You know more than you think you do
On Thursday we launched the RSA’s new Design & Society programme. We gave away copies of this poster we made with Anthony Burrill and Adams of Rye and here’s what I said.
This country is awash with great designers; has been for years. But as citizens we’re showing limited ability to design our own future. There’s a big gap between the professional provision of the design industry and our common competence and readiness to solve the problems around us – our environment, our health, the education of our children, our imagining and realisation of a good, shared future.
We all know exactly how the gap happened. In last century designers achieved such sublime exercises of skill and judgement right across the gamut of need – from the toys and baubles of private luxury to housing and transport and labour-saving devices for everyone, and iPods – such sublime exercises of skill and judgement that of course the rest of us are cowed into assuming we leave design to the professionals. The twentieth-century triumphs of designers have led everyone else to forget how much they know.
We want designers to see themselves in a different role, and everybody else to stop assuming it’s only designers who do the design. We’re not talking about lowering the threshold of skill and judgement that defines a designer – the sublime exercises need to go on, in fact we need more of them in the public realm. This is not about everyone becoming a designer, but everybody does need a bit of what designers have got.
That thing that designers have got – the best of them anyway – is resourcefulness. They know how the detail and the whole fit together – whether the whole is an object or an idea – they don’t run from complexity and disorder, and they’re not shy about prototyping and improvising and visualising what a solution might look like
We’re going right into that space between the designer and the citizen and trying to find a new accommodation between them. Instead of simply making beautiful resources – which we know designers can do – can they redefine themselves as helping everyone become more resourceful?
These days there’s a design specialist for your brand, your building, your bridge, your packaging, your public space, your website, your wardrobe, your wedding… And some of this design is very civic-minded – from time to time we do get better public buildings and bridges and hospital receptions and classroom furniture. That’s all good, it’s wonderful, but it falls into the classic definition of design as problem-solving.
What if, instead of taking the problem away, design showed you how a problem might be solved so you could do it for yourself? What if product design showed you how something was made so you could repair or customise it? What if designers left the job half-done so you could use your own intrinsic design sense to finish it off. Because I bet you know more than you think you do.
This is the RSA Design & Society space. We know it’s incomplete and raises a lot more questions than answers but we’re going into it knowing that plenty of you out there agree and that the world already has a small number of outstanding protagonists. Here are a handful: The Open Architecture Network, Aravegna’s Quinta Monroy housing development, JoinedUpDesignForSchools and Pascal Anson’s home decorating films on YouTube. Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO said in Objectified that the most exciting thing about design right now is how it can make everyone more creative.
Design for the public, design with the public
Earlier this week I found myself in the most beautiful modern building in Europe, the Lisbon headquarters of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Experimenta ‘09, the Lisbon design bienalle, enthusiastically took up our proposal to run a bilateral version of our Action for Age Design Directions brief as part of their time-themed biennialle in September. This week six Portugese design students are starting work on the original brief, sponsored by Gulbenkian, that our five British finalists tackled earlier in the year.
The headquarters, completed in 1969, is a masterpiece of horizontal orientation and lovely materiality; concrete and glass and wood and bronze and leather and massive commissioned artworks and glorious landscaped gardens. Plus a concert hall and one of the worlds greatest private art collections. Minor interventions and additions in the intervening years are virtually undetectable: it is rich and austere at the same time, the vision and handwrititng of singular professional sensibilities; unchanging, monumental, awesome; a magnificent gift from high powers to the people of Lisbon and the world.
To the people but not by them, not at all. How ironic that we should be down in one of the conference rooms engaged in an opposite act of design, a co-design masterclass on services to relieve the social isolation and loneliness of older people, led by thinkpublic!, and driven by the principle that a good design solution is one owned by all the members of the community that created it.
I want to say it’s all design, but such an extreme contrast makes me wonder what possible connection there is between what the architects Pessoa, Cid and Athouguia did in the 1960s and what thinkpublic! do now.
Let’s see what the Portugese and British kids come up with together at the workshops in September. It might be rich or austere, but but I don’t expect it to be unchanging, monumental or awesome.
Is he or isn’t he (the world’s first industrial designer)?
Yesterday afternoon, at the awards ceremony for Shine at the V&A Sackler Centre, David Kester, Chief Executive of the Design Council, began a little 3-question quiz by asking “Who was the world’s first industrial designer?” While my brain auto-prompted “Christopher Dresser“, discursive noise-interference stopped my mouth. It depends what you mean by an industrial designer, obviously. Didn’t Alice Rawsthorn in Gary Hurstwit’s new film Objectified date the birth of industrial design to the rationalisation of armaments by mediaeval Chinese knights? Christopher Dresser, however, was the “right” answer.
He later asked what design was. Mike Ive said “The opposite of accident”; a nice answer, and I anticipated a range of further suggestions. Not so. According to the Design Council, design is the connection between creativity and innovation. Innovation, moreover, is “getting ideas to market”, and the Design Council has a diagram showing you how to do it. Right. I felt generally sadenned by the contraction of language’s rich ambiguity to this rather dry, pseudo-scientific lexicography, and particularly indignant on behalf of the word innovation that it should be appropriated in the Design Council’s merely expedient definition.
Recently, another Design Council person asked me, in conversation about the RSA’s Opening Minds secondary school curriculum, whether my colleagues had used “the strategic design process” to develop it. I stared blankly back, for surely there are many?
I do accept that when your communications targets are civil servants and businesspeople, it pays to be straightforward; to give one answer rather than many. The Design Council is justifiably admired around the world for the definition, often numerical, that it gives to design in business and public affairs. But to say innovation is this and “the” strategic design process is that is to lead poor design-innocents into a false sense of security.
Ironically, Kester’s middle question (”How old was Christopher Dresser when he started design school?”) clearly had a completely unequivocal answer, but he gave it to someone for being close enough (14; correct answer 13). Maybe the Design Council think all the things I think are clear are fuzzy; the opposite is certainly true.
Calling spiritually prosperous and self-knowing designers everywhere!
Because Love, Life, Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World is one of the most marvellous books I have ever read, I was excited to learn that John Armstong, the philosopher, was yesterday’s RSA Thursday speaker. He spoke about a new book , The Promise of Civilisation; about how money and power might be used well, about the power of spiritual prosperity to guide material activity, and about how that spiritual prosperity consists above all in self-knowledge and authenticity.
As always, I mentally wrestled throughout with the design angle on all of this. Actually his example of high civilisation was a masterpiece of urban design in Edinburgh’s New Town, and he refers readily to “objects” that speak to him of civilisation, so it’s not much of a stretch.
So what are the habits of a civilised designer? In what respect is he or she spiritually prosperous and self-knowing? The ones I can think of really know, but do not vulgarly over-estimate, the full stretch of what design can do, and find ways to express how design relates to the world around us. Next question: who was the more civilised: Victor Papanek or George Nelson?
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