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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 approvingly and – completely off their own bat, I swear – suggested 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?

Civic goods and civic good

In her New Statesman preview of the coming Tate Modern exhibition Rodchenko and Popova, Rachel Aspen recounts how the October Revolution brought art into everyday life in complete and programmatic way which is bracing for a designer to imagine today: “Their work was no longer to be confined to the elite realm of galleries and studios. The entire fabric of everyday existence – from mass transportation and housing projects to teacups and book jackets – was to be redesigned to serve a new vision of Russian life”.

 

 

Let’s go back to the Royal Mail Design Classics, which also belong to an era when it seems you could capture the whole force of social optimism in a thing (Concorde, a mini-skirt, a public phone box…). Am I just torturing myself that it’s no longer this simple? Look at the 2012 Olympic logo debacle. So high are our expectations now of pluralism and interactivity that Olympic logo had to be endlessly changeable and accommodating of infill imagery and colour, applicable in digital and analogue form. No wonder the mark itself is nasty and its typographic resolution poor – you’re almost never supposed to see it as the mark itself, only in its infinite subjective metamorphoses.

 

Earlier this week I had the happy privilege of visiting Manchester Town Hall. Actually it’s not such a privilege; you can just walk in off the street. But what a neo-Gothic treat of mosaic and stained glass and coffered ceilings and spiral staircases and cloisters is this building, reputedly the most expensive in Europe at the time of its construction in 1877. The guidebook narrates the incident three days after the opening banquet when 43,000 working men of the Manchester and Salford Trade Societies marched into the Town Hall bearing samples of their craftsmanship “ranging from glass swords carried by the United Flint Glass Cutters’ Society to a tin suit of armour worn by a member of the Manchester Tin-Plate Workers’ Society”. In Manchester, amidst all the industrial and bureaucratic steam of the late 19^th century, these symbols of industry were incontrovertible civic symbols as well.

 

Franklin Roosevelts’s New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration, instigated a massive programme of civic building to generate employment in the Depression; a programme of progress manifest in built things (parks, bridges and schools) as well as artistic and literary activities. They are symbols of social good; some more allegorically coded than others, like the famous Rincon post office murals in San Francisco depicting the history of California in social-realist terms influenced by Diego Rivera. Gordon Brown has recently invoked the New Deal in the context of our own recession. But how could its ethos apply in a society now so suspicious of propaganda, political iconography and material depictions of public good? Allegory and symbolism in design now seem acceptable only in the commercial realm where the narrative manipulation is so self-evident as to be unobjectionable.

 

Design now works subtly and intangibly at citizenship ceremonies, public service reforms and electronic forms of democracy. Obama’s campaign betrays the influence of design through and through but you simply can’t quantify it in things like posters and logos. Has the idea of visually manifest, designed, singular, symbolic identity passed forever into private hands? Has the commercial marketing promise of choice killed off the very idea that your state could commission the one true thing you the citizen need?

 

“Map is wrong”: existential cartography

Woops. I conjectured two days ago that Harry Beck’s metaphysical London Underground map is eternally modern because anyone over the age of seven can tell it’s schematic rather than literal. I forgot to mention yesterday that Richard Wentworth also told a story about finding a Japanese man measuring the distances between stations on the map at Russell Square and indignantly pointing out “Map is wrong”. I was wrong.

But Emily King did say that for her the London Underground map and the A-Z streetfinder “are” London. Design has imprinted her very neurons; existential cartography, isn’t it great?

A powerful design nerve

Great phrase, isn’t it? It’s not mine, it’s Richard Wentworth’s. He said it last night in discussion with Emily King at London Transport Museum in a discussion of the London Underground posters going back a century. Man Ray was the man with the actual powerful design nerve in question, but Wentworth boldly went on to say it’s what all American artists have.  Of course I really wanted to know what it is to have a powerful design nerve. “They know how to organise things” said Wentworth, “they’re do-ers, while here we just desire”. He made several exceptions, most notably among the “commissioning class” who in the 1930s included Frank Pick, Managing Director of London Transport and among many achievements, commissioner of the Edward Johnston typeface and roundel. In Wentworth’s always distinctive words, “these people had a sense of connection accross a big critical territory”. I think part of what he means is that people like Pick, who trained as a lawyer, weren’t cowed into thinking commissioning design needed a specialist: it is simply in the workaday gift of a public servant to think critically about design.

We talked later about how America’s early pioneering spirit – “do-ers” out West building their own houses and tilling their own fields, getting railroads built – obtains today in some magnificent amaterism from high-craft wooden-boat building to Pro-Am running a ranch for pleasure. It’s something about doing things with complete commitment. I occasionally subscibe to a beautifully designed American magazine called Cook’s Illustrated which goes into magnificently scientific, alchemical detail as it presents not just the product but the process of its recipe testing in order to determine the ultimate 5-bean chili or chewy chocolate cookie; the archetype. 

“Yes we can!” With a powerful design nerve, maybe it’s true.

Design Classics: unequivocal, tangible, iconic?

Concorde (1976) is the youngest of Royal Mail’s new Design Classics special stamps, and a reminder of how far design has stretched in the last thirty years. More recently London’s design community witnessed an ugly fissure in two incidents that provoked unprecedented media debate about the meaning of design. Remember the angry resignation of James Dyson (inventor of the bagless, dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner) as the Design Museum’s Chair of Trustees? An exhibition about the pioneering mid-century styling maven Constance Spry – a Martha Stewart before her time but all too easily dismissed as a flower-arranger – was the final straw for those who believed a design musuem should narrowly demonstrate the power of engineering wed to manufacturing technology. Then Design Museum jury’s decision to award the title of Designer of the Year to Hilary Cottam; not herself a designer like her fellow candidates, but a social activist passionate about using “design thinking” to address deeply entrenched dysfunction in public services; particularly prisons, schools and health services.

 

All of this begged us to ask: what is design anyway? In the 20^th century chairs were really important touchstones of future thinking; as were labour-saving domestic devices, housing solutions for everyone and, later, portable electronics. But these two incidents were at the centre of a new discourse in which the meaning of design in our post-modernist, post-industrial world has irretrievably expanded. The image is recognised to be as significant as the artefact; the value of the service is known often to outstrip that of the goods; the built environment is a metaphysical concept full of hidden forces; regeneration finds more favour than the new; and design – for so many and for so long synonymous with the sleazy adjectival tag “designer-” – regains some of its more abstract and divine original significance.

 

Three of these classics – Alec Issigionis’s Mini, Mary Quant’s mini-skirt and Robin Day’s Polypropylene chair – were designed by the RSA’s own Royal Designers; themselves continuously exercised in defining “sustained excellence in design” as the uses and sightings of design proliferate around us.  

 

It’s sobering for design insiders to look at the Design Classics selection, for while we strive to determine the meaning of design today, these classics are unequivocal: tangible and iconic. The Classic most tractable in our modern, stretchy design-critical terms is Harry Beck’s London Underground map. Its metaphysical character is its virtue; almost anyone over the age of about seven can see that it’s a schematic rather than literal representation of geographical reality. In our interactive times, when the Web gives us access to information that is infinitely deep and wide, the Underground map is eternally modern.

The black and white of design

Design Week reports that the Royal Mint has offered a public prize for the design of a commemorative 2012 coin, noting that this initiative, along with Boris’s public competition for a new Routemaster and the 2003 public competition for a London 2012 logo, is starting to look like a trend.

I spent much of the end of last year thinking about amateurs and design. Fashion or zeitgeist, it turns out – as it always does – that I’m not the only one and I’ve been lucky enough to converse and correspond with Juergen Bey, Jerszey Seymour and a handful of others for whom amateurs in design are deeply interesting and topical. I asked earlier here if the relative lack of amateurs in design – compared to crafts or astronomy or history – was in part responsible for fractured relationship between design and the rest of society – no shades of grey between the black of designers, as it were, and the white of everyone else.

Repairing this fracture is not about making everyone into a designer, not about taking away the commercial work of designers and giving it to amateurs. Of course it isn’t. It’s about a better relationship between professional practice and public participation; between the education of professionals (supply) and the education of everone else (demand); between the leadership professionals can give and the ability of everyone else to criticise it intelligently.  A public competition like this seems to me to be a good way to engage non-professionals in the processes that designers go through all the time, and thereby increase the public understanding of design.

In my work-in-progress account of design as part of the RSA’s larger agenda of progressive social change, I’m arguing that designers have a particular resourcefulness that needs to be more widely shared. It’s a readiness to improvise and prototype, a bravery in the face of disorder and complexity, an holistic and people-centred approach to defining problems. What I want to know is this:  if you give people who aren’t designers some of the insights of design, do they become more self-reliant and resourceful?

The Design Business Association has urged professional designers not to enter the Royal Mint competition because there are no fees to entrants: “In the current economic climate it is more important than ever that design businesses maintain a healthy profit margin”. I’d say in the current civic climate it’s more important than ever that the public understands what designers do.

Democratic ecology or retail?

14 January 2009: Compliments to Caroline Roux, Editor of the Guardian Weekend’s Space feature for her report on a conversation between Sir Terence Conran, Kirstie Alsopp and Philippe Starck on the role of the designer in lean times. It cast up some ideas with traction. It’s fantastic that Starck, self-styled “design superstar” who rose to glory in the decade of big shoulders and conspicuous consumption, should now so outspokenly champion the politics of design, “democratic ecology” and revolution. It’s easy enough to claim, as he does, that design has always been political, but when design has also always been commercial, how is that more than a truism? It’s like that old chestnut: “look around you, everything man-made has been designed!”; so true that so what? But this notion of democractic ecology does advance the political idea, especially when Starck elaborates with an example from the internet design resource Mydeco.com: “The next years will be the time of the microstar. It’s our duty to help this new solution along”. This speaks directly to the new hypothesis that RSA Design will set out to demonstrate: that the insights and processes of design can increase the resourcefulness of people and communities. Since design has for so long been concerned more with creating beautiful resources, this could be quite political.

 

So naturally, I also admire Kirstie Alsopp’s statement about self-reliance: “I like the idea that people become as confident about furniture and decoration as they have about food”. Not for the first time, I’m struck with the thought that cooking is the last remaining bastion of domestic craftsmanship. We don’t dressmake much any more (the haberdashery and fashion fabrics and dress patterns department of John Lewis used to cover half the ground floor of their Oxford Street store, now it’s tiny), but we cook like mad.

 

Terence Conran answers Roux’s question about taste by invoking the idea of essentials, basics, “necessary things that were good value and simple”. As a designer, with a designer’s radar for the archetype, the perfect synthesis of utility and form, I concur. But I think there’s a problem. For the English eccentric, the sceptical, anti-modernist, individualist British person, there’s something too dogmatic about this design-led prescription. Doesn’t it suggest a liveried matching set – or perhaps an assorted but exquisite collection – of designer items? Where in Japan it might be culture, here it just sounds like retail.

 

Conran also raises the economic question of employment: “If we design everything for longevity… what are all our hands going to do”. The answer is somewhere in Starck’s democratic ecology: a more ambiguous relationship between supply and demand, producer and consumer, professional and amateur. Charles Leadbeater, in his essay Production by the Masses, argues that the future role of professionals is to guide non-professionals into a condition of self-reliance, rather than to “do” for them. “Professionals should become campaigners, counsellors and advocates…”, he writes. How might this vocation be interpreted for design?