Questioning Design: A Strategy for the 21c

In his 1973 edition of Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek calls out advertising designers for persuading “people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have”, and industrial designers for creating unsafe, unnecessary, “tawdry idiocies” to be “hawked by advertisers”. Papanek pulls no punches, accusing design of putting “murder on the level of mass production”. As evidence he points to the industrial process and product-use that create exorbitant waste material, pollute our air and water, and are capable of causing injury and harm to a cross-global population.

It is at this point that I wikipedia Papanek and discover, to my great disappointment, that we can’t bond over whiskey and our shared design-related crankiness.

Web sites, while not the outcome nor the mass producer of industrial design, enable production, distribution, purchasing, and obsolescence of designed objects on a scale that does not have its equal in a physical counterpart. Take amazon.com as an example. In 2014, Amazon reported almost US$89 billion in net sales (Statista 2015), with almost 114,000 total office and warehouse units, 181.12 million unique monthly visitors, and 305,258,547 unique products.

While Amazon is not responsible for manufacturing all these products, the company and its web site do provide unprecedented access to them in terms of availability and lower cost, with little substantial information regarding the products’ origin or value. If I wanted to know which specific sheep helped…