https://designopendata.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/design-for-the-real-world-victor-papanek.pdf

Chapter 1.

The mode of action by which a design fulfils its purpose is its function.

Details six parts of the function complex

1. Method: The interaction of tools, processes, and materials.
2. Use: 'Does it work?’
3. Need: The economic, psychological, spiritual, technological, and intellectual needs of a human.
4. Telesis: 'The deliberate, purposeful utilisation of the processes of nature and society to obtain particular goals' (American College Dictionary, 1961). The telesic content of a design must reflect the times and conditions that have given rise to it, and must fit in with the general human socio-economic order in which it is to operate. (things do not translate well from one culture to another)
5. Association: Our psychological conditioning pre- disposes us, or provides us with antipathy against a given value.
6. Aesthetics: Aesthetics is a tool, one of the most important ones in the repertory of the designer, a tool that helps in shaping his forms and colours into entities that move us, please us, and are beautiful, exciting, filled with delight, meaningful. Because there is no ready yardstick for the analysis of aesthetics, it is simply considered to be a personal expression fraught with mystery and surrounded with nonsense.

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“In an age of mass production when everything must be planned and designed, design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself)”

“In February 1968, Fortune magazine published an article that foretold the end of the industrial design profession… As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial 'toys for adults', killing machines with gleaming tailfins, and ‘sexed-up' shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist”

Design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross- disciplinary tool responsive to the true needs of men > I have tried to give a clear picture of what it means to design within a social context.

Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order.

Shoving coins around on a board is a design act in miniature because design as a problem-solving activity can never, by definition, yield the one right answer: it will always produce an infinite number of answers, some 'righter' and some 'wronger'. The Brightness' of any design solution will depend on the meaning with which we invest the arrangement.

Architecture is the most natural example of designing in response to the environment, conditions, methods and tools available. “the elegance of solution possible with a creative interaction of tools, materials, and processes”

In short, the associational values of design have degenerated to the lowest common denominator, determined more by inspired guesswork and piebald graphic charts rather than by the genuinely felt wants of the consumer.