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).