In-house or out: embedding design
As little as a year ago it seemed that in-house design teams, in both the public and private sector, had practically vanished. So had senior civic roles in design: Leeds City Council was often named as the last remaining local authority to employ a Civic Architect. With a handful of notable exceptions – Apple and The Guardian, for example – it seemed to have become conventional for organisations to buy design services in from outside consultancies.
Last month the Design Council reported a 10% growth in in-house design teams since 2005, while also, quite suddenly, we are witnessing a growing trend for “embedding” design within the structure of public and private sector organisations. This means that anything from a private telecommunications provider to a local authority housing department, which might previously have subcontracted discrete design tasks, might now have designers on staff. Rather than apply their discipline narrowly to specific issues and projects arising – to corporate publications or product development, for example – these new recruits are usually paid to have a holistic view of the organisation; to apply so-called “design-thinking” to its whole structure and all its functions. In many cases, the designers’ role is described quite elusively as “service design” or as a source of unspecified but strategic problem-solving capability.
While many designers will cheer at this new recognition of their deep strategic value, the dislocation of design from patently designed things – from publications, presentations, products and so on – does make design hard to explain.
Is embedded or holistic service design new, or a new name for something that designers have always done for organisations? Along with embedded anthropology and artists-in-residence it is fashionable, but has the interest in embedding design happened for specific social, political or economic reasons? If it has, what are they? How likely is it to stay with us as the wind changes?
In practical terms, what is the job description for an in-house designer with a holistic brief? How does an organisation intent on embedding design go about recruiting designers? How is the effectiveness of staff designers paid for their holistic view to be measured? How does the design of services, structures and strategy respond to cost-benefit analysis? How is the language barrier between designers and other specialists to be overcome? How are creativity and innovation to be managed within large and often cautious or risk-averse organisations?
RSA Design & Society has organised a small, expert seminar to discuss all of this in a couple of weeks, conceived with the National Policing Improvement Agency as part of their bold investigation into the best strategic uses of design by organisations seeking improvement and innovation.
We’ve got Lynne Maher from the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement on the language issue; Tony Coultas of Skills Development Scotland and Ben Reason of live/work doing point-and-counterpoint on the virtues of in-house teams and external consultancy; Lucy Kimbell from the Said Business School at Oxford drawing analogies with artists-in-residence; and Simon Roberts of Intel and the Ideas Bazaar on embedded anthropology and social science.
Look out for the transcript of what looks to be a fascinating conversation, dowloadable from the Design & Society pages of the RSA website at the end of May.
The meaning of business, the utility of craft and the great How? of our times
On the evidence of last week’s events, business has entered a curious search for higher purpose, while craft is all higher purpose and no utility.
I arrived at the Design Council/Economists Big Rethink design summit on Thursday in time to hear Roberto Verganti’s thoughts on radical meaning. We know how to improve things using technology, he said, and everyone knows studying users will help design, but we don’t know how to improve meaning. Designers have become much less visionary in the last ten years, according to Verganti, because design has dwelt on processses, methods, tools, brainstorming and ethnography – growing closer in its language to business than to its origins in arts and crafts – none of which teaches you to discover meaning. Successful companies, he argues, get close to “interpreters”, not to users.
Who are they, I wonder? Novellists, curators, illustrators, art directors? It’s that storytelling imperative again. Two case studies followed; both qutie radical re-interpretations of meaning. Hugo Spowers of the Riversimple transport enterprise spoke about selling “miles travelled as a service, rather than cars as products”, and the winsome Californian Jeff Denby told the story of his integrated organic underwear/packaging/charitable giving/social networking enterprise PACT which ”put meaning where generally there was no meaning” – i.e. your underwear drawer; true enough.
Deadly presentations about Samsung and Microsoft confirmed that their entire meaning is to chase customers (try rendering the Microsoft logo as flower-petals), and Vijay Vaitheeswaran summed up the morning’s insight as ” Good design is alwasy human-centred design”. It struck me as quite hard to find examples of design that are not human-centred; performed, as it is, by humans for humans. More a question of degree I suppose – Albert Speer and Howard Roark being less “human-centred” than, say, Lord Rogers.
Paul Bennett of the design-thinking mothership IDEO opened the afternoon with a rousing presentation about meaning, underpinned by the creed of co-creation. I liked that his presentation was entirely typographic, but was driven to mean-spirited disdain by his portentous use of the full stop (”We need to reboot our values. Our choices. Our morality. Ourselves.) and the italic (”Managing your expectations”. “So what did we learn?”). The ensuing workshops, led by valiant IDEO colleagues, yielded insights in greater volume than quality, I would say. Verganti told me later he thinks that’s a feature of “idea-generation” techniques: you get a long list but not necessarily any pearls. My session on EDF Energy contrived a “higher purpose” in the French utility supplier partnering with people to produce energy (see below).
Since day two’s Innovation Master Class promised to “leave you with new means to innovate using design”, the principal speakers were asked for a final word; a practical tip, as it were. Richard Seymour urged “More anthropology; less technology”; David Kester said “Find new spaces to collaborate” and Bonnie Dean of Quantum Property Partnership’s less alluring advice was “Bring design-thinking in early”. Paul Bennett had spoken repeatedly of ”giving us things to do on Monday” but in the conversion of insight into “tools”, “means” and “things to do”, I think we’ve a long way to go.
Using my workshop session as an example, guided by the incisive Andrea Koestenbaum of IDEO, we discussed EDF’s Assets and Capabiltiies under the headline Now; the opportunities ahead under Now What?; the higher purpose that answered these opportunities under Higher Purpose; and, well, we didn’t really get around to the final section, How? See that’s the thing: I work for a think tank so there’s no shortage of higher purpose, but it doesn’t make the “how?” any easier. And anyway, a healthy skeptic in my group kept reminding us that energy was “just a commodity” and had no higher purpose.
The prevailing wind of participation, user engagement, co-production etc. – and not just in design – has saddled us with a great how? How exactly do you turn what “people” do and say and desire into ideas that have life; how do you make “people” have the ideas themselves? Since we published the thought that design can make everone more resourceful and self-reliant, we’re as implicated as anyone in calibrating the answer, and it’s not obvious.
I also attended the launch of the Crafts Council campaign Craft Matters. I do think craft matters a lot; certainly the haptic sense of schoolchildren should be nurtured as much as their visual and aural concentration skills, as Rosie Greenlees put it. But I’m always disappointed by the arguments, which all seem to be about supporting potters and weavers. I find myself wanting to elevate craft to a great spectrum of everything from handwriting to plumbing, with potting and weaving somewhere in the recherché middle, in the mode of Richard Sennett but perhaps in more accessible language. I fully concede that anyone making a living from craft needs to be exemplary in flexibility and resourcefulness (although if they’re flexible and resourceful I wonder why they need so much support). If you linked the haptic sense of potters and weavers with the haptic sense of heating engineers and carpenters and sign-writers, you’d have a utility argument as well. Flexible, resourceful and occasionally useful – what’s not to like?
Are designers born or made?
I wasn’t surprised when someone asked me this recently. I’ve argued for a re-distribution of design – or the tools and insights and processes that designers use – beyond the professionals for whom design was likely a vocation, to everyone else. So I must think designers are made not born. Let’s see.
I asked it myself of Rianne Makkink in the Arts & Crafts conference at Vienna Design Week last week. She’d regailed us with the highly-crafted, scintillating cabinet of curiosities inhabited by Makkink & Bey and its workforce of brilliantly talented young designers. You’d never imagine you could enter it without being a genius, without being born with it. Not so. Rianne used herself as proof that designers can be made: everything about her own birth and background, she said, indicated she should more properly be a housewife.
Roberto Verganti later a summarised of his recent book, Design-Driven Innovation. He points out that designers, more than most professionals, are plagued by stereotpyes. First they had to fight off the common perception that what they did was something like art; unbusinesslike. Now Tim Brown, David Kelley, IDEO and the spreading message of design-thinking have birthed another stereotype. Design thinking is the dream of managers: ”Finally, there’s a process! It’s not art after all, and therefore I can understand it. You do ethnographic research, then you brainstorm, then you prototpye and test and finally you have your product and service, threaded through with deep cultural insight”. Unfortunately, quoth Venturini, business schools tell people that it is wrong to decide from their gut. Put differently, I wonder if managers are being misled into thinking that designers are made and not born.
Last week we ran a seminar jointly with RSA Education for RSA Fellows: “How can design help education?” It asked, since teachers are increasingly required to undertake things that correspond to design – from lesson planning to timetabling to classrom layout to managing capital projects - whether and how the input of professional designers could help. One Fellow raised the troublesome point that the creative, “cognitive”, interdisciplinary, project-based approach to teaching is very much more resource-heavy than the traditional didacticism by which you teach a single subject. The interdiciplinary teacher, the teacher with a designer’s knack for integration and synthesis of part and whole: born or made? And if he/she is made, then what is the cost?
The science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling was enthralling in conversation with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Icon Minds symposium on Wednesday. But as he extrapolated and ellaborated in glorious language the idea that design is a lot like writing fiction (”potentially thinkable objects and services”), I began to wonder. A significant number of designers are born dyslexic, which effectively makes them into designers rather than writers. Sterling reckons Karim Rashid is a “pretty good writer”; certainly easier to imagine as a novellist than a mathematician or a police officer. This is like saying if you’re born a designer, then you’re born a writer. Likewise if you’re made. I begin to fear elision. Although I know many designers whose critical analysis is acute, I can count the ones that can (or want to) write on the fingers of one hand.
Our own debate on hacking yielded many insights in the midst of a tangled subject. Otto von Busch spoke of fashion designers’ “source code”, as if you could learn and re-apply (hack) the aesthetic insight with which Karl Lagerfeld was born, thereby transfering it into the “made” category. Colin McDowell’s elegant response was to characterise the come-lately, made-rather-than-born creator, the happy hacking amateur, as “infantile”. Scott Burnham, who chaired, praises the open-source-spirited denial of the lofty auteur in order to garner creativity at large; this he calls the hacking “methodology”. It pursues the progressively made, the built-upon, rather than the thunderstroke insight of a born designer.
The purpose of universal education is to overide accidents of birth so that everyone has a chance to be re-made. Working with RSA Education colleagues I’ve argued that that Design & Technology (as it is currently termed by the QCA) comprises generic skills that can empower the learner and the citizen: problem-finding and problem-solving; improvisation and adaptation, visualisation and conceptualisation, drawing and making, order, sequence and the integration of “big-picture” and detail. Moreover that these have unique potential to contribute to a sense of practical competence and resourceful optimism in young people.
In spite of my personal wonder at what certain individuals can do on the strength of something innate and environmentally inexplicable (born), I believe this about design: that it can make you different because it teaches you (made) that problems have solutions and that there’s a way of getting to them.
The born and made of design were arrayed grandly at Buckingham Palace last night for the Prince Philip Designer’s Prize. The winner was Andrew Ritchie, inventor of the Brompton folding bicycle. The bike itself has clearly had a slow birth and progressive evolution to the elegant thing it is now, and Ritchie was himself in the process “made” from an engineer into a designer. In the nicest possible sense, Ritchie is a one-hit wonder.
The nominees with the inimitable innate gifts, Peter Saville and Hussein Chalayan, the born designers with a language all their own, were rather abruptly summarised by the Design Council’s copywriter as pretty much a designer of record-covers and of freakish, avant-garde concept dresses. I think the born cateogry of designer is not optimistic for Britain Plc.. He doesn’t seem to come from a continuous supply; seems the exception when we want a rule; a rational continuum from Brunel and his Victorian peers to the present. We want reassurance that there’s more where he came from, which seems more likely true of the made than the born.
Someone asked how the RSA’s nomination of Peter Saville squares with our argument that more people can be made to think like designers; he being so unique and all. I replied that millions of people know what a designer is because of Peter Saville. Seeing and looking at what he did has taught them to see and look. What he and Chalayan were born to do has made everyone more of a designer.
Bruce Sterling proposed that someone should write a science-fiction type of parody of Ruskin – put themselves into Ruskin’s head and imagine what the author of Modern Painters and Unto This Last would have to say about interraction design or Facebook. He didn’t write fiction, but he could transfigure art and nature into prose images better than anyone. He is the greatest ever advocate of seeing and looking. I think Ruskin would really go for Peter Saville.
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.
Design as a choice-path; and more home-made toasters
A provocative afternoon with my Dutch friends in Amsterdam this week where I joined an expert-panel to discuss Premsela’s project The People’s Republic of Design. It aims to enlarge design and fashion to become “open cultural fields”. My session was a full-brain workout on professionals and amateurs in design. A few headlines surfaced.
Dingeman Kuilman, Director of Premsela, and I wrestled with how the process of choice among amateurs appears to be what substitutes for the process of creation among professional designers. Amateur interior decorators, for example, choose between options of style, colour, finish and furnishing and those choices synthesise as their act of design. Similarly people compose their outfits by selecting and rejecting. Of course professional design is a choice-making process as well – between flat or pronounced curve, greater or lesser contrast, reference or abstraction, and so on - but designers’ relatively vast stock of options (if they’re any good) is internalised and empirically formed so they can predict the effect.
George Eastman gave the world, Dingeman argued, a powerful democratic tool in 1888 because the instant camera makes endless choice available in image making. What would be its equivalents in fashion or poster-making, I wanted to know, and how come the photocopier didn’t do for graphic design what the button camera did for photography? Really low skill threshold: making choices explicit allows amateurs to enter the creative process with no barriers at the skill level, somebody said. I believe it was Willem Velthoven who answered that creativity could be construed as having a continuous stream of possibilities; and further, that although the world is a good generator of choices for photography, not so for t-shirts.
It was also Velthoven who classified amateurs in this useful way: the co-creating amateur whose participation in design is facilitated by professionals; the “publishing”, visible amateur who puts their pictures up on Flickr and maybe sells the surplas of what they make for themselves; and the private amateur who strives only for close, local benefit. There was also consensus that “top design domains” for amateur design are local and low-risk: fashion and interior design – everything to do with identity, in fact – while you wouldn’t expect to find many non-professionals in aircraft design. Actually there are quite a few, but would you want to fly with them?
Last week I disclosed my strong feeling that design is actually changing and this is how Dingeman put it for Holland: “The fashion model and the art model that design followed are both worn-out, and the economic value argument that sustained design in the 1990s now needs to be supplanted by thinking in terms of social and cultural value”. I’ve drawn the contrast before between the poweful cultural pleading of the Dutch and “creative industries”, innovation-themed language that finds favour with civil servants over here. This contrast was made stark by my brief attendance at the Design Council’s Design for Economic Growth: Measuring the value of design seminar the day after Amsterdam. Their International Design Scoreboard is a valiant and internationally co-operative research exercise with one ironic flaw: no data is available for Germany, Italy or the Netherlands – three countries we so intimately connect with design.
Actually Premsela had warned me about this. They’d done lots of “cultural mapping” of design in the Netherlands but had not been able to supply the Design Council with any economic data. They had at one point tried to enumerate the designers working in Holland, which sounds rather like more cultural mapping. Premsela themselves have a sense of humour about this, and a great admiration for the Design Council. But they also have an uncommon confidence in the sufficiency of a social and cultural argument for design.
I recommended Helen Lofman’s homemade toasters at the Central St Martins degree show last week and it’s looking like a flush. Thomas Thwaites at RCA Design Interactions actually made his own plastic from raw materials and generated his own electricity to make his toaster.
Design hoax and design hygeine
So the Amateur Share in Milan last week was all a big hoax. I guess the dead French philosopher in the A-list was a clue, but you never know; I just thought the invocation of Guy Debord - not uncommon among designers – meant it had a conceptual edge.
Meanwhile the Today programme redeemed themselves fully with its feature on the Design Council’s project to “design out” hospital bugs earlier this week. David Kester’s insights argued winsomely how far design has moved on from chairs (see my last post) ; but pointed out that the chair in question (a commode with no crannies wherein bugs may lurk) was designed by the very same designers (Royal Designers, no less) of Virgin’s Upper Class seat.
This was a nice move. It’s important that we don’t divorce socially-minded design from premium-service-consumerly-minded design. Those who know the difference - and therefore also the similarity - should strive to make plausible links between design whose virtue is formal and design whose value is social. The Design Council will be touring hygeinic hospital room-set widely.
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.
Current RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- The Flaw October 11, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010