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The Humane Village Journal 1

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Designers

The
Humane Village
Journal 1

 

 

 

The Work of the Designer

The order in the universe indicates that there is a Designer, but not necessarily a moral or immoral one.

Voltaire

Victor Papanek •

All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk, pulling a tooth, baking an apple pie, educating a child.

 

Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order. The ultimate job of the designer is to transform man's environment and tools, and by extension, man himself.

 

Robert Burns •

If you form ideas and turn them into products, services, communications, environments, systems or organizations, you're a designer.

 

Victor Papanek •

In facing the consequences of our work and accepting both social and moral responsibility for what we do, we can make our best contribution: to transform and to give form. A precious gift.

 

Masuteru Aoba •

Designing is an act which should benefit everybody, and not be possessed exclusively by an individual. It should be instrumental in realizing a spiritually enriched and more convenient life style for the greatest possible number of people. The quality of design depends on the extensiveness of the designer's mind and spirit. Design must take into account resources, environment, energy, convenience, beauty, and should be reasonable; as well, it must consider recycling. Successful design is kind not only to mankind but also to the environment. Designers should bear in mind that they have a responsibility not only to their clients, but to all inhabitants of this planet, because design concepts must be of benefit to all.

Victor Papanek •

In design these basic human strivings: a need for comprehensible order, beauty, fitness, simplicity, anticipatory thinking, and playful innovation all interact. A designer &endash; in the broadest sense &endash; is a human being successfully walking the thin bridge between past endowments and future possibilities.

 

Alexander Neumeister •

...The creative process should be accompanied by a profound feeling of responsibility &endash; not in the legal sense, but more from a moral standpoint. It should stem from the awareness that it is our obligation to choose, from the spectrum of alternatives, the most appropriate solution

 

... Choosing the most appropriate solution could and should mean something quite different from finding an optimal compromise within the classic triade of function, production and marketing.

 

Dieter Rams •

Indifference toward people and the reality in which they live is the one and only cardinal sin in design.

Stefano Marzano •

Design is a political act. Every time we design a product we are making a statement about the direction the world will move in.

 

Marshal McLuhan • 

Every human artifact is a medium of communication whose message may be said to be the totality of the satisfactions and dissatisfactions it engenders which, at the speed of light, reveal simultaneous process patterns. To arrive at this set of process patterns, one asks the questions:

1. What does any artifact enlarge or enhance?
2. What does it erode or obsolesce?
3. What does it retrieve that had been earlier obsolesced?
4. What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of
its potential ?

 

Jorge Frascara •

Design is a professional activity that must be practised within an ethical context. A technically good designer without an ethical attitude is a cultural, social, ideological and environmental danger.

A technically good designer who works to help one corporation against another when neither provides a true benefit to the public, practises useless design.

The measure of design quality is not the satisfaction of the client but the positive and significant contribution a design makes to the lives of people, above and beyond short term goals or unsound market appetites.

Creating industrial objects and massively promoting attitudes and behaviours, design offers fantastic possibilities, but it poses an unavoidable responsibility to the practitioners and their clients.

Design, understood within broad contexts and long term goals, helps business and governments, and brings personal satisfaction to the designers, but, at the centre, design is not about profit, propaganda, style or personal expression, it is about the welfare of humanity.

Peter Lloyd Jones • 

...We live in a largely secular world whose radical novelty de-mands its own mythology. The creation of myths is not the province of designers, even less of design managers. It is primarily a task

for poets, rooted in concerns more substantial than shopping, in tune with the deepest fears and desires of their society.

 

But if it is not for designers to create myths, it is for them to respond to them and, using all the resources of industry, to generate a physical world which expresses their deepest content. For, after nearly a century of a modernism which has had nothing to say about culture or the transmission of deeper social meanings and values &endash; a modernism so radical it has sought to destroy that continuity of culture in time, which is the province of myth &endash; we have forgotten how to respond to briefs which demand more than technical and marketing solutions. Unless we can rediscover this sensibility, we will never achieve a design that is more satisfying, and therefore more permanent, than our febrile century has so far managed. And mindless growth and its counterparts, alienation and pollution, will go on.

 

Ezio Manzini •

The recent history of the culture of design and products shows us a more evident line that, from the critics of the Modern Movement through a series of phases, now finds itself at a sort of impasse: the trend towards an unimportant formalism, the multiplication of forms and functions without reason, the loss of the product's ethical references.

Peter Lloyd Jones •

Because it does not even attempt to address wider cultural issues, design which is prompted by conventional marketing theory leads to the production of an unending stream of so called 'life-style' products which are really no such thing, but only - surface imitations. Emotionally unsatisfying in the long run, they are discardedfor some new offering, leading not only to the demand for ever 'more' with the concomitant environmental problems which that brings, but finally, to a sense of dissatisfaction and alienation that cannot be assuaged by consumption at all.

Philip Slater •

The environment can absorb a man's organic wastes, and even turn them to good use; and as to his psychic pollution, what difference do fantasies make? Let him project his evil-heartedness wherever he likes&endash; what does it matter? The danger arises when man's psychic excretions are given material form &endash; when his projections appear as physical objects... Our psychic excretions show an annoying tendency to become part of our real environment, so that we are forced to consume our own psychic wastes in physical form.

 

Ezio Manzini •

The limited character of the physical and semiotic environment in which we live and operate stands out and appears in the form of product saturation and an accumulation of trash of all kinds (both physical and semiotic). Messages, images, languages may not proliferate uncontrolled without resulting into an accumulation of semiotic trash and a huge noise. This is obviously true for the information provided by media, as well as for other peculiar 'media', that is, products; the uncontrolled increase of performances and forms made possible by technology takes place beyond an adequate cultural control, thus producing noise and trash.

 

Bruce Archer • 

Design without any ethic, serving industry on the basis of sheer expediency, would certainly have been baleful in the past, and could not conceivably be acceptable now. It was the tawdriness

of the industrial revolution which gave birth to the idea of cultu-rally responsible, art-based designing. Society continues to raid natural resources, ravage the ecology, and degrade people's living and working environments at an accelerating pace.

It must be recognised that most of the pressures which have demolished the carefully nurtured art-directed ethic are directed towards the same fundamental ends as those which gave birth to it. They leave us still concerned with the preservation of society, but in a different, holistic, more urgent, yet perhaps more mundane way. We are concerned with physical as well as cultural survival. Whatever we put in the place of our present battered design philosophy, or use to modify it, must therefore be at least as responsible.

Penny Sparke •

The art of design, which chooses that the things we use shall look as they do, has a very much wider and more sustained impact than any other art. Everyone is exposed to it all day long.

 

The responsibility for the relationship between industry and culture falls, in the modern world, on the shoulders of design. In the hands of responsible manufacturers, designers, critics and theorists, design can act as a powerful agent of change.

 

Avram Grant •

Can anyone recognize anymore the cultural background of any given new design? Does a design today manifest the climatic and geographic conditions from where it has originated, or in which it will have to function? Are there still regional characteristics of shapes and materials? Or does McLuhan's 'Global Village' already cover not only verbal and pictorial communication, but also all forms of visual and three dimensional information including architecture, products, packaging, food and fashion? Through the promotion of design we are actually destroying the rich cultural diversity of our world. Thus within one or two generations design has been transformed from a 'bright future' prophecy into a culture nightmare, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

 

Andrea Branzi •

Today we are surrounded by an international planetary culture teeming with handcrafted items, local products, ethnic cultures etc. Post-industrial capitalism's home base is not the factory but the 'integral company'. Design is contending with one of its traditions.

 

The '50s and '60s were the awareness decades, which then gave way to arrogant internationalism. Everything was distilled down to the quintessence of a cold, grey, reductive reality. The idea is that industry brings order to things; hence, by doing its bidding, we arrive at an international style.

 

Today we've swung to the opposite pole, where industry has proved to be a producer of disorder the world over, in both things and people. So it's useless to stand around waiting for diversity to help.

P.J.Grillo • 

In the great confusion that today covers the appreciation of good or bad design, a general reassessment of these values is necessary. In this highly organised society we have become the victims of two impulses which have gradually taken over one of our most precious prerogatives: Freedom of Choice. Inertia and fear control our daily lives, our thoughts, and our acts.

Robert Campbell •

Designers are not destroying the planet because they're specifying the wrong kind of toilets or hardwoods. They're destroying it because they're encouraging the wrong ways of living.

Stefano Marzano •

Are we doing enough to make sure that the world we'd like to live in will actually come about? A world where we not only have material comforts but a clear conscience as well? A world in which we can rejoice in the fulfilment of our own goal as well as those of others?

 

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© 199 4 The Humane Village Centre for Compassionate Design and the Authors

The Humane Village Centre for Compassionate Design is a not for profit organization.
Its objectives are:
• to promote the philosophy of design known as the "Humane Village" among designers, manufacturers and consumers through the publication of
material and the holding of seminars and conferences.
• to develop methods and advise corporations and consumers on issues related to socially responsible design;
• to promote and establish a network of interested parties and organizations.
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