Alison J. Clarke

The history and controversial roots of the social design movement, explored through the life and work of its leading pioneer, Victor Papanek. In Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, Alison Clarke explores the social design movement through the life of its leading pioneer, the Austrian American designer, theorist, and activist Victor Papanek. Papanek's 1971 best seller, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change has been translated into twenty-two languages and never fallen out of print. Its politics of social design, anti-corporatism, and environmental sustainability have found renewed pertinence in the twenty-first century and dominate the agendas of design schools today. Drawing extensively on previously unexplored archival sources, Clarke uncovers and contextualizes the movement's controversial origins and contradictions.

Designer for the Real World

Victor Papanek

“Design Anthropology” brings together a unique range of cutting-edge design theorists and social scientists to explore the changing object culture of the 21st century. Decades ago, product designers utilised basic market research to fine-tune their designs for consumer success – today the design process has been radically transformed; the user is now centre-stage in the design process. From design ethnography to cultural probing, innovative designers in the 21st century are relying on anthropological methods to illicit the meaning, rather than the mere form and function of stuff. The work offers the definitive guide to the issues facing the shapers of our increasingly complex material world. How has user-experience transformed our understanding of design? And how do leading design corporations, from IDEO to INTEL, harness the insight of anthropologists in generating future visions? Why are new disciplines, like digital anthropology, shaping our increasingly de-materialised product cultures?

Object Culture in the 21st Century

Design Anthropology

From Wonder Bowls to Ice-Tup molds to Party Susans, Tupperware has become an icon of suburban living. Tracing the fortunes of Earl Tupper's polyethylene containers from early design to global distribution, Alison J. Clarke explains how Tupperware tapped into potent commercial and social forces, becoming a prevailing symbol of late twentieth-century consumer culture. Invented by Earl Tupper in the 1940s to promote thrift and cleanliness, the pastel plasticwares were touted as essential to a postwar lifestyle that emphasized casual entertaining and celebrated America's material abundance. By the mid-1950s the Tupperware party, which gathered women in a hostess's home for lively product demonstrations and sales, was the foundation of a multimillion-dollar business that proved as innovative as the containers themselves. Clarke shows how the “party plan” direct sales system, by creating a corporate culture based on women's domestic lives, played a greater role than patented seals and streamlined design in the success of Tupperware.

The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America

Tupperware

Jeremy Aynsley

Tania Messell

This innovative volume brings together international design scholars to address the history and present-day status of national and international design organizations, working across design disciplines and located in countries including Argentina, Turkey, Estonia, Switzerland, Italy, China and the USA. In the second half of the 20th century, many non-governmental organizations were created to address urgent cultural, economic and welfare issues. Design organizations set out to create an international consensus for the future direction of design. This included enhancing communication between professionals, educators and practitioners, raising standards for design, and creating communities of designers across linguistic, national and political borders. Shared needs and agendas were identified and categories of design constantly defined and re-defined, often with overt cultural and political intents. Drawing on an impressive range of original research, archival sources and oral testimony, this volume questions the aims and achievements of national and international design organizations in light of their subsequent histories and their global remits. The Cold War period is central to the book, while many chapters draw on post-colonial perspectives to interpret how transnational networks and negotiations took place at events and congresses, and through publication.

Alison J. Clarke

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