‘Good design is an upward sales curve’
From forecourts to textiles, IT and the cinema, the record shows that, in economic downturns, investing in design is not a luxury, it’s a competitive necessity
1830s
Politicians have fretted about Britain becoming uncompetitive for centuries. In 1836, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Art and Manufacturers feared Britain was losing the “export race” because its manufactured goods were not up to scratch. The silk industry was losing market share at home to low-cost competition from abroad.
Design wasn’t helping. Carpets with frenzied vegetable patterns weren’t cutting it as the global competition in the textiles market intensified.
In response, the first Government School of Design was founded in 1837. If designers were better trained, politicians believed, the quality of British goods would improve. They were proved right, eventually. After the 1840s, so grim they were dubbed the Hungry Forties, British textiles slowly recovered.
British designers – led by Christopher Dresser, the Glaswegian who was arguably the first industrial designer – began to focus on affordable, functional objects.
A similar spirit, with a big dollop of utopianism, inspired the Bauhaus movement in the 1920s. Guided by German architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Bauhaus set out to design affordable, useful, quality objects suited to mass production, an approach encapsulated in its slogan: “Art into industry”.
Bauhaus was not alone. In England in 1915, a new, independent body called the Design and Industries Association (DIA) had called on industry to embrace “sound workmanship,” “respect for material” and “fitness for purpose”.
1930s
Raymond Loewy, the great American industrial designer, remarked: “Good design is an upward sales curve.” Loewy’s rival, Walter D. Teague, proved him right.
Trying to stand out in the Great Depression, with one brand of oil seeming much like any other, Texaco asked Teague (1883-1960) to design a new petrol station.
After talking to drivers and staff, Teague designed a station – branded with Texaco stars and a banjo-shaped logo – with large glass areas, white, easy-to-clean walls, canopies over pumps and rest rooms. By 1940, Texaco had built 500 stations in this iconic style.
This design helped Texaco exhibit tyres, batteries and repair services, all vital new revenue streams as oil sales slumped. The stations were at the heart of Teaxaco’s revolutionary corporate branding. Teague insisted he was no genius: “It is not surprising we all adopted the same method, those who did not simply did not last.” But in the worst recession of the 20th century his design delivered a phenomenal return on investment.
Texaco’s forecourt revolution had a sexy precedent. In the booming 1920s, film studios built palatial cinemas where moviegoers felt like royalty. The most famous cinema owned by RKO, (created by merger in 1929, the year Wall Street crashed), was RKO Keith’s in New York. With lobby fountains, sweeping marble staircases and ceilings that resembled starry skies, RKO Keiths’ was an experiment in experience design – 50 years before the term even existed.
Palaces weren’t the only answer. In the 1930s, designer Albert Dreyfuss created a modern, modest, warm style of RKO cinema suited to middle America.
Though he was a designer, Dreyfuss’s role wasn’t confined to craft. He was once asked to discover why RKO’s new Sioux City cinema was losing out to a dilapidated rival. After cutting prices to no avail, Dreyfuss stood outside the cinema for three days, watching locals walk past. Sensing that farmers were worried about leaving muddy tracks on the red carpet up the steps, he replaced it with a rubber mat. Ticket sales soared.
'Apple's problem is that it believes in selling caviar in a world that is content with cheese and crackers'
In Hollywood, art director Van Nest Polglase shaped RKO’s moviemaking strategy in the 1930s. Rather than compete with MGM’s costly historical epics, Polglase and his team designed versatile, low-cost sets that provided the backdrop to such classics as King Kong and the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals, giving a high-style gloss to a string of successful romantic, musical and science fiction fantasies.
As the recession bit into budgets, RKO designers created a setting dubbed the BWS (Big White Set), used in eight Astaire/Rogers musicals. The BWS seemed vast on screen but was mostly white space, with a few walls, stairs and dancing platforms. The BWS made white rooms fashionable in the US and sales of Venetian blinds (seen in The Gay Divorcee) soared.
For King Kong, RKO redressed sets from the action film The Most Dangerous Game. Fay Wray, who starred in Dangerous Game, signed up for Kong believing her co-star was tall, dark, handsome Cary Grant. King Kong cost $500,000 ($8.3m in today’s money) and grossed four times that in the US alone.
1970s
Nineteen seventy-three was a year of stagflation, war, soaring oil prices and Xerox’s Alto personal computer. The Alto was inspired by inventor Doug Engelbart: his observations of how children learn influenced mouse-driven cursors, multiple windows and hypertext.
Like many ground-breaking innovations, the Alto was not an immediate commercial hit but its successor, the 8010 Star, had the first true Graphic User Interface (GUI) using icons, What You See Is What You Get editing, and a pointer to control the computer. Launched in 1981, the Star was part of an integrated office system, not a stand-alone PC.
Steve Jobs, developing a new computer with some former Xerox engineers, took the stand-alone route when he launched the Apple Mac, the first commercially successful computer to feature a GUI.
In 1986, Donald A. Norman published a book called The Design of Everyday Things, in which he used the term “user-centred design” and called for design that served, rather than ignored, the user. Norman felt computers were especially unfriendly, but the PC revolution placed the user’s experience at the heart of good design, leading designers to study customer behaviour acutely and revolutionising design as a discipline and an industry.
The roots of the idea that design could be applied to experiences, services and corporate strategy lie in Engelbart’s trailblazing research. This philosophy has underpinned the Design Council’s Designing Demand programme, which has transformed thousands of businesses since 2004.
User experience also inspired Apple to invent the iPod. Looking to diversify, it tested digital cameras, camcorders and portable music players. Feeling the music players on offer weren’t up to scratch, it created its own. With the economy stalling in 2001, Apple invested in product and retail design, opening a chain of stores and launching the iPod.
Joseph Graziano, Apple’s former CFO, sneered at the time: “Apple’s problem is that it believes in selling caviar in a world that is content with cheese and crackers.” But by differentiating through design, Apple persuaded millions to buy its caviar.
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 5, Winter 2008