Harmful or Useless? Victor Papanek and the Student Rebellion

Danish design educations changed radically with the student rebellion starting in the late ‘6os until around the mid ‘70s. During this period, Victor Papanek visited the Nordic Design Schools several times and spent a year teaching in Copenhagen. Some research into these events has been done in the other Nordic countries. However, the history of the Danish design schools has never been investigated, and few archival sources are saved from these turbulent years, hence, this paper is preliminary research. Papanek published ideas on design education in Danish journals, and we compare his perspective with our initial findings from annual reports, school magazines and minutes from debate events. The focus of our discussion here is how the agenda of the students concerning impact on society was articulated in their actions, and how it developed with events and reforms of the schools. Initially, the Danish students felt that their education trained them in useless skills with only rare possibilities for employment, and they were far removed from any impact of changing the harmfulness of design consumption. As actions and reforms developed, however, the scope of the students’ interests turned out to be quite different from Papanek’s.