I think I probably needed a lesson in speed talking here, because I’ve got 15 minutes and we’re running late, so... Thank you for that.
Small companies... actually big companies start as small companies. The principles I’m going to talk about are, effectively, universal.
This is how I was taught – one of the greatest designers of this generation, Bob Gill said this to me when I was at college – what he meant was, if you follow the normal way of looking at things, you end up with, usually, repeat solutions, but if you look in here, in the bits where there aren’t solutions, you can find things that are disproportionately wonderful. If you can solve problems that people don’t even realise they’ve got, if you can bring joy where there isn’t any at the moment, then you can have a major effect. That’s how you add value.
Designing is adding value to things, it’s making it better, but it’s a commercial act. It creates money. I’m going to show you something now that isn’t a design. I’m going to show you how to add value to something that you don’t like. This is something that you did in the last 24 hours that I’m going to show you. At best it was boring; at worst it was a pain in the arse. If you do what I’m about to show you, it will turn that boring thing into something that you look forward to doing every single time you do it. I’m going to change your life. Are you ready? This is not a trick.
Watch carefully. There’s no sound.
[silence]
Tah-dah!
[laughter, clapping]
It’s on you-tube if any of you want to see it. We didn’t do it, I found it. You thought, if you thought at all, that these shirts were folded by a machine. They’re not; they’re folded by under-aged, under paid people in China. It takes a lot to make me fold a t-shirt, but now, it’s transformed a corner of my life and turned it into something that I look forward to doing. That’s part of the design process. We’re finding the things that aren’t right and we’re fixing them.
I worked on the world’s first cordless kettle in 1985 for a little company called Tefal – it wasn’t that small, was it? – and a few years later, 83% of all kettles sold in Europe use that system; and I’m not on a royalty. Did we know that was going to happen when we did it? No, we didn’t, but the job was looking at what people did – fill kettles, plug in – and just make it better. It wasn’t more expensive to do. Argos and Curries said, no-one’s going to buy a kettle that costs more than 19.99, but they did and it changed the whole face of that.
We worked with a little company called Technophone a few years... sorry, that is the kettle there, the first one, the Freeline... a little company called Technophone in 1985 to produce the world’s first truly pocketable mobile phone. That company, having launched that product, the PC205, was bought by Nokia. Now, as you can see with those figures – those staggering figures - nearly half the population of the planet uses a mobile phone – more than televisions, more than credit cards – and that’s what it looked like. The predecessor to it, that claimed to be a pocket mobile phone, wasn’t. The marketing department made giant pockets, to say, look, I’ve got a pocket mobile phone. This is a tipping point. This is the point where a business machine started to turn into something else. If you spot the tipping point, that’s where it is.
For those of you that are too old or male to know what these are, this is Baby G. This is probably one of the most successful launches, ever, of a watch. This is in Japan. I think at one stage, 20% of the population under the age of 17 in Japan owned at least one of those watches.
Now, let me tell you something about design. It’s incredibly cheap. In fact, the better the design, the cheaper it is. If you look at the numbers that that racked up, it cost a ha’penny per unit by the time we cleared the first year. Now, you can’t measure it. They’re still on the market, millions and millions later. If that had been shit, it wouldn’t have sold; it would have been very expensive, but because it was so good, it was incredibly cheap. When people talk about investing in design, there are very few investments that you can find these days that will produce that kind of value. Get it right and you’ve got probably the most powerful strategic tool in your arsenal to create money in your business.
And what about this? Now, this was a little company once – a man called Richard Branson – and he came to us two years ago to ask how we would help to create the world’s first commercial space-liner. This little bit of film – which I’d love to show you a lot of, but I can’t, because we’ve run out of time – is basically what it’s going to be like.
This is the dream which is turning into the reality. If you’ve got 200 thousand bucks lying around next year, you’ll be able to do this. You’ll be able to go to the space port in the Mojave Desert and spend a week learning how to keep your breakfast down on an aircraft that does parabolic, zero-g turns and then you’ll get yourself into this device – which, the aerospace side was designed by Burt Rutan, who’s the man who won the X Prize for the first privateer into space – and you’ll sit in the thing in the underneath there, which they call the shuttle cock; and inside here is where you’ll be, six of us – or, if I’m on board, three of us – and off you’ll go. And you’ll be carried aloft by the lift they call the White Knight, it will take you up into space and you’ll enjoy yourself and come back, but we’ve run out of time, so I can’t show you the rest of it. But, if anybody’s around at lunch and wants to see that, I’ll show you the rest of it then.
How do you do the future? How do we have the audacity to do it? Why did Steve Jobs... who gave Jobs the permission to redesign how we buy music, over the internet? Can you imagine how pissed off the music industry was, when that cheeky bastard came and pinched it out from under their noses? Jobs says, the further into the future you look, the better it is, because there’s nobody there. There’s no competitors. The future is not something that happens to you, the future is something that you create. And, the bold are the ones that win. But, if you want to know where the future is, it’s out there.
At Seymour Power we have something called Seymour Power Foresight, which is our over-the-horizon radar, looking at the coincidences of society in economics and science, to find the new nodes where things change. But if you think that the future is out in science land, you’re not right. It’s here. It’s buried in people.
This is a piece of ethnography. I’ve turned the sound off – if you’d heard what he was saying, the man is telling you how wonderful the stair-lift is, how fantastic the switch is, which he loves best. It switches itself off, so his grandchildren can’t injure themselves. He thinks it’s great. He’s told the focus group to do it. Look, he can’t do it and he doesn’t know he can’t do it and, even if he did know, he wouldn’t tell you, because it’s very, very, very humiliating to tell people that.
Don’t use focus groups to ask people about the future – they don’t know. If you want to know about the future, you need to ask somebody who works there; somebody like me. Because I know what the trends of 2012 look like, because I’m working on them now and I know what the aircraft in 2020 look like, because I’m working on them now. And I know what the cars of four years from now are going to look like, because I’m working on them now. That’s what design is. It’s not just the creation of the object, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designers like me work in the future. We create what is going to happen. But to do it we have to watch what people really do and really are. The future is within our existing embedded behaviour and it is in our emergent behaviour and that’s why I love to watch.
I ask people things, but I don’t really listen, I watch what they’re doing. I watched these ladies, especially the one on the top right, talking about a packet of peas, but what she was actually doing was creating something extraordinary as we talked. Here she is, telling us about the fact that this funny little rip she’d made in this bag of peas, meant that she could tie the bag up together in a very clever way afterwards. What is always at the bottom of the freezer when you defrost it? Peas. That’s because the packaging is crap. It doesn’t suit the need, yet that’s what the client says reduced the cost of. We don’t buy packaging or goo, we buy products and it’s the whole product that we buy and I want to talk to you briefly about this.
This is the core of what I’m going to tell you about. I’m not going to tell you who the client was, because I need to protect the guilty. But, this client in frozen food came to me seven years ago and said, we wanted to reduce the cost of the packaging of the frozen... of our lasagne and they showed me it. Cardboard box, full of colour printing, plastic tray with a piece of foil over the top and the miserable piece of crap inside. I said, what are you talking about? What is this thing? Oh, it’s our lasagne. No, it’s not, it’s a miserable piece of crap. Why do you want me to reduce the cost of the packaging? Because we’re going to reduce the cost of everything, we’re going to cost engineer it further, you know, and then, and then the retail can do a two for £1 BOGOF – buy one get one free. I said, you’re out of your mind. Have you ever thought about making something better for people? What is the UK’s number one FMCG brand? As of this April. Does anybody know? It’s Tesco’s Finest. Bigger than Coke. Bigger than Heinz. That is a retail platform masquerading as a brand and it’s at the top end. Creeping premiumisation is affecting everything that we do.
I said, look, why don’t you just make it a better lasagne? They said, because we can’t afford to. I said, let’s look at this differently. I went to the chef and said, how much more money to make a really nice lasagne? Four layers, nice ragout. He needed three times as much money to make the food. I said, go and make it, but I want you to make it this big and that thick. And he said, why? I said, just do it. He went off and then I said, take that and don’t put it in the lasagne freezer, take it over there to the blast freezer in your factory and freeze it, which he did. I then said, turn it out. We the got a paving slab of lasagne. I then asked the MD to hit it as hard as he could with his fist. What happened? He hurt his fist.
You may have noticed – or maybe you haven’t – that there’s a constantness between a lasagne and a bullet-proof vest. When a lasagna’s frozen, it is absolutely rock solid, it’s structural. Then I said, feed that lasagne through the fish finger saw – because fish fingers are made from a big slab of cod that’s fed through a band saw – and we ended up with a portion of lasagne. He said, it’s still three times too expensive. I said, right, now take it to the yellow fats division – it’s delicious, that means butter – and wrap it in a piece of greaseproof paper with lovely graphics with, like-a mamma she used to make, or something on the front of it. And then they suddenly realised what was going on. This delicious lasagne we’d created was cheaper than the piece of crap that they’d asked us to reduce the packaging on, because if you looked at the whole issue together, you could make the product better. Better.
And it didn’t end there, because then we put theirs in the little plastic tray in the microwave and, when it came out, took a fish slice and tried to decant it onto the plate in a dignified manner – and you all know what that does, don’t you? And we put ours on the plate and put it in and, ping, it came out and it was perfect. Ready to eat.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is industrial Judo. You turn the strength of your opponent against him. You find out where the real problem is and you solve that problem. And, what did he say when we’d done it? That’s fantastic! Now I can still sell my piece of crap at a much reduced price.
You can take a horse to water, you can strap its head under the surface with gaffer tape, but you will not necessarily make it drink. It is my job as a corporate electrician to make the sucker drink. Three quarters of my design budgets are usually spent in persuading people about the violence of the new that’s about to happen to them. Preparing them to do the unthinkable that will make the innovation actually happen.
Let me finish, on time, on this: design – think of it from the verb, think designing, think a process. My definition of design is making things better for people. The version that we heard of innovation earlier on, the first speaker, was interesting. It was that... it was, innovation was the successful exploitation of new ideas – and it’s a very good one, by the way, try and remember that one – exploiting new ideas. They don’t have to be new; they just have to be new to what you’re doing. But designing is about making things better for people.
Thank you very much.