don’t think I go along with that sort of classical definition for several reasons. First of all, things don’t have to be made in a very large number. For example, in things connected with the space program, such as space probes, capsules, and so forth, frequently the entire production run consists of six, yet who could deny that these are industrial products? Secondly, things that are designed and made through industry don’t necessarily have to be sold. I have designed medical equipment for the World Health Organization that is given away to people in developing countries; Scandinavian countries give wheel chairs and other devices to people who need them through programs that are tax supported. Thirdly, I think it is limiting to think of these things as being necessarily produced by industry; some of these products can be made by craftspeople in a cottage level industry in many parts of the world. Now, the minute you talk about a cottage level industry people immediately think of Ghana or Haiti or something of that sort. That’s not necessarily true; there are things made through the Southern Appalachian Crafts Guild for instance, and these are not just souvenirs – they are useful objects and products in some cases, like chairs and cradles.

SB: of all the different objects and systems you’ve designed, is there something that is especially exciting to you?

VP: Well, Mr. Wright is very much on my mind; people would say “well Mr. Wright, you have designed 471 buildings so far – which do you like best?” And he would say “Always the next one, my boy, always the next one.” That is the way I feel about it.

An example of “always the next one” is an item that does not yet really exist, but it will very soon. There are some places in this world where people pretend to think it never gets cold. Florida, Southern California, and Australia are such places, where it gets quite chilly but people claim it does not, and therefore they have to install large electric heater panels in the walls of their homes so that they don’t freeze.

One of the contributions that Mr. Wright made to domestic architecture in the ‘80s and ‘90s of the last century was something that he called the radiant floor heating system. This was simply a concrete slab floor into which a series of copper pipes which circulated hot water had been put. Heat rises, and if your feet are warm the rest of you tends to be warm. If you keep the floor warm you would keep people warm with less expenditure of energy. This system was invented in Japan where, say 100 years ago, each house had something called a Mongolian Room, which was heated like that, and you could go in there from time to time and be warm. Now that’s one part of the story.

Another part is my own comfort in sleeping. There are electric blankets and electric sheets, but I have all my life looked for an electric sheet that chills rather than warms, because I’m always hot at night. So I fiddled around trying to invent an air-conditioned sheet, which makes most people sick when I talk about it. They either get sick or they want to sleep with me.

Well, half-jokingly thinking about that and at the same time thinking about Mr. Wright’s floor heating, I came to the conclusion that it was possible to design an electric carpet. The amount that it costs for you to run an electric blanket is very little. So I began to develop a square format, 39 x 39 inch, modular rug system that can plug together, be heated electrically, where you could spill water and still not electrocute yourself. It’s now being made for a client of mine in Australia – it’s not on the market yet, but this will give people in Australia or Southern California or Florida a chance to have their place warm on a chilly day – and when the oil crisis comes back, and folks in places like New England have to shut off part of their homes again, they will be able to, for less money, have a warm floor. It’s also a healthier way of warming a room because it’s kinder to your upper respiratory tract than central heating. It’s not going to replace central heating, and I wouldn’t want it in the middle of Kansas, but still it is one approach. That would be a case history of how an idea comes about, and that’s the one that I’m fairly excited about because it’s new. That’s my present “next one.”

SB: In Design for the Real World, you discuss a consumer mentality, especially in the United States, that accepts gadgets of poor quality in ever-increasing numbers; at this point, at the end of the ‘80s, is there more of a demand for higher quality?

VP: In the United States right now, there are a number of predominantly young people with excess money to spend; we’ve come up with a series of specific curse words, such as yuppies, to describe them. I don’t believe in market segmentation, but because these people have a little bit more money to spend, they do look for quality in some of the things they buy. I think that’s part of the reason why we are suffering from an enormous glut of imported, high quality products in this country, and from the inability to export many of our products. There are also a lot of poor people who have to look for things that wear well because they can’t afford to throw things away. It seems to me that from both sides of the spectrum, from the new poor as well as from the new rich, there is a greater understanding of and demand for quality.

In certain specific areas, there is certainly a greater insistence on quality. You can see that in retail shops that are devoted to tropical plants, bicycling, rock-climbing, or scuba diving; the folks that run these shops, which are usually small in size, know a great deal about their products, know a great deal about the quality, and are involved with whatever it is that they are selling in a number of other ways. For instance, you could walk into a bicycle shop, and in addition to their knowledgeably discussing bicycles with you they’ll probably have you sign a petition for bicycle paths in your town, they will try to get you to join a club, and various other things which are not directly profit-linked. They’ve become specialists and therefore are aware of quality in their own field. Some of these things give me a great deal of hope, because that sort of quality awareness is beginning to creep back into the American mind. That has nothing to do with what some folks call “good taste.” I think we are really beginning to lose that battle in this country, because a lot of the things in this country are what could be called “kitsch” or “cornball”.

In my lectures throughout the world I am often asked, “Mr. Papanek, what countries do you think have the best taste in the population at large?” and my answer is always the same, “Denmark and Finland.” Let me explain why this is so: all over the world, young people who want to become designers or architects usually take what is called a foundation year at an art academy or university, in which they do very basic design exercises. Young Finnish and Danish people do that same sort of thing, except they do it at age 5 instead of age 17 or 18 or 19. Not only are people going through that training at a much earlier age, but everybody is, not just the people who have chosen to become designers.

Also when you go to Copenhagen and begin to talk to folks, you find out there’s a good chance that the taxi driver who takes you from the airport to the hotel is an architect, and that the man who delivers a case of Tuborg beer is an industrial designer, and that his brother, who is also an architect or a graphic designer, works in the Carlsberg plant bottling beer. Denmark and Finland over-produce architects and designers, and although many of these people end up driving a taxi or filling bottles in a brewery, they are knowledgeable about matters of design and taste.

SB: You’ve mentioned that the United States is one of a number of countries that has a “pioneer society,” and that function is of paramount importance and everything else gets thrown by the wayside; in some senses it seems that function has also now been thrown by the wayside, that we’re moving out of the “pioneer era.”

VP: Yes I think it has. If we want an unappetizing metaphor, we’ve thrown out the baby and then drunk the dirty bath water – I think we’ve thrown away function as well. The fight between function and aesthetics is a hollow one; function and aesthetics are all part of the same aspect of things. But if you asked whether the people who plan our cities or design our cars or design the furniture we sit on were trying to be functional or aesthetic you’d come to the conclusion that they were trying to be neither, because it looks like hell, and it doesn’t work, either.

One of the things that’s missing out of all this, it seems to me, is joy or fun. People used to say of travel, that getting there was half the fun. I’ve just arrived in New York by plane, on a single non-stop flight, only three hours long, and getting there is most of the tragedy, because flying isn’t very much fun. I see absolutely no reason why flying can’t be made a decent experience by having larger windows. For instance, it’s a lot of fun flying first class in a Russian aircraft that has been converted from military, which the Russians often do. That type of plane has a glazed nose, so in the whole first class section you can look out and see everything around you. That’s a very pleasant experience.

I always compare contemporary taxi cabs to London cabs of the ‘40s or early ‘50s, when they were tall and you stepped up into them; they were extraordinarily comfortable and you had a feeling of adventure and getting somewhere. Those taxis were originally designed so that a tall man wearing a top hat wouldn’t have to take it off. I think that’s a great way of designing something, and with new textures and materials, it must be possible to imbue a lot of common things with fun, to re-introduce joy or fun into daily activity. I think we have lost a great deal of the functional requirements that we need in things and at the same time we haven’t improved their relation to people or anything else. There are exceptions to this of course; for instance, my own feeling is that the Macintosh computer can be fun to work with.

This still has to do with the question of quality. I think that in some way our country is materially over-developed, and culturally under-developed. Just think of cities in the United States, and see what kind of picture they bring to mind. You say Minneapolis, and that’s wheat, you say Detroit, and that’s cars, you say Houston, and that’s oil, you say Los Angeles, and that’s movies, you say Chicago and that’s wheat futures, and so on. Nobody ever goes to Houston for pleasure, because there’s nothing to do in Houston except deal in oil. That may be an over-simplification but essentially it’s true. Now there are places of course where you can go, like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, I would probably hold out for San Francisco, Seattle and maybe Santa Fe; those are the only ones. The rest of the towns are mono-culture industrial towns, unlike towns in many parts of Europe. We are imposing that kind of cultural re-development onto other countries, whole places like Mexico and South Korea and Taiwan, which are turning themselves into giant manufacturing complexes; there will probably still be cultural things in the capital city, but not anywhere else, not in the countryside, which Europe has still retained. That’s another way of looking at how we are manipulating cultures through an entirely economic sense, and a sense of greed. What we are really talking about is decentralization in a way, aren’t we?

SB: And specialization vs. generalization.

VP: Which is the reverse side of the same coin. When I came to this country as a little boy with my mother, we found out after a short while that we had relatives in Fall River, Massachusetts. My mother absolutely wanted to go to Fall River, and she also wanted to go to Newark, New Jersey because she felt that there would be a great difference between those towns – the opera would be different. Well it was, because there wasn’t any! I think we centralize things entirely too much.

SB: You have emphasized that there are these huge pools of need that we all have, and it’s not just somewhere else around the world, it’s right here in America, it’s in your home town…

VP: I’ve given you one design case history, the electric modular carpet, but another one that I’m working on now with some graduate students is very intriguing. Our local hospital has asked me to consult with them about a room or set of rooms adjoining the intensive care ward – this is the room into which you will walk to be told that your mother will not recover consciousness after they pulled her out of the flaming wreck, or that your brother will recover but he’ll be a vegetable, or that your little girl will be okay and there’s nothing to worry about. What should that room look like? Should it have windows in it or shouldn’t it? Should there be liquor? For that matter, what kind of clothes should the sisters and the doctors wear when they tell you that you are now an orphan? Those are all design decisions, I assure you. And it does have something to do with the unredeemed body, and the unredeemed mind, if you will. I can’t tell you what we’re doing because I don’t know yet, but it is a very interesting architectural and interior design exercise.

SB: It’s true for an emergency room too. Why is it so horrendous? There you are, you’re dealing with enough anyway without the stress of institutional lighting and horrifying chairs…

VP: That’s right, and drinking cherry diet Pepsi and having 40 cigarettes and watching Donahue, which is essentially what it’s about.

SB: Can you run through the checklist you developed to indicate whether you should buy something or not?

VP: Well the first thing you should ask is whether, in fact, you really need this. If the answer is “yes” then how can you get it? Do you really have to buy it, or can you borrow, rent, or lease it, buy it and share it with someone else or with others? Can you buy it used? Can you buy it broken and fix it, and learn something by fixing it? Can you buy it in the form of a kit and build it yourself, and then understand what makes it work? If the answer to all these is “yes I still need it,” regardless of whether it’s shared or not, does it have all the features you need? Does it have features that you do not need? Does it have so-called convenience features that may get in the way, and may make it break down more often than if these features weren’t there? Or are they convenience features that are very convenient and don’t get in the way? Those are some of the questions that I think people should ask themselves. Is there an alternative solution to this? I was shocked when I did How Things Don’t Work (my least successful book) to find that I was in a struggle with my editor in New York for months over can openers, because she said nobody, nobody at all uses a hand-powered can opener any more.

SB: That’s not true.

VP: I know it’s not true, but she just refused to accept that for a long long time. So, that’s one of many checklists one can obviously develop.

SB: I noticed that there’s quite a lot of emotion that comes up at the mention of your name, some of it joyous, some of it more defensive. I was wondering if some of the controversy has now died down since we’ve got a little more hindsight; I know that you have been a challenge for the design community in the past.

VP: There are a number of reasons for that. I was a national meeting co-chairman [of the IDSA] for one day in 1969; at that time a very serious challenge to the profession was mounted by the students who attended that meeting. I sided with the students, merely because they seemed to be more sensible than my older colleagues. I resigned for that reason. Well, I guess you didn’t resign from the Industrial Design Society of America any more than you would resign from the KGB or the CIA. It’s changed to some degree since. I was re-invited to be a member of the IDSA, and I did re-join.

Shortly after Design for the Real World first came out in this country, came the oil crisis of 1972-73. Detroit began going down the tubes. Since I said some things in my book that were critical of the design of American cars as practiced by Detroit, there were a number of older industrial designers who were announcing that I was the person who had destroyed the profession. Of course I don’t have that much power, nor would I care to destroy it. There are certainly people who don’t see the world as I see it, and I would be appalled if they did, but at least we can manage to get along, more or less.

Some people say they enjoyed my first book, Design for the Real World, so much because it deals entirely with design for developing countries. Other people say they enjoyed it because it is the only book that deals only with biological design prototypes. Other people think that it deals only with the disabled. The one message that didn’t get across was that there are many possibilities in industrial design; here are some things that I think designers should also pay attention to. Most people seem to read the book and get the message that industrial designers should stop doing what they are doing now, and only design for elderly, retarded black people living in the southern tip of Chile and that’s not true; if there were a world where everything had been designed according to my precepts I wouldn’t care to live in it. I wouldn’t know where I’d get my VCR. So I’m not saying either/or, I’m saying and, and, and, and.

SB: On the architectural front, I was interested in the “Intentional Community” on the Baja peninsula of Mexico. Could you discuss that?

VP: One of the young directors of the Bank Pesca operation asked me if I would be willing to come down there and design the community so that it could be self-sustaining. A young woman architect from Venezuela who was a graduate student of mine went down and did most of the work. The reason we were involved is that the bank had brought two young Mexican architects there to do it. They spoke to the people, asked them what they wanted, and then designed precisely the opposite. They put a grid road network down even though it’s only for 37 houses, there were big arguments bout parking places and where the church should be; the people didn’t want that at all. They wanted the houses to be independent from on another, they did not want a grid network, they wanted a chance for chickens and pigs to run around, and things like that. We developed housing for them, out of a concrete based volcanic rock, a material abundant on the peninsula. There is some solar power and a lot of planting because the winds are very strong. The most important thing we developed is a fairly sophisticated and cheap water recycling system that cuts the foreign exchange of the community down because they have t buy less water; instead of buying 100% of their water, they now have to buy only 10% of their water needs a year.

SB: There is a certain resistance within the West or with western technology to “cater to” different cultures, but with the Batta Koya (talking book), your simplification of an existing tape recorder for people who speak many different dialects, and do not read, you represent an opposing point of view. The African bush people for whom it was being designed gave you input into the design process. It was very difficult for them to figure out the positive and negative symbology for putting a battery in correctly, so you designed a case that only accepted the battery in the way in which it would function. You seemed to be saying “if that’s what they need, then that’s what we’re going to design” as opposed to saying “well, we’re just going to have to teach them how to put the battery in right because this is the 20th century.”

VP: Well, first of all, it’s not the 20th century – it may be the 20th century here today, but it’s many other centuries in other places. In Iran, it’s the 13th century, one could argue. I think that any tool, object, artifact, machine or whatever one designs should be designed for the ease of the people who use it, and not for the convenience of the machine. Therefore, I think it is wrong to design something so that people have to learn how to operate it; that’s one way of looking at it.

Now, I will attack my position, if I may, by saying, “but doesn’t that mean that you are keeping people in ignorance?” Maybe it does to some degree. But I feel that this device has helped people to make the jump from a pre-literate to a post-literate society. If you really wanted to be a good educator, then you would probably first teach them how to read and write, then you’d teach them English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, or German language, depending on who the colonial power used to be a long time ago, and then you’d send them books. But the problems of health and water management and agricultural resources and animal health are problems of now, and they have to be solved now, hence that’s the best design I could do at that time.

SB: That is reminiscent of pedagogy, that all stages of development are part of a linear progression that we must all go through. I think in certain senses it’s true, but why do people who haven’t had the benefit of going through the industrial revolution have to go through the whole thing, why can’t they immediately benefit from what we’ve learned and go on? I think there’s a fear of being surpassed.

VP: I think that’s the basis of it all, but I think you’ve put your finger on something very significant and important. It seems to me that people do have to go through the same stages, but they can do it more quickly by learning from the mistakes of others. America was not as devastated by the industrial revolution as England, Sweden not as much as the United States, because Sweden learned from us, we learned from England; Nigeria has learned something from Sweden, even, so the process can be speeded up.

Secondly, there is some degree of leap-frogging; you can jump over certain obstacles along the way. But you don’t go from an ox-cart to a Porsche; you do have to go through some of these things. You mentioned the word pedagogy – one of my biggest challenges in teaching is to somehow communicate to my students that, no matter how brilliant they are, no matter how talented they are, and no matter how much money their parents or their grandmother have to give them, it will still take them nine years to get from 17 to 26, and there’s no way of speeding up that particular process. So, you do have to go through some stages, and some stages take time. In the curriculum of a design school one sees courses taught for a semester that could probably be taught in 2 hours or 3 hours, and other course that could be taught for a semester that should probably be taught for six semester in order for the material to age with the student.

SB: What do you think about the industrial design education process? I’ve been told from a number of sources that conceptualization is all, that it’s very important to draw, and there’s not much emphasis on hands-on experience. Understanding the materials seems to be very secondary; it’s kind of a supremacy theory of design: “We are too good to get our hands dirty.” I find this split very difficult to accept, especially in a place like America, which is built so much on hands-on experience.

VP: Over the last 20 or 30 years, the biggest difference between the American system and the British system for educating industrial designers was that in America students learned how to draw things and how to build and test them, whereas in England, students would design them and then make assembly drawings and give them to a shop worker employed by the university or the school, and he would build these things. There’s something to be said for both systems; so it should probably ideally be a combination of both. As far as drawing is concerned, I think we draw for two reasons, or designers ought to draw for two reasons. One is to have a dialogue with yourself; you doodle your way towards a solution by drawing, and something grows under your hands.

SB: …without judgment, without narrowing down the process before you see what is there.

VP: Right. Also, industrial designers or architects need to know how to draw to photograph things that don’t exist yet, to show to their clients, whose imagination isn’t that good.

SB: So it’s a means of communication as well as a means of making things possible that are not yet in existence.

VP: But of course, that becomes very seductive; you draw things because they’re easier to draw, you get “paper architecture” where the result is not something that gets built, but something in a book that lies on a coffee table, or in a magazine, conceptual architecture. And that doesn’t really solve any problems, except possibly the psychiatric ones of the people who do them. Now, should the designer know about metallurgy? Probably not, because there’s just too much to know. You can’t know all of this, but you do have to know how to talk to different people in the various disciplines.

SB: It seems that one of your central points is that people must be involved, and if people are participating not just as end-users but actually are involved at the beginning of the design process, it seems that design has to be intimately involved with politics, with sociology, with all the cultural ties.

VP: I like things when they are simple, but to make something simple it sometimes has to be very complicated. This is an example of it. First of all I think all design is political, no design stands mute politically. On the other hand, I feel that no design should be primarily ideological because I think the ideology gets in the way. When design is propelled by ideological reasons, they are invented reasons, because if I bring a certain ideology to the design process, if it is not propelled by real needs out there, then I’m imposing something else of my own.

When people say that design is not political they are wrong, because everybody, except possibly members of the vegetable kingdom, is political. And recent findings about botanical behavior tell us that trees seem to form societies, and, in a manner still opaque to us, communicate to protect themselves against gypsy moths, lumberjacks, and other organisms.

SB: You are challenging the design community, in implying that it’s time to grab some responsibility, to be active as opposed to reactive, and by asking designers to stop passing the buck and waiting for politicians to make it possible to design the kind of products we all need.

VP: Well, essentially it’s a question of ethics. I don’t even try to get my students or the people who work in my office to act ethically, though I hope they will. I do try to communicate with them that an ethical dilemma exists, and teach them how to recognize it. I think that’s of extreme importance. Most architects and designers don’t even know that there is an ethical dilemma. Once you recognize it exists, you can then deal with it in any way that makes you feel comfortable about it. But you must know that you’re facing an ethical dilemma.

SB: Would you comment on the designer who leaves the metropolitan office and goes to places around the world where something is needed and then goes home again?

VP: This designer is subjecting himself or herself to various kinds of culture shocks. It’s difficult at the time, but I think it’s an enormous learning process. One of the things that I don’t like about architecture and design, maybe the only thing I don’t like about architecture and design, is that designers and architects really don’t know about the rest of the world. We know about the “in” architect in Finland and the most “with it” designers in Italy, but we really don’t know too much about the social structure behind it and how certain things are done. So we live in these tight compartments. The only reason I’m picking on designers and architects is because the doctors that I’ve met over the years, the surgeons, the chemists and the biophysicists do know what’s going on all over the world. In fact, it is like an international tennis game, where the ball takes off in Tokyo and hits a racquet in Berlin and is lobbed from there to Beijing and from there to Paris and then back to New York and so on, going on all the time. That doesn’t really happen in architecture and design.

There is no theory of architecture, aside from “it shouldn’t fall down” – there are ideologies, and idolatries, but there is no theory, only precedent, and to some degree that holds true in design as well. I think that’s rather frightening…not that I’m about to write a generalized theory of design.

SB: I was wondering if you could whip one up.

VP: Whilst we are talking, of course – so, I think the designer who moves around will learn a great deal that will enrich him or her tremendously, through the sheer experience of seeing that things are different. I was amused that even President Reagan could learn something, because about 4 or 5 years ago, when he came back from his Latin American trip, he explained how he’d been in Colombia, Braziland, I think, in Venezuela, and then, I think rather endearingly, said “you know, these countries are all different from each other.” Well, I think that’s great. I am not a Reagan fan, but here is this gentleman in his 70s who is able to at least learn that from foreign travel, so all is not lost. And I think, as designers, we do have to learn by doing these sorts of things.

I’ve designed things for people to make in factories for a good part of my life, but until I worked with Volvo, I didn’t realize that all over the world, all the people who work in factories hate their jobs, all of them, without exception. They hate going in to work, some of them phone in and lie and say they are sick, a smaller group manage to make themselves sick. That’s the way everything is, unfortunately. That was a learning process for me.

Two people in the industrial design field have called me “the garbage can designer” or the “school of garbage can design” because they feel that many of the things that I design don’t look pretty at all; some of the things I design don’t. That’s too bad. There will be other versions of them made later on by other folks; by then they’ll look beautiful, because all of the original inventive work will be done and they can concentrate on looks.

The thing I’m probably proudest of so far, the little Indonesian tin can radio, was something we tried to keep ugly so that the people themselves would decorate it – then it becomes a question of personal like or dislike – whether people like the way the native peoples have done it. But you see, it’s a lot later now, and only one copy of that radio still exists in a museum in Java, showing a developmental stage in Bali. The reason they aren’t in use anymore is that there are decent radios available and there are satellites which broadcast things in all kinds of languages. There was absolutely no need for this thing to look beautiful; it was an intermediate technological step, and the length of intermediacy is slowly shrinking anyway. There was a time, maybe in the year 1890, when you could still worry about designing aesthetically the ultimate buggy whip. Well, nobody thinks about designing the ultimate driving glove anymore, because you are driving your car in an air-conditioned or heated environment; you don’t need driving gloves. And so, I think many of the aesthetic problems will sort themselves out. If the beautiful design of something becomes a glory trip for the designer or the architect, then I think it’s inherently wrong anyway.