Victor Papanek by Alison J. Clarke

Author:Alison J. Clarke [Clarke, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: socially responsible design; design for the real-world; human ecology; social change; buckminster fuller; marshall mcluhan; inclusion; Cold War;
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Volita Project: A Reactionary Among the Progressives?

The Design Course journal’s declared agenda had been to engage a newly politicized student cohort, as evidenced by Frazier’s uncompromising contribution. That article threw into sharp relief an anachronistic intervention Papanek had made in the first edition of Design Course (of which he was coeditor). Papanek’s “Volita Project” article (named after Nabokov’s infamous pedophilic novel, Lolita, made into a Stanley Kubrick film in 1962) described the logistics of designing and manufacturing a plastic, animatronic woman. Written in the guise of a leaked memo exchange between the “CEO of POW Chemicals” (a barely disguised reference to Dow Chemical Company for which Papanek had, unbeknownst to his students, worked as a consultant) and its “Synectics Team Chief,” it appeared as a “letter to the editor” posing as an insider’s corporate exposé. The spoof exchange attempted to mock the moral vapidity and social ineptitude of corporate research by drawing on the popular currency of pseudo-science fiction like Barbarella (1968), a film that famously featured 1960s icon Jane Fonda as its highly sexualized rubber-bondage-wear-clad central figure, and which later garnered widespread criticism for its regressive gender politics dressed up as sexual liberation.62

“If the first pilot model should turn out to be about 48-16-40 and sort of Euroasian-looking [sic] around the eyes,” pleaded Papanek in the guise of a corporate executive, “then send her over.”63 If the intention had been to capture the anticorporate sentiment of the activist student body, the licentious tone of the piece, the details of which were written with undisguised relish, seemed distinctly off-color for a middle-aged male professor who wielded power on a daily basis over female students: “Since women are increasingly thought of as expensive and capricious sexual playthings, the Volita Project should satisfy what has by now become a powerful drive. Both single and married men will find it possible to install one of our units in some small room closet, and activate her only when and if needed. Cross-cultural experimentation with women of varied racial backgrounds (i.e. Chinese, Hottentot, Australoid, Bushman, Pygmy, Eskimo, etc.) would now become feasible without fast expenses for travel, hotels, etc., or without courting social censure by one’s peers.”64 “Consumers who show marked preferences for unusually young or elderly Volita sub-types can also be accommodated through our Special Products Division,” continued Papanek in his assumed role of a sociologist of the POW Chemicals interdisciplinary design team.65

Rather than making a radical intervention into the politics of 1960s design, the faux exchange offers up an insight ino the subconscious of Papanek and a potential insight into the psyche of a generation of male design professors vexed by their relation to an increasingly liberated cohort of women (viewed here through an “exoticized” intersection with racial stereotyping). Seen as a tangible threat, women are “problem-solved” and silenced by the process of design, rendering them controlled and standardized for wholesale commodification or “made to order” according to the buyer’s preference.

Perhaps this uncomfortable, anachronistic attempt at humor betrays the growing gulf that

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