Victor Margolin

A “Social Model” of Design: Issues of Practice and Research

Introduction When most people think of product design, they envision products for the market, generated by a manufacturer and directed to a consumer. Since the Industrial Revolution, the dominant design paradigm has been one of design for the market, and alternatives have received little attention. In 1972, Victor Papanek, an industrial designer and, at the time, Dean of Design at the California Institute of the Arts, published his polemical book Design for the Real World in which he made the famous declaration that “[t]here are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.” The book, initially published in Swedish two years earlier, quickly gained worldwide popularity with its call for a new social agenda for designers. Since Design for the Real World appeared, others have responded to Papanek’s call and sought to develop programs of design for social need ranging from the needs of developing countries to the special needs of the aged, the poor, and the disabled. These efforts have provided evidence that an alternative to product design for the market is possible, but they have not led to a new model of social practice. Compared to the “market model,” there has been little theorizing about a model of product design for social need. Theory about design for the market is extremely well developed. It cuts across many fields from design methods to management studies and the semiotics of marketing. The rich and vast literature of market design has contributed to its continued success and its ability to adapt to new technologies, political and social circumstances, and organizational structures and processes. Conversely, little thought has been given to the structures, methods, and objectives of social design. Concerning design for development, some ideas have been borrowed from the intermediate or alternative technology movement, which has promoted low-cost technological solutions for problems in developing countries, but regarding the broader understanding of how design for social need might be commissioned, supported, and implemented, little has been accomplished. Nor has attention been given to changes in the education of product designers that might prepare them to design for populations in need rather than for the market alone. The field of environmental psychology has attempted to respond to the environmental needs of the vulnerable. Those work1 Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World; Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1985), ix. We have used Papanek’s 1985 revised edition rather than the original one of 1972 because he made a number of changes from one edition to another, and we wanted to draw on his most current thinking. For a discussion of Papanek’s concept of socially responsible design, see Nigel Whiteley, Design for Society (London: Reaktion Books, 1993), 103– 115. 2 See, for example, Julian Bicknell and Liz McQuiston, eds., Design for Need; The Social Contribution of Design (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977). This volume is a collection of papers from a conference of the same name held at the Royal College of Art in April 1976. 3 There is an extensive literature on appropriate technology. For a critical introduction to the subject, see Witold Rybczynski, Paper Heroes; A Review of Appropriate Technology (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1980).

Getting to know the user

Abstract The relation of products to users has become a central theme of design discourse, though users still remain little understood by designers. A key term in this new discourse is experience and its presence in discussions of how users relate to products is essential to our grasp of who a user is. To better conceive this essential relation between designers, products and users, we need to encourage large-scale research on product use. We also need to develop better ways of broadening participation in the design process itself.

Design, the Future and the Human Spirit

Introduction Designers, like everyone else on the planet, have good reason to be concerned about the future. The world is volatile, and the ability of the human race to make a healthy home for itself is at stake. Threats from global warming, poor nutrition, disease, terrorism, and nuclear weapons challenge the potential of everyone to exercise productive energies for the common good. Designers are certainly among those whose positive contributions are essential to the building of a more humane world. Trained in many disciplines—whether product design, architecture, engineering, visual communication, or software development—they are responsible for the artifacts, systems, and environments that make up the social world—bridges, buildings, the Internet, transportation, advertising, and clothing, to cite only a few examples. Companies would have nothing to manufacture without designers, nor would they have services to offer. Paradoxically, designers united as a professional class could be inordinately powerful and yet their voices in the various fora where social policies and plans are discussed and debated are rarely present. While the world has heard many calls for social change, few have come from designers themselves, in part because the design community has not produced its own arguments about what kinds of change it would like to see. Notwithstanding the discursive and practical potential to address this issue, the worldwide design community has yet to generate profession-wide visions of how its energies might be harnessed for social ends.1 As creators of models, prototypes, and propositions, designers occupy a dialectical space between the world that is and the world that could be. Informed by the past and the present, their activity is oriented towards the future. They operate in situations that call for interventions, and they have the unique ability to turn these interventions into material and immaterial forms. Granted that others usually define the conditions of their work, designers still create the artifacts that are put to use in the social world. At issue in any call for designers to act is the question of their autonomy or ability to set their own agendas. Initial support for this ability came from Tomas Maldonado and other design theorists in Italy beginning in the 1970s. They characterized the designer as one 1 There have been noble efforts such as the ICSID “Humane Village” Congress in Toronto in 1997, with inspiring words by the keynote speakers (Paul Hawken, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and others) but, in the end, the congress left only a modest legacy of ideas for building a constructive future.

Doctoral Education in Design: Problems and Prospects

This paper considers the status of design research and underlines the importance of setting up clear objectives for doctoral programs within this discipline. For this reason, it compiles a list of key considerations in order to advance towards a consensus in respect to these type of academic programs.

The Meanings of Modern Design: Towards the Twenty-First Century

Discusses the development of style in the twentieth century, including its relationship with engineering, new materials, changing views of home, luxury goods, contemporary crafts, and the future of conservatism in design.

Design in History

“What is the use of history?” one might ask, when attempting to make sense of contemporary life. What answers might we find in the past to questions about the present when the current configuration of actions and events seems so volatile and unstable? Simply trying to keep our balance demands so much energy and attention that looking beyond the moment for helpful explanations might seem like a useless distraction. However, history has always played a role in shaping contemporary thought, whether it was Herodotus’s attempt to find patterns of human action to explain Athenian military might, the rediscovery of ancient philosophical and literary texts by Petrarch and other Renaissance scholars; or Karl Marx’s teleological vision of a classless society that would dissolve the conflict between the wealthy and the working class.1 “In recent years, most historians have tended to carve the past into small pieces and focus on specialized topics. They have done this rather than pursue the larger spatial and temporal visions that have animated a few of the profession’s most prominent figures including Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who has written, among many books, an epochal four-volume history of Western politics and society that ranges from the French Revolution in 1789 to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. In a collection of his essays, published in 1997 as On History, Hobsbawm presented three papers which dealt, respectively, with the past, present, and future. In “The Sense of the Past,” he affirmed the place of the past in the present. “To be a member of any human community,” he wrote, “is to situate oneself with regard to one’s (its) past, if only by rejecting it. The past, therefore, is a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values, and other patterns of human society.”2 Hobsbawm combined a belief in “la longue duree” or “the long term” from the French Annales school, which he called the “formalized social past,” with the recognition that this stable component of the social order is complemented by more flexible sectors of social change and innovation.3 Recognizing the various components of society and their differing rates of change can be extremely helpful in contributing to a balanced process of social transformation that does not lead to social destabilization or collapse. Thus, for Hobsbawm, history in its best sense becomes “a process of directional change, of development or evolution.”4 Nonetheless, there are forces that militate against learning from history. One that Hobsbawm identifies is the “a-historical, The initial version of this essay was presented as the keynote address at the 17th Annual Symposium on the Decorative Arts and Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York City, Thursday, April 3, 2008.

Expanding the Boundaries of Design: The Product Environment and the New User

While debates about the comparative merits of modern and postmodern style, Braun and Memphis, High Tech and High Touch, rage worldwide, more radical changes in designing are taking place. Most significantly, microprocessors are making possible more complex products with a widened range of functions, resulting in a new flexible relation to the user, who selects specific functions from a broad set of options by programming the product or making choices from a visual menu. Consider the capabilities of the video cassette recorder. A person can have a program recorded off the air automatically and then can view it at any time. One can blip out commercials and st p, reverse, or fast forward programs to access any part of the tape, just as one does with a book or magazine. New picture-inpicture systems will even allow the viewer to watch as many as nine programs on the same screen.1 Programs on videocassettes can also be substituted for those offered by the networks or cable companies. This is no different from what readers do with printed materials, but for video viewing it breaks the hammerlock of predetermined programs at set times that the broadcast and cable networks previously offered the viewer. The point here is not to make too much of this token user control, since it is the content of video programming that is ultimately liberating or confining, but to illustrate that a more flexible relation to the video medium

Design Research and its Challenges

In the Editorial that accompanied the premier issue of Design Studies in June 1979, Sidney Gregory stated: ‘For the first time a forum exists for the written exchange of ideas and knowledge about design which lets us work across national boundaries and what are perhaps more difficult to traverse, the boundaries of prior disciplines (Gregory, 1979: the establishment of the journal was itself the outgrowth of a research initiative that had begun more than 15 years earlier with the first design methods conferences). While there were books and conference proceedings where research on design appeared before the arrival of Design Studies, the journals presence was an important step forward in the emergence of design research as a field. As its contribution to the fields development, Design Studies has, for more than 20 years, published numerous articles that have addressed important questions related particularly to the methodology, epistemology, and philosophy of design.

Constructivism and the Modern Poster

In the “Productivist Manifesto,” an early Russian Constructivist document written by Alexander Rodchenko and his wife, Varvara Stephanova, in 1920, a connection was made between ideology and the constructive organization of materials by the artist. The manifesto posited the necessity “to attain a synthesis of ideological and formal aspects” in order that the artists work have some practical application to social life. The authors rejected the art of the past and advocated “communist forms of constructive building” based on a systematic manipulation of materials.

Design Studies: Tasks and Challenges

ABSTRACT Useful parallels can be drawn between the way an art world has accepted and legitimized new forms of art and the situation where new forms of design are appearing as rapidly as art movements did in the 1960s. But we still do not have within the broad domain of design the sense of a design world. While designs discursive properties may be recognized, it is still expected to achieve an outcome. There is every reason to expect that unprecedented forms of design will continue to emerge as responses to new conditions. Therefore, design studies as it emerges as an interdisciplinary site for design reflection faces numerous challenges. First and foremost, it must find its own subject matter, topics of investigation and methods. Second, it must persuade accomplished scholars in traditional disciplines to participate in building the field; third, it must put forth research that can help clear up the chaos that currently exists in the design domain; and fourth, it must take a lead in shaping designs future in a world of increasing complexity and turbulence.