‘Actions Speak Louder.’ Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism

Victor J. Papanek's Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) is widely understood as the seminal text of twentieth-century design activism. Papanek, a Viennese émigré based in the USA, disseminated his ideas globally through lectures, broadcasts, and publications. This article uses previously unexplored primary sources to trace the origins of Papanek's design activism, asserting that his early activism has been incorrectly aligned with the historiography of green politics and North American consumer-rights discourse. Instead, it argues that the conception of Papanek's groundbreaking Design for the Real World, that would underpin a global design activism movement, had its origins in the early participatory design activism of 1960s Finland and the emergence of a pan-Scandinavian student design movement.