Design for the Real World

'Highly readable and informative … a seminal work for those following the patterns of aid and trade and technological development today' Financial Times

Design for the Real World has been translated into over twenty languages since it first appeared in 1971; it has become the world’s most widely read book on design and is an essential text in many design and architectural schools. This edition offers a blueprint for survival in the third millennium.

Victor Papanek’s lively and instructive guide shows how design can reduce pollution, overcrowding, starvation, obsolescence and other modern ills. He leads us away from ‘fetish objects for a wasteful society’ towards a new age of morally and environmentally responsible design.

'Wonderfully alive, and full of examples to instruct, amuse and horrify'
New Scientist

About the Author

Victor Papanek was a highly distinguished designer, educator, lecturer and writer, widely acknowledged for his visionary ideas on design theory. He was J. L. Constant Distinguished Professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas at the time of his death in 1998.