In 1970 Sweden’s premier design publication, FORM magazine, reported on a two-week seminar that Austrian-American designer Victor Papanek conducted with the Stockholm chapter of Skandinaviska Designstuderandes Organisation (Scandinavian Design Students Organization), or SDO, earlier that year.¹ According to the article, Papanek asked the students in the course to prototype a human-powered vehicle for “roadless” areas of the developing world. The article stated, “Papanek spoke about the difficulties of delivering food during famines, of transporting doctors and the injured during disasters.” Papanek stipulated a few important criteria for the students’ designs: the vehicles needed to carry a driver and at least 400kg of cargo (or two people on stretchers); they had to climb at least a 30-degree incline; and they couldn’t easily overturn. They also needed to be cheap and easy to repair.

When Papanek contemplated “roadless” terrain and the human problems it created, he saw “the need for a design contribution,” as the article described it, or what we’d more likely call a design intervention today. Presumably recognizing that building more roads in underdeveloped areas was not a politically feasible option, he decided that designing something – in theory, anything – that could purposefully intervene between people and their problems was the next best thing. From Papanek’s point of view, if the politicians and bureaucrats in charge of building the everyday world are doing a bad job, then it’s the designer’s responsibility to step in and find a workaround.

Today Papanek’s “interventionist” design is well-known and avidly followed by many designers, largely because the approach he’d developed with Nordic design students in the late 1960s became concrete in 1970.² That year, around the time of the Stockholm seminar, Papanek published (first in Swedish because no anglophone publisher would touch it) the book that would make him famous, Miljön och Miljonerna: Design som Tjänst eller Förtjänst? (The Environment and the Millions: Design as Service or Profit?). A year later, after a successful print run in Scandinavia, its English-language translation, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, was released in the UK and US. (Reportedly, Papanek did not like the original German translation, Design für die reale Welt: Anleitungen für eine humane Ökologie und sozialen Wandel, which was only re-translated after his death.) Having since been published in over 20 languages, it’s now often cited as the most widely read design book ever written.

In some respects, what Papanek was proposing in Design for the Real World wasn’t new or unique. While his moral agenda for promoting a just social world was presented in unusually abrasive language, like “The Myth of the Noble Slob” and “Do-It-Yourself Murder,” the ideas wrapped in that language had a long and familiar lineage. Papanek’s argument, in essence, was that design can and should be used for social improvement. His core assumption was that the world is full of problems and unmet “human needs” and that designers, because of their skills and training, were well-positioned in society to identify them.³ By introducing some purposefully designed thing that could meet those needs, social problems can be reduced, at least, or even entirely erased. Of course, plenty of other thinkers before Papanek’s time followed a similar logic. The Arts and Crafts movement, the Deutscher Werkbund, the Bauhaus, Scandinavian modernism, the Ulm School, and so on, each in its own way treated social improvement as a driver of creativity. And in the years since, social improvement through design intervention can regularly be found in projects at almost any scale, from city-planning, to architecture, to UX/UI, to type design. Transition design, speculative design, design thinking, design anthropology – all these approaches and many others are at least partially premised on the notion that purposefully considered design interventions are an important way to somehow make some conditions in the world better.

But what if this line of thinking is wrong? Or, if not exactly wrong, what if it’s misleading?

There’s an odd little glitch – I’ll call it the Papanek glitch, though I admit it’s a bit unfair to the man himself – in how the concept of “design intervention” has spread, and I think it has produced a fractured conceptual frame: some kinds of design are interventions and others are not. It certainly seems obvious, or even intuitive. Yet if we’re just looking at designed things themselves and not the process that produced them, how can we tell which one is which? Imagine that Papanek had given his students the same design brief (a 400kg capacity, can’t easily overturn, etc.), but had included nothing about “roadless” areas in the developing world, nothing explicit about solving a problem. Would the students have created the same prototypes, and would those prototypes still be recognizable as interventions if they’d been implemented? Perhaps, but perhaps not. I think the critical distinction between Papanek’s actual design brief and the imagined one is that the actual brief was backed by a specific governing ideology that, almost as if by magic, transformed the design process into an intervention. Conveniently, the SDO had published the organization’s goals in 1969, also in FORM,⁴ which make the ideology that they shared with Papanek clear:

We want to fight capitalism by all means in order to achieve a dynamic socialist system that makes possible total social justice.

From that follows:

We want to end a system in which invented needs are satisfied at the cost of actual needs.
We want to investigate people’s actual needs in different areas of the world.
We want to analyze the investigations’ results, and with this as the basis, participate in satisfying actual needs.
We want to end a system that abuses our common resources on the earth.
We want to actively support national liberation movements.
So long as these activities continue, these corollaries will be replenished.

Now, here’s what I see as the Papanek glitch: according to the conceptual frame he’s left us, what makes something a design intervention isn’t anything in the designed thing itself; it’s in a claim made before or during the design process that this is design for the real world; this is an intervention. I think this is a glitch because I think this claim isn’t necessary. I think every design is an intervention, and it’s useful to reframe design in this way.

I am an anthropologist by training, which means I view most things through an anthropological lens. This often leads me to question why humans – or some subset of humans – whom I encounter in the world do what they do, starting from a social and cultural perspective. For over 20 years this has included designers; and one anthropological way I’ve come to see what designers do is this: “humans provisioning for one another the conditions of life in innumerable forms and at almost every scale.”⁵ Here’s another way I might phrase it: design is a formalized mechanism for humans to intervene in the lives of other humans.

One thing anthropologists know, though not all of us would phrase it this way, is that to be human is to intervene – literally, to come between people and the world. In some respects, intervention is the basis of human sociality itself, which isn’t about simply being together or existing alongside each other; it’s about relations and connections. It’s about a constant coming between. Kinship comes between people and other people to verify who can be trusted, or who requires care.⁶ Religion intervenes to explain otherwise ineffable things. Politics intervenes to give order to power and distribute social control. Language intervenes to give shareable labels to emotions, thoughts, and things, an “architecture of intersubjectivity”⁷ through which almost everything that matters to humans is constructed. And so on. Taking all of this together, we can start to see human sociality as a complicated, never-ending meshwork of small and large moments in which people find themselves coming between each other and some facet of the world we all share.

And so, too, design – all design, not just the kind motivated by an ideology of improvement. The “glitch” part of the Papanek glitch is that Design for the Real World and the kind of designing it promoted helped solidify the idea that “intervention” in design is generally associated with a force for social improvement – when in fact intervention is simply an inherent quality of design itself. Rather than treating everything they make as an intervention, as something that will come between people and their world in some meaningful way, designers have been led by the Papanek glitch to see only some kinds of design as interventions – as ethical – and other kinds of design as… not exactly unethical, but certainly as not requiring an explicitly ethical stance. This then positions design intervention as a choice; that is, a designer can choose to carry out a design intervention (and thereby act ethically) or not (and thereby be less beholden to the ethical implications of their work).

But this is, and has always been, a false dichotomy. Design is never neutral. Every designed thing put out into the world intervenes in some person’s experience in some way—a color that catches the light well, material that feels like it’s always about to break, a shape designed to fit “every” human hand perfectly (but always leaves someone out), or a beautiful but almost unreadable letterform. Most of the time a design’s coming between a person and the world is small, barely perceptible, and isn’t consequential in any grand way. But that doesn’t mean that the intervention doesn’t matter. It just means that the impact of the intervention is distributed differently than the Papanek glitch would have it, one small part radiating outwards within a much larger whole. As the human species evolved over thousands of years, we’ve relied less and less on nature to give form and structure to everyday human environments and more on each other to imagine and build them. Today, everyday human experience is overstuffed with, and deeply dependent on, a vast assemblage of designed objects and spaces that together shape the lifeworlds everyone inhabits. In other words, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to experience anything at all without some designed thing mediating that experience. Continuing to ignore how the Papanek glitch has disrupted how design imagines itself prevents designers from accepting that design is always intervening. I think embracing that claim can only make design practice better.

Of course, one might object that this is all just a word game, a redefining of what intervention means. Perhaps, but perhaps not. I tend to think that classifying design interventions as projects backed by some explicit ethical ideology allows designers not working on such projects to ignore the moral weight of what they do when designing things that come between people and the world. Rethinking all design as intervention encourages every designer to foreground the experience-mediating nature of their work. This doesn’t mean that every project must be weighted with the pressure of social improvement; it just reminds designers that their work is a basic component of human sociality. Starting from there, I think, reprioritizes the social, the human responsibility that designers have, not just in “design interventions,” but in everything they do helping to give form, even if only in very small ways, to the world we all occupy together.