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.
Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.
Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.
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