Victor Papanek & Universal Design

September 10, 2020 1:56 AM

Years ago as a Fine Arts student I read Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World. I believe I read an idea which made a lifelong impression on me. Could anyone confirm if the following is from that book or perhaps from another of his? I'm sitting here with my copy sans index and not finding it. The idea: The height of a shelf can't be designed for a standard such as a average male. If you consider women, those with disability, children, aged people with shortening spines, the temporarily injured, and shorter males, they are in the clear majority.
posted by BrStekker to Technology (3 answers total)

Best answer:

Are we still designing for minorities? The fact of the matter is that all of us are children at one point of our lives, and that we need education throughout our lives. Almost all of us become adolescent, middle-aged, and old. We all need the services and help of teachers, doctors, dentists, and hospitals. We all belong special need groups, we all live in an underdeveloped and Emergent country of the mind, no matter what our geographical or cultural location. We all need transportation, communication, products, tools, shelter, and clothing. We must have water and air that is clean. As a species we need the challenge of research, the promise of space, the fulfilment of knowledge.
If we then 'lump together' all the seemingly little minorities of the last few pages, if we combine all these 'special' needs, we find that we have designed for the majority after all. It is only the 'industrial designer', style-happy in the seventies of this century, who, by concocting trivia for the market-places of a few abundant societies, really designs for the minority.

There is this excerpt. Maybe from page 27?
posted by Night_owl at 6:25 AM on September 10, 2020 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Great! That looks like it. I seem to have conflated that statement with another part of the book in my mind. Or possibly he repeats the points in another place.

Do you know the chapter? My edition doesn't have that excerpt on p27.
posted by BrStekker at 8:51 AM on September 10, 2020

Best answer: Got it! Page 56 to 57, 1st American edition, 1971. The year of my birth. Synchronicity :)
posted by BrStekker at 9:12 AM on September 10, 2020