Word: papanek
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Gustav F. Papanek, chairman of the Economics Department at Boston University and close colleague of Gilbert, said that "Gilbert had as much an impact on the economic development of Pakistan during that time as any foreigner bar none...
...layman, these designers may seem innocuous people who spend their time adding chrome strips to auto bodies, streamlining fountain pens, creating bright new packages. But Papanek indicts his own colleagues for forgetting the context of their innovative work. Since they occupy a key position in the transformation of an idea into a product, he says, designers could insist on manufacturing processes that do not damage the environment. Instead, he charges, their primary aim is to increase sales through wasteful changes in style. They also clutter the market with basically useless products -electrically heated footstools, ballpoint pens crowned with plastic orchids...
Candle Radio. As Papanek sees it, designers should turn to the problems of the "real world," particularly the problems of the world's poor. He and one of his students have designed a simple radio that is being manufactured in Indonesia as a cottage industry under UNESCO sponsorship. Powered by heat rising from a candle, the radio looks ugly but costs only 90, com plete with an earplug. In Africa, Papanek and another student sought a cheap means of preserving food. Their solution: a "cooling unit" insulated by walls of native fiber. It works for twelve hours...
Even for the affluent U.S., Papanek lists scores of useful items that designers have never bothered to make. For example, there is still no inexpensive pill bottle that dispenses one pill at a time and is thus safe from children's tampering. There is no practical pocket-size Braille writer, no simple gas and electricity meter, no well-designed first-aid kit, no cheap hearing aid (though transistor radios using the same basic technology cost only $3.98). He himself had to invent a cloth book his infant daughter might enjoy, complete with bright colors and different textures...
...Papanek, whose rhetoric is so extreme at times that he calls corporation executives "criminals," has already run into many critics who argue that he himself has lost contact with the real world. Some do not believe that designers can-or should-break their links to industry. Others doubt whether people truly want useful things, as defined by Papanek; they argue that the desire for embellishment in the design of cars or clocks, and even the demand for $1 diapers for parakeets, is just as real as the need for 90 radios. Finally, the critics denounce as Utopian Papanek...