Allison Clarke - Actions Speak Louder

Design and Culture
The Journal of the Design Studies Forum
ISSN: 1754-7075 (Print) 1754-7083 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdc20
“Actions Speak Louder”
Alison J. Clarke
To cite this article: Alison J. Clarke (2013) “Actions Speak Louder”, Design and Culture, 5:2,
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“Actions Speak
Louder”
Victor Papanek and the
Legacy of Design Activism
Alison J. Clarke
151 Design and Culture DOI: 10.2752/175470813X13638640370698

Alison J. Clarke, Chair ABSTRACT Victor J. Papanek’s Design for
of Design History and
Theory at the University
the Real World: Human Ecology and Social
of Applied Arts Vienna, Change (1971) is widely understood as the
is editor of Design seminal text of twentieth-century design
Anthropology: Object
Culture in the 21st
activism. Papanek, a Viennese émigré based
Century (Springer, in the USA, disseminated his ideas globally
2010), bringing together through lectures, broadcasts, and publications.
key thinkers in the
areas of anthropology
This article uses previously unexplored
and contemporary primary sources to trace the origins of
design. She is Papanek’s design activism, asserting that his
presently completing
a monograph. Victor
early activism has been incorrectly aligned
Papanek: Designer for with the historiography of green politics and
the Real World (MIT, North American consumer-rights discourse.
forthcoming).
designtheory@uni-ak.ac.at
Instead, it argues that the conception of
Papanek’s groundbreaking Design for the Real
World, that would underpin a global design
activism movement, had its origins in the early
participatory design activism of 1960s Finland
and the emergence of a pan-Scandinavian
student design movement.
Alison J. Clarke
KEYWORDS: Victor Papanek, design activism, 1960s Finnish

design, Scandinavian design
Introduction
In 1970, Victor J. Papanek, designer and design critic, published in
Swedish Miljön och miljonerna: design som tjänst eller förtjänst? (The
Environment and the Millions: Design for Service or Profit?), a book
that would become a seminal design work of the twentieth century
(Figure 1). An English edition was published under the title, Design
152 Design and Culture
Figure 1
Book cover, Miljön och miljonerna: design som tjänst eller förtjänst?
[The Environment and the Millions: Design for Service or Profit?],
by Victor Papanek. Sweden: Bonniers, 1970. Cover by Per-Olov Larsson.
Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism
for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, by Pantheon
Books in 1971. Eventually translated into over twenty languages,
it would become the most widely read and globally cited design
polemic of its time, politicizing a generation of design students.
Existing scholarly treatments typically locate Papanek’s work
in a historiography of design, environmentalism, and technology
spanning the beginning of 1960s counter-movements to the alterna-
tive and appropriate technology movements of the 1970s. Design
historian Pauline Madge, for example, has argued that Papanek was
part of a growing number of “voices of dissent within the design
profession” that included “the Appropriate Technology Movement
with E.F. Schumacher and the Intermediate Technology Group
(ITDG), and Alternative and Radical Technology that developed
out of the counter movement of the 1960s” (Madge 1993: 153).

Similarly, Design for the Real World and Papanek’s overall polemic
have generally been understood in the context of contemporaneous
publications, such as Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics
as If People Mattered (1973). A testament to the way in which he
has been so conclusively aligned with ecological movements is
summarized in the words of a populist 1980s design commentator,
who fifteen years after the publication of Design for the Real World
dismissed Papanek as “a cult figure while ecology was fashionable
during the early seventies” (Bayley 1985: 202).
One exception to this reductionist approach is the work of histo-
rian Nigel Whiteley, who has identified Papanek’s Design for the Real
World as a “seminal text” and “the bible of the responsible design
movement” (Whiteley 1993: 98). In his survey of socially responsible
design, Whiteley argues that Papanek’s major influence was less in
establishing ecological and green design and more in advocating a
moral and social purpose within the profession, particularly in the
guise of a holistic design approach that embraced “design inclusiv-
ity.” His agenda for design was premised on a broad recognition of
social inequality; as summarized by Whiteley, there was “no justifica-
tion for designing trivial and stylish consumer items for the affluent
of the advantaged countries, when the majority of humankind was
living below subsistence level” (Whiteley 1993: 99). While Papanek
engaged with issues of green design (and was regularly featured in
journals and publications related to ecological movements), his im-
pact on design for “developing countries,” aging, medicine, disability,
and State provisioning lay at the core of his agenda. Papanek’s main
objective was to politicize the design profession through sustained
activism and to bring to account the design industry’s failure to

offer any effective critique of the burgeoning culture of postwar
consumption.
Design for the Real World has been further assimilated into
a broader historiography of the postwar North American ethical
consumer and ecological movements of the 1970s (Madge 1993;
Whiteley 1993). Certainly, in literary terms Papanek’s discourse
Alison J. Clarke
adhered to a genre of US consumer critique heralded by popular

figureheads such as Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe at Any Speed:
The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (1965), and
Vance Packard’s bestselling exposé of the manufacturing industry’s
use of product obsolescence, The Waste Makers (1960). But in
contrast to consumer rights reformers and critics, Papanek was a
self-styled design intellectual and facilitator of grass-roots activism.
Design for the Real World and the emergence of a coherent
design activism were both the direct result of Papanek’s sustained
engagement with collaborative, action-based, “hands-on” design
activism in Nordic countries of the late 1960s. This article explores
how Papanek’s polemic was born out of a collective response to
the late twentieth-century struggle to re-engage design with a social
agenda that might operate outside the formal, monolithic capitalist

economies as defined by the USA. The fact that it was a Swedish
press that had published Papanek’s first major work reveals the ex-
tent to which his socially responsible design agenda was formulated
and embedded in late 1960s pan-Scandinavian design politics.
Using original primary research to chart Papanek’s initial encounters
with Finland and Finnish design, this article goes on to reposition the
most widely read design activism polemic in the broader context of
Scandinavian student design initiatives of the late 1960s.
During Victor Papanek’s tenure as Professor and Chair of the
Environmental and Industrial Design Department, Purdue University,
Indiana, he combined intensive work on the manuscript that would
become Design for the Real World with the pioneering of a trans-
disciplinary design program that exposed students to alternative de-
sign perspectives, including anthropology, bionics, psychology, and
filmmaking.1 In the latter part of this period, 1969–70, when Papanek
had already become established on the art-college circuit as a critic
of design, he visited numerous Scandinavian countries to take part
in a range of student projects (Fallan 2011: 40). However, the most
formative period of his engagement with Scandinavian design was
1966–8, when Papanek was invited to Finland by prominent arts and
design figureheads, in what would become a mutually beneficial and
enduring alliance that, crucially, coincided with Papanek’s refining
of the first draft for Design for the Real World. It is important to note
that during this period, at least within the parameters of design
history, the term “Scandinavian design” was generally understood
to include Finland.2 Yet, as this article explores, there were, in fact,
distinctive design cultures emanating from the respective countries
brought together under the self-consciously generated definition

of “Scandinavian design” that had substantially more influence in
political and activist terms than others.
The “Northern Lights” of Finnish Design

It was in Finland that Papanek’s proselytizing over the value of cross-
disciplinary design pedagogy and the understanding of design
ractice within the anthropological paradigm met its most enthusi-

p
astic audience (Clarke 2010). His thesis of an ethical design culture
underpinned by an economy of need, rather than an economy of
desire, sketched by his US contemporaries Packard and Nader,
required empirical example; and Finland, with its relatively recent
urbanization, socialist infrastructure, and “good design” pedigree
proffered an ideal backdrop for Papanek’s theories.
Following one of his earliest Finnish visits in 1967, Papanek penned
an article poetically titled “Northern Lights,” in which he explained
to the American design profession how “[a]lmost all excellence of
Finnish design has grown out of honest need” (Papanek 1967a: 29).
He described how the lineage from handcraft to mass production had
evolved naturally, thus eluding the ceaseless and purposelessness
of a megalithic US industrial model geared up to generate design

obsolescence. Finnish design, by Papanek’s account, belonged to
a sustainable ecology exemplified by the influence of environmen-
tally determining factors: long winters, small living spaces, and the
traditions of the sauna. The fully illustrated “Northern Lights” piece
appeared in the journal Industrial Design, a publication loosely affili-
ated with the Industrial Design Society of America – the organization
that Papanek would later claimed had “blackballed” him following
publication of the English version of Design for the Real World in
1971. Juxtaposing Finnish design, defined as “good form” born
of a democratic society, with the endless flotsam of gadgetry and
“toys for adults” that defined late twentieth-century North American
design, the feature was intended as a provocative, open critique
of the design industry that the journal, itself, sought to represent.
Readers of Industrial Design would have been fully aware of Finland’s
sensitive proximity to the USSR and the Cold War politics of design
(McDonald 2010; Rislakki 2011).3 Within the context of the conserva-
tive strictures of the US design industry, Papanek’s expression of an
overt sympathy for a socialist economic system that prioritized social
relations over individual aspiration and state-supported amenities
over privatized wealth was a form of “internal” activism. His contempt
for an American culture defined by commerce, in which even the
most traditional communities were beholden to “the market,” was
made explicit: where Finland boasted a surviving arts and crafts
tradition, in the USA, lamented Papanek, there were “five-and-ten
cent stores, supermarkets and discount houses in every town and
hamlet with the worst excesses of trash product culture filtering down
into even ‘the tiniest village’” (Papanek 1967a: 29).
In contrast to the superficiality and alienation of US commodity

culture, Papanek’s feature sketched out an idyllic vision of Finnish
design culture centered on the home and its familial and social
relations:
[T]he northern climate is partially responsible for the fact that

the dwelling is regarded not only as a place where one eats
Alison J. Clarke
and sleeps, but as the true frame around family life. In the
South one meets friends in bars and inns; in Finland you invite
them to your home, hence the house and its furnishings are of
social interest. (Papanek 1967a: 29)
In his romanticized analysis of late 1960s Finnish life, dreary winters

resulted in the bright, kaleidoscopic colors of Marimekko fabrics and
Vuokko dresses; small farmhouses inspired Finns to develop closely
packed furnishings and stackable, multi-function home wares; and
wood technology derived from the making of stave boats, elabo-
rated Papanek, “greatly influenced the Finnish designer’s approach
to wood, as the early furniture of Alvar Aalto exemplifies” (Papanek
1967a: 29–30). Furthermore, Papanek observed, “unlike England,

France and the United States fashion is designed by people who
don’t hate women” (Papanek 1967a: 29–30).
It was the Marimekko dress which Papanek specifically lionized
and the ways in which it expressed nuanced cultural sensitivity and
fitness for purpose wholly in tune with the versatility of the compara-
tively liberated 1960s European woman:
If we look at the circumstances under which a Marimekko dress

is worn (housework in the morning, shopping in the afternoon,
cocktails and dinner out, and then a film with only the sandals
changed to heels and stockings, and then a final plunge in the
Sauna), it is easy to see how the simple and comfortable lines
reflect these many activities. (Papanek 1967a: 30)
Papanek’s singling out of the Marimekko dress for celebration was

by no means arbitrary. Jacqueline Kennedy’s taste for easy-to-wear,
brightly colored, “liberal” European Marimekko dresses was well
known; she was famously pictured on the front cover of Sports
Illustrated in 1960, the launch year of John F. Kennedy’s presidential
campaign, and was widely photographed in Marimekko sundresses
throughout the 1960s. Finnish design, even for a general United
States audience, was already associated with a brand of utopian
liberalism.
The leading Finnish design companies Marimekko, Artek, Iittala,
and Nuutajarvi distributed their wares during the 1960s to a pre-
dominantly liberal, bourgeois elite through The Design Research
Store, which had a dozen branches throughout the States, including
New York City, Boston, and San Francisco. The items these com-
panies produced, ranging from textiles and bent-wood furniture to
table- and glassware, presented themselves to Papanek with a type
of anthropological integrity that far exceeded modernist functionality;
“these products,” he commented, “have made real inroads in the
everyday culture of Finland and play an important part in the average
man’s way of life” (Papanek 1967a: 29).
Historian Kjetil Fallan has described how the understanding of

Finnish design has, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, been
stifled by a “straight-jacket of mythologies meticulously woven
around design from the Nordic countries by marketers, promoters
and historians alike” (Fallan 2012: 1). What Fallan describes as the
“disturbingly narrow” parameters by which Nordic material culture
is viewed is perfectly exemplified by Papanek’s vision of a liberal,
homogenized Finnish life devoid of popular culture and defined by
a material culture of authenticity. Yet, as design historian Pekka
Korvenmaa has argued, Finland during this period was the most
Americanized of all the Nordic countries, and it was not “until radical
and … left-wing political currents swept over the intellectual land-
scape of Finland in the late 1960s that the culture of design became
ideologically politicized” (Korvenmaa 2012: 222).

The essentialist tone of Papanek’s homage to Finnish design and
culture, his setting up of its authenticity in opposition to the degen-
eracy of American commodity capitalism, is undoubtedly flawed
as a serious piece of anthropologically researched critique. The
suggestion that Finns did not embrace popular commodity culture,
or the influences of contemporary media, in the 1960s is clearly
over-simplistic in analysis. Furthermore, Papanek’s article acted
in part as a type of “advertorial” for the Finnish design industry as
awards, including the Finnish Cultural Affairs Travel Grant, supported
a number of Papanek’s trips to Finland. However, in arguing for a
societal understanding of the practice of design and the necessity
to frame aesthetics in the broader contexts of local traditions of
material culture, Papanek’s essay drew attention to the inseparability
of design and the politics of everyday life and sketched out an
“embedded” approach to design that would become the hallmark
of his approach. As such, it represented the beginning of a genre of
design activism, shaped directly by Papanek’s experience of Finnish
design and material culture, which would feed into the broader
design activism of Europe and North America throughout the 1970s.
Prior to the 1960s and 1970s, Finnish design culture had been
dominated by the impact of governmental policy and the broader
representation of Scandinavian design and mid-century modernism
typified by the Design in Scandinavia exhibition that toured the USA
and Canada in 1954–7, the effect of which extended well into the
mid-1960s (Guldberg 2011). The government policies that boosted
Finnish design had made national heroes of designers such as Tapio
Wirkkala, Kaj Franck, and Timo Sarpeneva. The dramatic urbaniza-
tion of Finland in the 1960s saw the country transformed from an

agrarian to an industrialized nation which, according to Korvenmaa,
prompted an urgency for “national strategies to steer this new and
more complex union of design, industries and growing foreign trade”
(Korvenmaa 2012: 225).
The extent to which Victor Papanek was formally entangled
in what Korvenmaa has described as the “ideological battlefield”
Alison J. Clarke
of 1960s and 1970s Finland, as both a critic and a representa-

tive of the design industry in the United States, is indisputable.
His relationship with Finnish design culture extended formally
at least as far back as the summer of 1966, when he attended
an International Design Seminar in Jyväskylä before going on to
travel through Lapland and central and southern Finland. In July
1967, Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek represented the
United States at the 11th Jyväskylä Kulttuuripäivät [Arts Festival]
and later that summer were also invited to speak at the first pan-
Scandinavian design conference at Otaniemi, Finland (Papanek
1967a: 33). They would also attend the groundbreaking design
seminars of Suomenlinna in July 1968, addressed later in this
article.
Despite the widespread, enthusiastic coverage of Papanek’s vis-

its to Finland, in both the design and popular national press, voices
of dissent toward his wholesale appropriation of Finnish design
began to emerge from diverse quarters. Following Papanek’s at-
tendance of the Jyväskylä Arts Festival in 1967, whose theme was
“Technology and Humanism,” Lauri Perkki, a student activist and
journalist, condemned the patronage of well-meaning outsiders in
the daily central Finnish newspaper Keskisuomalaine: “We cannot
afford to bring specialists from behind the oceans just to tell jokes
to the plebei” (Perkki 1967: 19). The basis of Perkki’s critique was
that the Institute of Special Education at Jyväskylä University, with
which he was involved, had not been engaged in the design project
for the special equipment developed by Papanek for the rehabilita-
tion of the physically impaired during his visit. Certainly Papanek
interacted mostly with the general public during his initial visit to
Finland, rather than designers and architects. This is made evident
by the prominent articles regarding his design reform manifesto
appearing first in Finnish and Swedish women’s magazines rather
than the design press – due in part to the fact that Papanek had
been a late addition to the Jyväskylä Arts Festival 1967 program,
actively seeking the invitation himself rather than being indepen-
dently approached as a key speaker.4 Consequently, his lectures
were delivered for the “studia generalis” (Open University) and
attended by large audiences, including students, the press, and
residents of Jyväskylä. In the context of a pre-existing national
design culture centered so fervently on famed and fêted individual
design personalities, Papanek’s ambiguous status (was he a “real”
designer?) also lent to the disquiet in some design-profession
quarters.
The women’s press in Finland and Sweden picked up enthusi-
astically on the ethical consumption aspects of Papanek’s lectures.
In September 1967, Finland’s largest-circulation women’s weekly
magazine, Me Naiset, featured a leading article (Figure 2) entitled
“The Third Way,” which used the politicized tone of a consciousness-
raising speech for consumers, its byline reading:
Figure 2
Portrait of Victor Papanek featured in Me Naiset (September 27, 1967).
Photograph by Jukka Vatanen.
Have you ever drunk from a glass that is difficult to drink from?
Ever wondered why some saucers are more expensive than
others? Have you ever taken up a brush handle and noticed
that it is too short? Many people have! (Papanek 1967b: 76)
While Papanek’s consumer critique found favor in popular media, it

was a fellow North American who would emerge as one of Papanek’s

greatest critics in Finland. Donald Willcox, a self-taught expert of
Finnish material culture, keenly followed Papanek’s involvement with
Finnish national design throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1973, Willcox published an impressively detailed account of
Finnish design as a form of extended critique of the misappropriation
of indigenous material culture. In Finnish Design: Facts and Fancy
Alison J. Clarke
Willcox titled an entire section of the postscript “Victor Papanek.”

Taking Papanek to task for his false representation of Finland, he
described him as a “design parasite” with a superficial understand-
ing of the nation’s culture:
[Papanek’s] opinions ring with the same sounds as that of an

American tourist visiting Helsinki on a 24-hour stopover … he
has been guided from place to place without the opportunity
of going it alone. His opinions about Finland have come from
surface glances, rather than digging below the surface to see
what makes Finland tick. (Willcox 1973: 47)
Willcox goes on to tell how a Finnish friend compared

Mr Papanek’s visits to Finland to those of the circuit-riding

gospel preacher who travels from town to town delivering the
same Sunday sermon, and who sometimes forgets where he
is, and delivers the same message a second time. (Willcox
1973: 47)
Papanek and Willcox had, according to Willcox’s account in Finnish

Design: Facts and Fancy, directly corresponded regarding their
conflicting claims, as North Americans, to an authentic insight into
their host culture. In 1973, Willcox forwarded a signed copy of his
book to Papanek, claiming its synchronicity with Design for the Real
World and pointing out that the manuscript for his Finnish Design
had actually been completed in 1970, but that the press had taken a
tardy three years in releasing it.
Design Activism Helsinki 1968: The Suomenlinna

Design Seminars
In 1968, Suomenlinna (a series of fortressed islands in the port of
Helsinki) became the setting for a design activist intervention that
brought into question the craft-based vernacular design heritage
that Papanek, and the broader international design establishment,
so vociferously celebrated. The Industrial, Environment, and Product
Design Seminars were initiated in February 1968 by a group of
Finnish design-activist students who had approached the Finnish
National Fund for Research and Development to garner support for
a forum in which to generate critical approaches to contemporary
design, and more significantly to urgently address the perceived
shift from craft production and object-based design thinking to the

broader interdisciplinary role of industrial design. The Suomenlinna
design event was initiated shortly after criticism was voiced over the
Finnish contribution to the Montreal World Expo of 1967. Curated by
the highly influential Finnish designer and sculptor Timo Sarpaneva,
the Finnish exhibit featured abstract and “craft as art” pieces that
were deemed to have failed the Exposition’s central theme of
lobalization and mass electronic communication. The perceived

g
inappropriateness of Sarpaneva’s 1967 Finnish Expo contribution
signaled a broader crisis and complacency within a Finnish design
culture that promoted selected individual designers, rather than a
proactive societal activism.
Following on from the Jyväskylä Summer Festival of 1967, stu-
dents of the Institute of Industrial Art (later to become the University
of Art and Design Helsinki), in cooperation with student activists
from other Nordic countries, generated a critical discussion around
the direction of design pedagogy and the future of design. Initiating
the Scandinavian Design Students Organization (SDO), they orga-
nized a further Design Seminar in Otaniemi, Finland, inviting Victor
J. Papanek and Buckminster Fuller. Papanek’s lecture appeared
under the title “Do-it-yourself Murder” in the SDO journal, edited by

Yrjö Sotamaa and printed in Helsinki.5 A version of this article would
later form the fourth chapter of Papanek’s Design for the Real World,
revealing how his activities in Finland and with the students directly
influenced his work.6
According to Korvenmaa, the student activism that led to the
SDO initiative and the 1968 Suomenlinna seminars marked a turning
point in Finnish design: “Nordic collaboration was revived by the
young generation now centred on critical thinking and activism
instead of promotional strategies linked to export industries, mani-
fested in international exhibitions and their object-focused displays”
(Korvenmaa 2012: 229).
The Industrial, Environment, and Product Design Seminars that
were organized in two three-day sessions in July 1968 featured
leading figures of Finnish design, design pedagogy, and policymak-
ing alongside leading international guest experts renowned for their
tackling of socially and politically pressing design and architectural
issues. The “think-tank” style of the event included talks and design
projects and brought together the great luminaries of design activ-
ism, including Buckminster Fuller, Christopher Alexander, a research
team headed by Bruce Archer from the Royal College of Art, London,
Victor Papanek, himself, and figures that defined Finnish contempo-
rary design, including Kaj Frank and Antti Nurmesniemi (Figure 3).
The talks and seminars were intense, immersive events that often
lasted well into the night – with discussion transferring to the sum-
mer houses of Finland’s leading designers. Several of Papanek’s
speeches formed the basis of chapters in Design for the Real World;
and the title of the first Swedish edition of Miljön och miljonerna:
design som tjänst eller förtjänst?, translated into English as The

Environment and the Millions: Design for Service or Profit?, revealed
just how closely the book was aligned with the agenda of the
Suomenlinna 1968 “Industrial, Environment and Product Design”
seminars. When asked by the student organizers to offer an insight
into design pedagogy in the USA, Papanek described at length his
own trans-disciplinary program at Purdue University, inspiring one
Alison J. Clarke
Figure 3
Victor Papanek leads a discussion at the design seminars Suomenlinna,
Helsinki, 1968. Photograph by Kristian Runeberg. Courtesy of Yrjö Sotamaa.
of the leading organizers Yrjö Sotamma to join him in Indiana as

Associate Professor from 1969 to 1970.7
But it was “action,” rather than words, that defined the
Suomenlinna design seminars, as well as an emphasis on anthropo-
logical and participation-based design research. An environment for
children with cerebral palsy formed the basis of Papanek’s contribu-
tion to the event. Nine design students from Finland, Sweden, and
Hungary carried out the basic research regarding needs for children
with cerebral palsy from an interdisciplinary perspective and con-
ducted ethnographic-style research with face-to-face interviews with
clinicians, as well as “participant-user” play sessions with children
affected by the condition. Starting from the premise that not a single
toy had ever been designed specifically for children with cerebral
palsy, the team, facilitated by Victor Papanek, Zolton Popovic, and
Yrjö Sotamma, set about designing environments and objects that
embraced fun and playfulness while offering therapy. The action-
based, “hands-on” approach involved four meetings of three hours
each with the nine-person team, each meeting deciding the direction
of the next. Gradually, the idea for an “environmental, two-meter
cube that could travel in knocked-down form from clinic to clinic
emerged” (Papanek 1968: 43). The actual structure – featuring
Marimekko fabrics – was constructed in five afternoons of six hours
each. It was named “CP-1” on the understanding that this prototype
would spawn a series (“CP-2,” “CP-3,” and so on), thus creating a
portable product genre, each designed and researched with specific

special needs in mind.
This “design lab” approach demonstrated, according to Papanek,
“that a design conference need not be a succession of papers
presented by the pedantic to the apathetic” (Papanek 1968: 43). The
brightly colored cube was essentially an activist installation which the
team hoped would draw attention to “a vast area of design neglect”
and “make sure that each of the students who had participated
afterward would forever feel a little ashamed when designing a ‘sexy’
coffee percolator with tail fins, a grenade launcher or a transistorized
back-scratcher” (Papanek 1968: 43).
The Industrial, Environment, and Product Design Seminars took
place just weeks after the May 1968 opening of the 14th Milan
Triennale had been boycotted and then occupied by students

protesting against the consumerist agenda of the fair. The theme
of the 1968 Triennale had been “The Greater Number,” intended
loosely to address the issue of greater access to design and the
democracy of global communication as well as offering some form
of social critique; however, Europe’s most prominent design fair had
to be suspended after student activism ended in police intervention
(Nicolin 2008).
When Papanek chose the slogan “Actions Speak Louder” as the
title of a feature for the leading US industry journal Industrial Design,
in 1968, he was clearly alluding to a broader backdrop of radi-
cal politics, social upheaval, and student activism afoot in Europe.
Neither was it coincidental that he chose to decry the emptiness
of conventional design conferences in a journal whose audience
were predominantly corporate designers; he announced instead the
radical new participatory design processes he had evolved through
working with Finnish designers in Suomenlinna (Papanek 1968).
Contrasting the tedium and lack of creativity of conventional
design conferences with the enlightenment of student-originated
informal think tanks, Papanek continued thus:
Too many martinis, slight morning hangovers, overheated hotel

rooms … boring dry-as-dust-speeches … with one or two
topics, [such as] “Is Industrial Design Moving towards greater
Professionalism?” or “Do We have an Identity?”; all of these
combined with a degree of back-slapping bonhomie, spell
“design conference.” (Papanek 1968: 41)
In what was clearly meant as a thinly disguised critique of the world-

famous Aspen Design Conference in Colorado, which was domi-
nated by the major corporate power players of the USA and adhered
to a conventional speech-led format, Papanek declared: “We made
the decision … that at the 1968 Suomenlinna conference we would
take the heretical step of having designers design rather than dis-
cuss methodology” (Papanek 1968: 41).
Alison J. Clarke
In the course of his earliest engagements with Finland and Finnish

design, Papanek had managed to secure a dedicated activist follow-
ing that opened up further networks. Invitations to lead action-based
design initiatives, including an environmental renovation project in
urban Oslo, had become a regular feature of Papanek’s working itin-
erary (Papanek 1971: 281; Fallan 2011: 30).8 This culminated in the
summer of 1969 with the Danish representatives of the Scandinavian
Design Student Organization (SDO) inviting him as key speaker to
the student conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Here, Papanek
ran a series of symposia exploring the politics of design and the
future of design pedagogy, with an emphasis on issues of disability
and design. Most significantly, it was the Copenhagen SDO initiative
that inspired Papanek’s creation of the “Big Character Flow Chart,” a
visual mapping of the moral and social responsibility of the designer

that acted as the blueprint of Design for the Real World (Papanek
1971: 277). The “Copenhagen chart” marked the culmination of
Papanek’s involvement in design-activist events and exchanges with
Nordic countries and students but more significantly it marked the
beginning of his broader populist activism in the United States.
Conclusion
In 1970, two years after Papanek had called for the abandon-
ment of conventional design conferences in the mainstream USA
design press, the Aspen Design Conference fell under attack from
student protests directed at the corporate-dominated board of
the International Design Conference Aspen, leading to significant
resignations. In the words of historian Alice Twemlow, “the pro-
tests at the 1970 Aspen conference epitomized more widespread
clashes that took place during the late 1960s and early 1970s
between an emerging counterculture and the economically and
politically dominant regime” (Twemlow 2009: 25). The same year
that students brought to account the great white male luminaries at
the Aspen Design Conference, Papanek’s first Swedish edition of
Design for the Real World was released with a suitably apocalyptic
statement in its preface: “It is about time that industrial design, as
we have come to know it, should cease to exist” (Papanek 1970:
7). Papanek, having honed his ideas in an alternative culture defined
by state provision, small-scale production, and radicalized design
students, was ready to address a North American design public
with a fresh vision of an alternative design culture. In 1969, Richard
Farson, founding Dean of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Design School, recruited Papanek as an unorthodox voice that tra-

versed the disciplines. This unique and timely opportunity provided
Papanek with a forum in which to develop his trans-disciplinary and
activist approach, in a suitably unconventional pedagogic setting.9
In 1971, Farson’s deanship coincided with his being granted the
position of program chairman of the Aspen Design Conference,
Colorado (Twemlow 2009: 41–2), giving CalArts (students and
faculty) a pronounced presence and leading Papanek to con-

tribute to the international design event he had previously vilified
throughout the late 1960s. Design Journal (UK) reported how the
revised, informal format of the Aspen conference had taken on a
non-prescriptive social agenda: “the theme is being left deliberately
vague, but discussion is likely to centre around social problems
of the day, in particular communications, consciousness, sexual
politics and the third world.”10 Along with Buckminster Fuller, Victor
Papanek presented around the theme of “Paradox” (Banham 1974:
5), importing a freshly honed activism born of his “action-led” inter-
actions with Scandinavian design culture. While US stores such as
Design Research (Thompson et al. 2010) had, since the early 1950s,
disseminated the aesthetics and liberal allure of Finnish design,
Papanek had harnessed its liberal appeal and placed it center stage
of design discourse in the United States.
This article has explored hitherto undocumented aspects of
the twentieth century’s leading design activist, Victor J. Papanek,
challenging the assumption that his distinctive design polemic was
formulated in the context of green politics and North American anti-
consumption rhetoric. Instead it has argued, through original primary
research, that Papanek’s working life during the period 1966–70 was
intrinsically tied to the activism of designers and design students of
Nordic countries. Most specifically it was Finnish design, and the
historical specificity of its national ideological battles over design,
that framed his discourse. This intense period of interaction gener-
ated a radicalism in Papanek’s discourse that went far beyond North
American consumer-activist rhetoric, making his best-read polemic,
Design for the Real World a seminal tool of late twentieth-century
design activism.
Acknowledgments
A version of this article was given as a talk in the Alvar Aalto Academy
lecture series, the National Gallery Helsinki, Finland, October 18,
2012. The author wishes to thank the Director, Esa Laaksonen, the
organizers and audience of the Alvar Aalto Academy lecture series,
and Mikko Pyhälä and Sotamaa Yrjö for their invaluable comments.
Many thanks are also extended to Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, and the
anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments.
Notes
1. Papanek was Associate Professor from 1964, and full Professor
between 1968 and 1970, in the department of Environment and

Industrial Design, at the University of Purdue, Indiana, USA.
2. The colloquial definition of Scandinavia includes Denmark,
Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries include Denmark,
Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden and associated terri-
tories; however, these definitions are frequently conflated as
“Scandinavian.” For an elaborated discussion of these cultural
Alison J. Clarke
definitions pertaining specifically to design history see Fallan

(2012).
3. Finland and the United States fostered a mutually beneficial
strategic defense relationship throughout the Cold War that
extended to “soft” cultural mechanisms of allegiance. See
“Without Mercy: US Strategic Intelligence and Finland in the
Cold War” by Jukka Rislakki, republished in The Economist,
December 1, 2011. In 1953, the United States Information
Agency (USIA), a government organization promoting “public
diplomacy,” and the Finnish-American Society, devised the
American Home exhibition at the Taidehalli (Art Hall) in Helsinki.
This event was a precursor to the renowned USIA Moscow
1959 American National Exhibition, whose model American
home generated the so-called “Kitchen Debate” in which US

President Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev articulated the
politics of the Cold War through respective material representa-
tions of the “standard of living.” See McDonald (2010).
4. Victor Papanek directly approached the key organizer of the
Jyväskylä Arts Festival, composer Seppo Nummi, inquiring if it
might offer him a platform at the 1967 event (personal commu-
nication with Mikko Pyhälä, October 4, 2012). Pyhälä assisted
Nummi in coordinating Papanek’s visit and acted as the inter-
preter for Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek’s contributions
to the 1967 Jyväskylä Arts Festival.
5. Students responsible for editing the SDO publication included
Yrjö Sotamaa, Timo Aarniala, Lauri Anttila, and Tapio Vapaasalo.
6. See Chapter 4 of Design for the Real World, “‘Do-It-Yourself-
Murder’: The Social and Moral Responsibilities of the Designer,’”
pp. 44–73.
7. Yrjö Sotamma would go on to be one of the most influential
figures of Finnish design pedagogy and Rector of the University
of Art and Design Helsinki, and was also invited to work along-
side Victor Papanek at the University of Purdue as an associate
professor (1969–70).
8. See Papanek (1971); Fallan (2011).
9. See The Experimental Impulse, a 2011 exhibition exploring
Los Angeles as an artistic center. Catalog available online:
http://www.eastofborneo.org/topics/the-experimental-impulse
(accessed November 18, 2012).
10. See the editorial in Design Journal, “News: Crying Wolfe” (1971),
26.
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Design and Culture

The Journal of the Design Studies Forum

ISSN: 1754-7075 (Print) 1754-7083 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdc20

“Actions Speak Louder”

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175470813X13638640370698

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151 Design and Culture DOI: 10.2752/175470813X13638640370698

KEYWORDS: Victor Papanek, design activism, 1960s Finnish

out of the counter movement of the 1960s” (Madge 1993: 153).

activism and to bring to account the design industry’s failure to

adhered to a genre of US consumer critique heralded by popular

agenda that might operate outside the formal, monolithic capitalist

brought together under the self-consciously generated definition

The “Northern Lights” of Finnish Design

­ ractice within the anthropological paradigm met its most enthusi-

of a megalithic US industrial model geared up to generate design

In contrast to the superficiality and alienation of US commodity

[T]he northern climate is partially responsible for the fact that

In his romanticized analysis of late 1960s Finnish life, dreary winters

1967a: 29–30). Furthermore, Papanek observed, “unlike England,

If we look at the circumstances under which a Marimekko dress

Papanek’s singling out of the Marimekko dress for celebration was

Historian Kjetil Fallan has described how the understanding of

ideologically politicized” (Korvenmaa 2012: 222).

tion of Finland in the 1960s saw the country transformed from an

of 1960s and 1970s Finland, as both a critic and a representa-

Despite the widespread, enthusiastic coverage of Papanek’s vis-

While Papanek’s consumer critique found favor in popular media, it

was a fellow North American who would emerge as one of Papanek’s

Willcox titled an entire section of the postscript “Victor Papanek.”

[Papanek’s] opinions ring with the same sounds as that of an

Willcox goes on to tell how a Finnish friend compared

Mr Papanek’s visits to Finland to those of the circuit-riding

Papanek and Willcox had, according to Willcox’s account in Finnish

Design Activism Helsinki 1968: The Suomenlinna

shift from craft production and object-based design thinking to the

­ lobalization and mass electronic communication. The perceived

under the title “Do-it-yourself Murder” in the SDO journal, edited by

design som tjänst eller förtjänst?, translated into English as The

of the leading organizers Yrjö Sotamma to join him in Indiana as

portable product genre, each designed and researched with specific

Triennale had been boycotted and then occupied by students

Too many martinis, slight morning hangovers, overheated hotel

In what was clearly meant as a thinly disguised critique of the world-

In the course of his earliest engagements with Finland and Finnish

visual mapping of the moral and social responsibility of the designer

Design School, recruited Papanek as an unorthodox voice that tra-

faculty) a pronounced presence and leading Papanek to con-

between 1968 and 1970, in the department of Environment and

definitions pertaining specifically to design history see Fallan

home generated the so-called “Kitchen Debate” in which US

Bayley, Stephen (ed.). 1985. The Conran Directory of Design.

and Social Change. New York: Pantheon Books.

Rislakki, Jukka. 2011. “Without Mercy: US Strategic Intelligence and

Whiteley, Nigel. 1993. Design for Society. London: Reaktion Books.

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ractice within the anthropological paradigm met its most enthusi-

lobalization and mass electronic communication. The perceived