Victor J. Papanek: Émigré Cultural Networks and the Founding of Social Design

The project draws upon previously unused, original archival materials (housed at the new Victor J. Papanek Foundation, University Applied Arts Vienna) to consider the legacy of émigré intellectual networks in the creation of the 1970s socially responsible and humanist design movements. Challenging a hagiographic approach to design history, the project re-frames the work of leading design theorist Victor Papanek (Jewish Viennese émigré and instigator of socially responsible design) in the context of a specifically émigré discourse around consumption, identity and material culture. Despite Papaneks connections to the intellectual trajectories of fellow Austrian émigrés, his lifework has to date been assimilated into a broader historiography of the post-war North American ethical consumer and ecological movements of the 1970s. In placing him alongside US consumer-reformers existing scholarly work presents Papanek merely as a pragmatic anti-corporate lobbyist, rather than an original thinker belonging to a European-Jewish and Viennese theoretical tradition. Building on recent theoretical approaches to émigré consumption and identity politics, the project asserts that Austria, and more particularly Vienna, was crucial in the development of social design. It traces Papanek and his émigré networks trajectory from their intellectual origins in early twentieth century progressive Vienna, to the founding of the late twentieth century social design movement. Its main hypothesis is that émigré experience and intellectual discourse were instrumental to the founding of the social design movement. 1

Victor J. Papanek: Design Émigré Networks and the Founding of Social Design focused on the previously unexplored biography and cultural networks of the twentieth centurys leading advocate of socially and ecologically responsible; the Viennese-American émigré designer, Victor Papanek, author of the ground-breaking publication Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1970). As design and architecture today moves further toward understanding the social and ecological impacts of the material environment, historical inquiry of the origins of this social thinking takes on an urgent prescience. This project makes a major scholarly contribution to the fields of émigré history, environmental and ecological history, post-development studies and design history and theory. The project research formed the basis of a major international retrospective exhibition Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design (2018) conceived and co-curated by the projects leader (Clarke) with one of the worlds leading design museums, Vitra Design Museum, Germany. Touring to major museum venues in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and USA, it showcases previously unseen archival materials from the Papanek Foundation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The substantial exhibition catalogue makes Papaneks work accessible to the general public for the first time, juxtaposing his ideas with works of leading designers of the 21st century. The project resulted in extensive public and academic output: a monograph Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (Clarke, MIT Press forthcoming) and the edited volumes Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (Clarke & Shapira, Bloomsbury) and Design Organisations: Contested Histories and Values (Clarke and Aynsley, Bloomsbury, forthcoming); international symposia Émigré Design Culture: Histories of the Social in Design (University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2015), Undesign (University of Applied Arts Vienna 2016), Design and Ethics, (Austrian Embassy, London Design Week 2017); International Design Organisations: Histories, Legacies, Values, (Centre of Design History, University of Brighton, UK). Research was shared through academic articles, and media (ORF, SRF) as well as public lectures in the following institutions: National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India (Clarke); Bard Graduate Centre, New York (Clarke); University of Cambridge, UK (Clarke); École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Paris (Clarke); Concordia University, Montreal (Clarke); Bauhaus Dessau, Germany (Clarke); University of Southern Denmark, Odense (Clarke); RSDI, Providence, USA (Clarke); Alvar Aalto Foundation, Finland (Clarke); Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Clarke); KHT Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden (Clarke) Innsbruck University, Austria (Shapira); Bar Ilan University, Israel (Shapira); Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Shapira); Freud Museum, Vienna (Shapira); Linz University of Arts (Franke); Zurich University of Arts, Switzerland (Franke); University of Palermo. Italy (Morsink); University of Auckland, NZ (Morsink).