The Green Imperative By Victor Papanek

The book focuses much more around Design than I initially expected. It's not very in your face about what I thought would be the immediate demand to put the environment first. Papanek instead meanders around the influence of design on consumption, with a particularly strong distaste for Mid-Century Modern design and the Bauhaus movement. The connection he draws between simple, undecorated furniture and human consumption is a little unclear to me, but he's spending a lot of time talking about how humans have a long tradition of adding superfluous decorations to objects that would otherwise be purely utility.

It's actually a lot more related to Caps Lock than I expected. Discussions of design collectives, the things that prevent designers from designing for just purposes, etc.

I just feel that too much has changed since it's original publishing in 1995. The Green Imperative, in my opinion, takes a rather lackadaisical approach to designing for reslilience in the face of climate change, but the world Papanek was living in was different than the world we live in now.

Our biogenetic heritage governs expectations of size, weight, distance, speed and time. 'Old' measurements like mile, pound, yard, foot, stone, reflect what we can lift or carry easily, and how we used our bodies as templates for measurement. As explained in Chapter 4, the eidetic image that we carry with us through life gives us another system for judging harmonious relationships and scale. 'Invented' measuring systems, like the metric system, are as meaningless to us as is the time displayed on a digital watch.

What the hell is Papanek saying here? All units of measure are made up. How does 12” in a foot make it more harmonious? The page before this Papanek is talking about how the slums of Rio are positioned at the highest, most beautiful place in the city because that’s where people would go naturally. I’ve got a few more pages in me before I call bullshit on this goon.

Chapter 6: The lessons of vernacular architecture

Honestly, I feel like this whole book so far has mostly been about Papanek’s obsession with vernacular design.

Chapter 7: Form Follows Fun

What do you do when the real place looks like the copy of a fake - Student

This dude has some serious distaste for the young and new. He starts the chapter with two quotes from students that gives the impression that youth cannot appreciate something that is real, and not carefully curated.

Even though designers realize that the objects they bring into life will last only briefly in the marketplace, they still wish that - even in everyday use - their 'babies' might somehow remain unblemished and 'perfect'. At international conferences the design chief of a firm that made cigarette lighters would meet fellow designers who still carried their original black lighter. After years of being kept in a pocket with keys, a penknife or whatever, nicks and scratches on the black finish would cause the original brass casing to glint through. The designer would obligingly offer a free replacement then and there. I remember saying to him myself, 'No thank you, all the scratches are just beginning to give it character, making it unique!' In his search for perfection, he was never able to understand that things can't remain unchanged. In an age in which fortunes are spent on beauty creams and lotions to stretch out a semblance of youth, it is difficult to explain that material choices should be made so that objects can age gracefully once more.

I vibe with this. I still have a hard time realizing this in my own thoughts though. Often I find myself disatisfied with blemishes and marks of wear.

One of my design clients in Japan is a subsidiary of a large automobile company. Visiting their design laboratory, I saw a photograph of former President Reagan pinned on a bulletin board. 'Reagan is one of the greatest Japanese car designers, I was told, 'He bullied us into exporting fewer cars to America. So now we produce much larger cars for the American market. We export fewer numbers, but make a much higher profit with these over-sized models.'

Of course Reagan is to blame for this too! This belongs on r/fuckcars. And of course , when you start to think he’s gonna say rationally that importing larger cars to the US is bad because it contributes to visual, noise, and air pollution, without providing much, if any practical benefit, who is allegedly advocating for buying less because it is green says in the following paragraph:

… tiny is not necessarily better.

GODDAMMIT! I feel like this entire book wss written just to piss me off. He rounds this section off by saying washing dishes by hand is more water-efficient than dishwashers. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here since this book came out in the ‘90’s, but modern dishwashers use significantly less water than hand washing no matter how you cut it.