Victor Papanek

Victor Papanek was a strong advocate of socially responsible designs of products and tools. He believed that "The only important thing about design is how it relates to people." His books and products were an inspiration and provocation to all of us and he was very eloquent promoter of ecological design.

Design For The Real World by Victor Papanek: Human Ecology and Social Change With an Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller; Completely Illustrated". Papanek adorably refers to his friend and introduction-writer as Bucky throughout the book, and relates stories of visionary design teams doing what the two men refer to as Anticipatory Comprehensive Design.

we can say he is looking at real-world problems and trying to solve them in an ecologically-sound and efficient, forward-thinking way, with the help of the stakeholders, the people who are actually affected by the design problem and its potential solutions. This is opposed to the more common practice of profit-driven design, which uses planned obsolescence and the vagaries of "fashion" to sell the same old crap year after year, dressed up in fancy new skins or even just different marketing. For every cool new low-cost, low-impact tool that's accessible and useful to folks who really need it, there are a million new expensive, ugly and possibly dangerous items put on the market simply to make a profit, Papanek says, and his message holds true today. The design world, for all of its improvements, does continue to churn out useless junk and endless repetitions of bad ideas.

Here's part of the flow-chart illustration with which Papanek ended the book - you'll have to read the book to see the rest of it, including his suggestions for how to get around the problems outlined here. But he doesn't give us all the answers - the flow-chart only goes so far as suggesting possible solutions to the world's problems; he puts it on us to fill in the rest of the chart as we move onto creating those solutions.