Best 13 quotes of Victor Papanek on MyQuotes

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.

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.

Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.

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.

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order

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.

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.

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.

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.

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

There are professions more harmful than industrial design but only a few of them

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.

It would be tedious to continue piling example upon example, statistic upon statistic. For at a certain point, a feeling of deep lethargy sets in, and our reaction is: 'What's the use?' or 'What can one man possibly do?' If we respond in this manner, we are lost. For it is precisely by shifting problems from the trivial to the tragic plane, by forsaking a personal view for a cosmic one, that we rationalize and manage to shrug off our own personal responsibility.