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Scale rules Victor Papanek Design for Human Scale Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, (1983), 167 pp., $17.50

It's over a dozen years since Design for the real world announced loudly and clearly Victor Papanek's crusade against the moral degeneracy of modern design. The book was well- timed; it picked up on the concerns being articulated in the early 'seven- ties with appropriate technology, with energy saving, with recycling, with de-professionalized self-help.

What has happened in the mean- time? Not a lot. The rich still get rich and the poor still get poorer. In the real world, design gets sillier and more bourgeois style-conscious. Papanek is still away on the cru- sades.

In this new book he begins by affirming the joyous, positive, crea- tive aspects of design and catalogues examples of its success; and yet, he says, 'Something has gone wrong.' And the rallying-cry comes again:

'We curse the appliances and gadgets that clutter our lives and that seem to wear out at nearly the same rate as the warranty. We struggle to our garbage cans staggering under our national average of eighty-six cubic feet of empty boxes, wrappers, milk cartons, and nonreturnable bot- tles and egg boxes, all lovingly com- pacted into enormous plastic bags. Our garages are filled with broken dish-washers, three-year-old televi- sion sets, coffee perculators dis- carded for later models, malfunc- tioning pop-up toasters, and cameras we stopped using. Not only are these habits wasteful, they are no longer acceptable when unemployment is high, energy and raw materials are in limited supply, and many people in the southern half of the globe are dying from starvation.'

It 's particularly an American nightmare; my (British) garage isn't like that, is yours? And indeed it is often to Europe that Papanek turns for examples of Good Design. The

'clean and minimal lines' of a Braun coffee maker, for example, are con- trasted with the 'sloppy' lines of a U.S.A.-designed coffee maker.

But Design for human scale is meant to be more than a catalogue of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Design for the real world was sup- posed to have answered the ques- tions of what to design and why. This new book is meant to answer the questions how; it's meant to be about the design process and how it can be improved to avoid vulgarity and imappropriateness.

The main answer seems to be: design for people and with people. The main messages are: participa- tion, simplification, humanization and decentralization. These mes- sages are conveyed with exemplars frequently drawn from the projects of Papanek's design students around the world, and ranging from protec- tive helmets for welders in Britain to instructional cassette-tape players for villagers in Africa.

These examples show how modest yet appropriate objects can be de- veloped by collaboration between designers and users. Often, the users are meant to be involved not only in the evolution of design requirements and in the evaluation of prototypes, but also in the making of the finished object. Some of the examples are of designs developed by the workers who manufacture objects, rather than by the end-users.

But are a few exemplars - mostly student projects - enough? Clearly not. Why hasn't there been a design revolution in the last decade? Be- cause designers aren't revolutionar- ies? Because consumers are hooked on 'product addiction'?

Like most of us, Papanek's faint liberal hope lies with education; not only the education of designers, but also the extension of design educa- tion into the primary and secondary schools. Papanek claims that stan- dard, university-level 'basic design' courses can be taught successfully to six-year-olds, and can be a counter to

the 'assault on a child's sensibilities' of television and advertising.

This is a good book, and the examples in it continue to show us what is possible. But, perhaps be- cause its message is now familiar, it lacks impact. And teaching how to design for people and with people needs more careful pedagogy than mere examples.

Papanek is a moral crusader; but the forces of the infidel are mighty. He's an old-time revivalist preacher of the Good; but although the people go to hear him on Sunday, they still sin on Monday.

Nigel Cross

Women designers Isabelle Anscombe A Woman's Touch: women in design fiom 1860 to the present day. Virago, London (1984). 216pp. £7.95.

This history of the role of women in design movements will, I suspect, break new ground for many readers. It traces their role from the pre- Raphaelites and William Morris, when young and beautiful women like Janey Morris were passive cult objects, through the Glasgow School of Art, the Wiener Werkst~tte of the early 1900s, postRevolutionary Rus- sia, the Bauhaus, and the Arts and Crafts Movements of interwar Eng- land. In doing so it reminds us, or informs us for the first time, of forgotten episodes and actors in women's history. What now seems quaint, like the painted handscreens done by the sweetheart of Nicholas Nickleby, became in fact a new channel for women to earn an inde- pendent living and to establish a new identity in design. In late nineteenth- century America, women designers first became active agents rather than passive instruments, as the Women's Building at the great Columbian

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