NEW YORK — How would you feel if you had written a book, which was, in your own words, “derided, made fun of, or savagely attacked” by your peers? Or you were forced to resign from a professional body, which then threatened to boycott an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris if your work was included?

All of these slights — and more — were heaped upon the designer Victor Papanek after the publication of his 1971 book “Design for the Real World.” Why? There’s a clue in the opening line, “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.” Papanek went in to accuse his fellow designers of producing shoddy, stylized work that wasted natural resources, aggravated the environmental crisis and ignored their social and moral responsibilities. Ouch! Four years later he was described by Design magazine as being “disliked, even loathed by his contemporaries.”

Yet Papanek had the last laugh. In 1985 in his preface to the second edition of “Design for the Real World,” he noted proudly that the first edition had been translated into more than 20 languages and had become “the most widely read book on design in the world.” He died in 1998, but 40 years after his book was first published, it is still in print and hugely influential, and Papanek is praised as a pioneer of sustainable and humanitarian design. As Zoë Ryan, the chairwoman of design and architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, put it, “His approach seems more relevant than ever in today’s challenging times.”

Papanek has even been embraced by the design establishment. His archive was recently acquired by the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, which is to open the Victor J. Papanek Foundation in November with a symposium on his legacy. The foundation is also collaborating with the Museum of Arts and Design in New York to introduce the Victor J. Papanek Social Design Award.