Victor Papanek Quotes

Austria, Designer
November 22, 1923 – January, 10, 1998.

Victor Joseph Papanek (22 November 1923 – 10 January 1998) 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 inspired many designers.

Also known as Educator

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

Victor Papanek
- People
- Important
- Design
Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.

Victor Papanek

We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A...student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education.

Victor Papanek
- Thinking
- Live
- Society
Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it.

Victor Papanek
- Effort
- Design
- Meaningful
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.

Victor Papanek
- Design
- More
- Industrial
All designed tools and objects are sort of extensions of human abilities, and they do tend to make life richer for us. But, an awful lot of designs, especially in this country, make life a lot more inconvenient. I'm thinking, for instance, of high-fidelity units that have so many switches and toggles and buttons and things that they confuse most people.

Victor Papanek
- People
- Life
- Thinking
Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.

Victor Papanek
- Life
- Design
- Planning
In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.

Victor Papanek
- Space
- Place
- Los Angeles

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.

Victor Papanek
- People
- Money
- Today
Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.

Victor Papanek
- Men
- Earth
- Stop