Victor Papanek

Victor Joseph Papanek was a designer and educator who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. He disapproved of manufactured products that were unsafe, showy, maladapted, or essentially useless. His products, writings, and lectures were collectively considered an example and inspired many designers. Papanek was a philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to social and ecological considerations.   "Design has become the most powerful tool with which people shape their tools and environments and, by extension, society and themself." -Papanek Papanek was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923. He attended public school in England and immigrated to the US in 1930s, where he studied design and architecture. Papanek studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in Arizona in the 1940’s. He earned his bachelor's degree at