Design & Society has moved
…to this new RSA address. This week I spent three days on a National School of Government training course called Developing Deliverable Policy. The three fellow trainees at my table, respectively Andrew from from CLG (Communities and Local Government), Iain from HMT (Treasury) and a Jo on a complex secondment arrangement between DWP (Department for Work and Pensions), BERR (Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) and DfID (Department for International Development), upon listening to my Policy (or was it my Strategy? still not sure) of using design to increase the resourcefulness of people and communities, nodded enthusiastically and – completely off their own bat, I swear - suggested that I identify the following Outcome: “Design is a core competency for Civil Servants”. Obviously as well as being really good for my government acroynym fluency, this outcome was itself immensely cheering. Design and Society really has moved hasn’t it?
The ethics of making stuff
So back to the Design Museum’s Brit Insurance Designs of the Year. Blogging away here about design and society, I feel I should explain myself as the nominatator of, arguably, the most anti-social exhibit in the show in terms of democratic access: Tord Boontje’s limited edition armoire for Mallett. What was I thinking of? Well, here’s what I said at the time I was asked to nominate: “The inner sanctum of Mallett’s Meta collection at the Milan Furniture Fair revealed a wardrobe by Tord Boontje in the form of a tree bursting into the foliage of over 600 enamelled leaves. In the torturous semantic deliberations over design and craft, old-fashioned dignity of labour doesn’t get much of a look-in: this is an unequivocal tribute to very specialised and ancient manufacturing skills”.
On a long train ride this week I finally got to the end of Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman; not an easy read, but rewarding when you get to section 2 onwards and especially the fabulously metaphorical instructions for boning a chicken in the Persian style on page 190. Anyone who, like me, struggled to understand what Sennett was talking about in the introduction when he meets Hannah Arendt in the street and witnesses her disdain for animal laborens – ordinary working, making man – might also be pleased, like me, by the relatively simple resolution Sennett arrives at in the closing chapter on ethics. The Craftsman is complex and discursively illustrated argument for enrichment and pride in work that comes through crafstmanship. The vitrine of sample enamelled leaves on the Design Museum’s wall give an insight into this. Design has given new challenges of scale and illusion to enamellers who would otherwise be making an awful lot souvenir pill boxes.
“Our throwaway world”: taxi-driver wisdom
Taxi home from the Design Museum’s Brit Insurance Designs of the Year opening last night: “So where’ve you come from tonight?” “An opening party for an exhibition at the Design Museum.” “Oh yeah? Is that work or fun?” “Sort of the fun end of work.” “So what do you do for work then?” ” I work for a society that tries to influence people and government to think harder about citizenship. My job is to show what the value of design to society is.” “So what is the value of design to society?” “I think design teaches you that as a citizen you don’t have to just pay or wait for other people to solve problems for you. We don’t have to just buy things or have things done to us…” “In our throwaway world.” “Exactly.”
I’ll have what she’s having
Leading service design company Live/Work have published a thoughtful article on their website today: Service Thinking. At first I felt chastened at having attempted to explain recently to a US visitor what service design was. I said that because of their appetite for solving problems of order and function, designers can apply their visual and spatial fluency to systemic problems and to services as well as to the material world, as if systems and services were things.
Woops. Live/Work would probably say this is exactly the wrong way to explain it, for as they perceive it: “The reason so many services under perform and disappoint customers is because we treat a service as if it is an industrially manufactured product”. A thing, in my terminology. Thus chastened, I read on. They talk really well on the rise of mass production and mass consumption in the last century, and, citing Alvin Toffler, on the dislocation of those phenomena that has alienated everyone from first products and then from services treated by all sectors as if they were products (in our times “a train journey is somehow a product”).
It emerges that it’s not the production and consumption that are wrong, but the mass factor, and what they’re getting at is the service imperative of personalisation, in which “producer and consumer must come together”. Now I feel a bit vindicated, as co-curator of My World: the New Subjectivity in Design, an international exhibition looking at the influence of craft in contemporary design. We the curators agreed that because of industrial production at first, then later of globalisation and the rapid advance of digital technologies, design very easily risks the banishment of personal meaning. We were talking about products, but the New Subjectivity has serious traction in services.
But one thing still bugs me. Product or service, what we see is a lemming-like flight to brands. Not warmly individuated, customised, personalised things shaped uniquely to your needs, but fierce evidence that people want what everyone else is having. This is most obvious in the consumption of commercial products – the powerful desire to belong to Nike’s global club – but might it equally be true of services? Is the perceived need for personalisation actually a perceived need to compete with the individuation and choice that is the received wisdom of commercial marketing? Ben Barber’s book Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults and swallow citizens whole is as fantastically bracing a read on this subject as its title suggests.
Finally here’s a breakthrough in the recognition of intangible design. The RSA Academy in the West Midlands made it to Design Week’s Hot 50 last week. Surrounded in this league by personalities, commissioners, consultancies and cultural institutions who all damn well should know how to use design, there it is: a school. Not even a school in a fancy building, but a school operating an alternative to the National Curriculum. Neither product nor service; a curriculum. Now what kind of a thing is that?
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