Design for a Sustainable World

Since design's beginning, when it was conceived as an art of giving form to products for mass production, it has been firmly embedded in consumer culture. Design's first promoters in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Henry Cole in England and Herman Muthesius in Germany, for example, saw it exclusively in relation to the manufacture of products for the market. This was equally true when a new practice of consultant design emerged in the United States in the 1930s. In the postwar years, American consultant practice became a model for industrial designers throughout the world as they sought to create a place for themselves in their respective national economies. This model continues to be influential in the emerging global economy While the process of establishing design as an essential component of global economic competitiveness has progressed in an almost seamless manner, occasional critics have attempted to redirect design practice to other tasks. Perhaps the harshest castigation of industrial design came from the architect-designer Victor Papanek, who wrote in his seminal book of 1972, Design for the Real World: Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly one million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed.'