There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.
Interpretation
Industrial design can have negative impacts, but it is not the worst profession.
Victor Papanek highlights the ethical responsibilities of industrial designers, suggesting that while their work has potential drawbacks, it is still less harmful than many other professions. This statement encourages a critical examination of how design can contribute positively to society and challenges designers to consider the broader implications of their work.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of ethical design practices.
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.
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.
The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.
Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.
You canβt bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. Iβm hardly speaking in metaphor. Itβs the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?
A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades - Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue sky
I write because I'm in love with language; because I like working for myself, inside my head; and because it's the only way I know to make a stab at answering the never-ending questions of the heart that arise simply from the everyday living of our lives.
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
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