Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.
Interpretation
Design is an essential process that influences all aspects of life and should not be viewed in isolation.
In this quote, Victor Papanek emphasizes that design is not merely a separate discipline but a fundamental aspect of life that shapes our actions and outcomes. He argues that attempting to separate design from the broader contexts in which it exists undermines its role and significance, as design is inherently intertwined with all aspects of existence and decision-making.
In practice
In a presentation on the importance of holistic thinking in design processes.
We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A...student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education.
Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.
The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
Wanting to play the guitar was neither a wild dream nor a realistic ambition. It was simply inevitable.
I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings That fill the sky with silver glitterings!
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