Papanek, Victor (1926– )

Austrian-born designer and educator. Specializing in design appropriate to local materials and technology, his best-known book is Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971).

Papanek was born in Vienna, Austria. He moved to the USA in 1939, studied with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949, graduated from Cooper Union (1950), and earned an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1955). He taught at the University of Toronto, the Rhode Island School of Design, Purdue University, and the California Institute of the Arts, among other places in North America. He also worked, taught, and consulted in England, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, and Australia. In 1981 he became professor of design at the University of Kansas.