Clive Grinyer
Hello, well Richard was complaining about the graveyard slot after lunch, and I feel like the grave digger, filling this huge hole that Richard has planted in front of us all, that was a fantastic and inspiration speech, and I shall try and follow it.
It feels a great, oh there I am, thank you. Oh here we go, right, start at the beginning. I could have called my talk to you today, Heroes and Villains, and People I’ve Met, but I decided to call it The Silence of Design, which puzzled me for a bit as well, but let’s see where we go with this. But I want to talk to you about people, I’m going to try and keep off things, because let’s remind ourselves, that’s actually, I think, what we’re really here for. Sometimes we feel like we’re kind of, you know, the top of the heap of a large number of people behind us, and we’re trying to make things work for them. So I wanted to do something a little bit different to what I normally do, which is look at the people, and of course, I’m a designer, so I start with myself. But I think it’s important that you know about me, because you’ve got to judge. Richard is this yours? can I do that, hello? Because then you know whether I’m talking bollocks or not, and what my perspective is, and why I may make sense, or why I may not, so I’ve justified introducing myself to you, I think.
Yes, it’s true, I started off as a product designer, made physical stuff, sometimes for really big brands that made crap stuff, like Samsung at the time. Sometimes for fantastic brands, like McLaren, really, really exciting, that only made either stuff that was $1 million, or baseball caps and t-shirts. So trying to find a middle ground where you could buy-in to a brand like McLaren was really, really exciting. You had to make people believe that if they sliced through that thing, then engine oil would bleed out, that was a lovely design brief. So it was all about things.
But now I’m at Orange, and that’s a tricky place to be, because it’s not so much about things, but there are, of course, those things mobile phones, and I love them because everyone’s got them, they’re much more interesting to me than computers or PCs, or any other electronic equipment that I’ve ever designed before. And this was the first phone I had when I joined Orange about nearly five years ago now, it’s the longest I’ve ever been at a job, that’s quite good. And the thing about this phone was; (a) it was really ugly, (b) it had more technology in it than the entire Apollo moon missions all put together, in that phone, in my pocket, so this was a big deal. And this was the first time Orange, which of course is a mobile operator, a fantastic brand, but they put up masts and send you bills most of the time. This was about having a technology platform, having a phone. So yes, it was really ugly, it took me two weeks to find out how the phonebook worked, it took me two weeks to ring anybody basically, and I said, thanks guys, you know, I don’t think I want to join you anymore, I’ll give it back. Then I thought, no, no, it can only get better, because this is such a piece of crap. And I have to, of course, point out that the current Orange SPV phones are really delightful and wonderful, and Microsoft is a fantastic company who sorted all the problems out for us.
So what did I do? Because the problem was, okay, we have Microsoft, but you know, the name on the top of that phone are the people that actually do it. It’s Nokia, it’s Motorola, it’s Samsung, it’s LG, it’s a load of unheard of Chinese manufacturers now. But I believed we could do something, we could do something on the user interface. So now we work with those companies, I create things like that user interface, so that nearly every Orange phone you get, has a kind of consistent brake on the left, accelerator on the right, you can get to portals, you can get to services, and then you go into the wonderful richness of Nokia and everybody else. But it’s a very convoluted industry, it’s a very strange industry, so I’m not doing the product anymore, I’m doing the user interface, but it’s all the same kind of thinking. And then Orange went and changed on me, they stopped being a mobile company, they went from mobile into broadband, they went from being, well let’s face it, the UK’s favourite mobile company, to the UK’s least favourite broadband supplier, which was a bit of a shock, but that’s what happens when brands get lost, and I’ll be honest, Orange gets lost occasionally. But now I’m an internet designer, I’m telling people how, helping people buy phones, sort their problems out, all the stuff I learned from product, from user interface, I’m now working on, on the internet. And then I go full circle, because finally Orange realise, hey, those things in your hand, they do say something, don’t they, it is important that people can easily get access to the stuff we give them, it is important that they love, and their personality is expressed by those things, so I’m back to being a product designer again, and we’re going to be launching a range of Orange mobiles next year, which I think is hugely exciting, and no, it’s not going to be called the O-phone. But it nearly was.
Now our boss is Didier Lombard, now he’s French of course, and the programme notes said I live in Paris, I don’t anymore, I just came back. Didier is a very political guy, he knows how to run this big France telecom thing, he’s good at keeping people happy. Does he care about design at all? No, not in the slightest bit. It’s all about technology, it’s about convergence, we still talk about it, we’re still trying to create it and make it work.
I work in an organisation that doesn’t understand anything I do, if it does understand it, it thinks it’s about putting the logo on at the end, and that it’s something you do right at the end of the process, when all the really important decisions have all been made, and people come in and say: ‘Hey, we’ve got two weeks left, would you please do the user interface thing? Make it Orange, make it the right font, you know, and then we’ll go.’ I said, you know, you mean a year and two weeks or do you really mean two weeks? And of course, if it’s late, it’s my fault, and the whole thing goes wrong. I give a big talk called Lipstick on a Pig, which is how I feel about that approach to design.
So now you know me, I want to talk to you about some other people that I know. This is my dad, drinking beer obviously. So my dad’s a normal guy, regular bloke, in his 70s, okay, he was an engineer. He doesn’t really understand what I do either, he’s much closer to Didier Lombard than me. But now he’s old, he goes around the world quite a lot with my mum, and they’ve got more money than his parents had, they can go and travel, but he doesn’t like airports, in fact, he really hates airports. And unlike most people of his generation, he finds them noisy and dangerous places, and he can’t hear what’s going on. So again, like most people of his age, he goes to the toilet a lot when he goes to the airport, but he doesn’t go to the toilet to go to the toilet, he goes so he can hear the announcements in the toilet when he’s trying to find his way round, and trying to find what plane to catch. So he’s fascinated by the mobile phone as well, and he realises he needs one. He loves the fact that he can text his grandchildren and his children, and communicate with them through this mobile phone. It’s a huge technology enabling him, one of the biggest revolutions in his life, and he was even more delighted when designers, nice people, and Vodafone, another lovely company, as lovely as Orange, decided to create a phone for him, for people like him, because they realised that lots of people have mobile phones, they weren’t using them enough, we weren’t making enough money from them. So how can we design a phone, or how can the industry design a phone, that older people can use? So Vodafone spent a lot of effort, and they worked with a very famous design company, who you will probably know, Ideo, and it’s a shame Tim’s not here actually, but he’s not is he? And I’m going to do something really, really bad now that designers really are not very good at doing, and do very rarely, and I almost feel guilty about doing it. But I have to admit to you that this phone is not very simple, it doesn’t actually work very well. We poured all, I say we, the design industry, right minded thinking, they persuaded a phone company to make a phone for older people. They did a lot of user testing, they used their creativity, and do you know what, it wasn’t very good. Now what do we, what happens when we do something, we tell everybody that we’re good, that we’re going to solve all these problems, and this phone wasn’t simple, it had the buttons in the wrong place. It had simple terminology, brilliant, like your battery is full, and you’ve got a good signal, that’s fantastic, but as soon as you got into the phone, it all fell apart. We wanted to do something well, we don’t always do it.
And that made him a bit worried about technology, so now he’s got to have a digital TV, and he thinks that’s great because there’s lots of channels, you know, obviously more is better isn’t it? And now he goes through hundreds of channels trying to find stuff. But he has this EPG now, it used to be so easy when he just went up and down, I guess he can still do that, somehow the remote control is a bit more complicated. He can’t really read that anymore, he can’t really see what’s on next Wednesday anymore, the newspapers have two pages of stuff he can’t read. He’s worried about digital TV. And yet he’s a clever man. He’s a very, he’s an engineer, he could take this car apart, his car, and put it back together, and it would work better afterwards. I’d have a pile of nuts on the floor at the end of that. And he’s brilliant, you know, he’s a clever man, but he can’t set up his wi-fi. He lost a weekend of his life on a call to a very nice Indian lady who helped him, wanted to help him so badly, but he wants that weekend back. I had to go, and I lost two days of my life setting the bloody thing up. But this is his reality, this is what he sees of what, design?
Here’s my wife, Janice, she knows design isn’t about him anymore, she much prefers him, which is, I guess, a step in the right direction. Design. She teaches, she works, of course, we all work, she teaches at a school. And design at her school was mostly about trying to find one of the many designer mums at the school who would be able to scan all the drawings in that the kids did for the Christmas tea towel. That was the biggest design challenge they had, so they manage to do that every year. But now they’ve had the designers in, and they co-created, and they worked out how kids play, and they did nice things with old tyres and things like that.
So she understands design now, sort of coming really into her life. And she’s just had the loos made over, because they had a lot of problems with the loos, they had kids who weren’t going to the loo all day, and were losing concentration. And that was because they smelled bad, they didn’t want to go there. And they smelled bad because people didn’t respect them, they weren’t keeping them clean, it wasn’t a nice place. So they made them a nice place, design made it a nice place, design and toilets is a strong theme through all my presentations, but I think it’s a very effective vehicle for design.
And then she, as a teacher, she was invited on a day about six months ago, to use this fantastic new internet tool, Teacher Net, which is really sensational. Now all the teachers can come together, and they can compare, they can do all their, they take a day off, they can have a huge kind of coming together of analysing the school’s progress, it’s a wonderful thing. And they all sat down at 9.00 in the morning, the whole of London schools at least, I think it may even have been wider than that, and the password didn’t work, and they were stuck. So I don’t know how many countless teachers were sitting there looking at this fabulous piece of technology, that was beautifully designed with a really nice green apple logo, you get that teacher/apple thing going on there. It didn’t work, it did not work.
She was frustrated by that. She reads a lot, she buys books, she uses the internet for buying loads of things, but she does buy a lot of books. And the books come in nice, big packages, like this. However, there is a bit of a problem, because unfortunately we have a front door with a Victoria letterbox, as most people do, that was designed for the module of post that has been used for the last 200 years, which is very slim and like that, and she does not read The Daily Mail, I’m sorry. But you know, her box of Amazon doesn’t go through that, so every Saturday morning, we go off to the Fed Ex, the TNT, the DHL, the Post Office, to get all these wonderful things we’ve bought through the great power of the internet, and technology that’s allowed to do that. That’s a bit frustrating too actually.
And we have lots of remote controls in our house, and she thinks this is my fault, because I’m a designer. She said, why don’t you just stop designing these things, you know. Isn’t it you, you just keep designing plastic stuff don’t you? I try to explain it’s nothing to do with me, you know, it’s the companies, those people up there. And she said: ‘Well you work for them don’t you, I mean don’t you tell them?’ No, I don’t, they just say, you know, we need to do another remote control, we need to do another mobile phone, so we have all these things lying around our house now, and that frustrates you a bit as well.
And it’s great, this weekend, the clocks go back, you know, because heh, the thing about technology is you can put a clock in almost everything now, and that’s got to be good hasn’t it? Great, everywhere you go round the house. So now the clocks go back, so we get an hour back, which is back, we’ve just had a week in New York, so a bit tired, and we get an extra hour’s sleep. Except when we get up, we’ll then spend that hour we’ve just gained changing the central heating clock, the video, the car, all our watches, and we’ve lost all the instruction books to all our watches, so that takes a bit longer than that. And then we’ll drive to her mother’s, because her mother won’t be able to do it, so we’ll then lose a couple of hours again changing all her clocks. My PC is great, it automatically changes, the technical guys have sorted it out, but not actually in our lives.
Now here’s Jean Paul, now Jean Paul is an engineer, a technical guy from France Telecom, and he’s become a good friend of mine. I contacted him, and we have a big discussion, because when I worked in Paris, we worked in a big telephone exchange, and it was converted, and new energy saving stuff came in. And they put in these fabulous little infra red sensors in all the toilets, so that you don’t leave your lights on. So when there’s no one around, the lights go off, it’s great. The trouble is, when you go to the toilet, I told you I like toilets, you sit there fairly still, fairly still, usually, maybe a little effort, so after a couple of minutes, the fucking light goes out. You’re then waving. It’s somewhere, I think it was there, no, and if you’re lucky, you know, you haven’t made a mess and the light comes back on.
And I could see why Jean Pierre and his like thought that was a great idea, you know, we’re saving, technology is doing something great here, we’re saving energy, we’re making it good. But they had no understanding of what that experience was going to be like on the loo. And Jean Pierre has an English cousin called Bob or somebody, who was responsible for the thankfully old ticket machine of London Transport, where he felt, and again, he really wanted this thing to be simple, he knew he had to make things that was, how can you make buying a ticket as simple as possible? And he knew, and it was obviously a he, that the simplest solution was to have one button for every station. That surely, engineering mind, that’s the simplest thing, isn’t it? So we got 450 bloody buttons on that thing, this poor guy hasn’t got a hope of finding West Ham, is that a W or an H? And people with good intentions, often men, but not always, try to be simple.
But they miss something, they’re missing the process of course, of course they’re missing the process. But without that process, this thing we call design, it takes eight years. You know, it takes eight minutes when they install it, and they realise it’s crap. It then takes eight years to find investment to get rid of that with a nice new ticket machine, which are brilliant, because they’ve got really nice angled faces now, and it’s all user interface, and then you go and put your card in. Oh, except your card’s like that, so now you have to do that, so most Londoners appear to be deformed now around Waterloo, where they have to bend over because there’s two different things going on. And nobody thought of getting a bit of foam, and putting the position on, and trying it out. God, that would have been amazing.
So Jean Pierre, was he Jean Pierre, yes? Jean Pierre’s son is Arnot, and Arnot is a French designer, and he’s the guy we all want, he’s the guy Richard wants right now, I know, because he emailed me last week. He does Flash, he can model, he can produce concepts, he’s really creative and broad minded. Even better, he’s not English, he’s French, therefore he really understands emotion. We’re all with our bloody Jasper Morrison door knobs, the French go crazy, they know about design in emotion, they don’t want these bloody apple things with no emotion in them. So that makes him really interesting and valuable, but of course, he actually does work for Johnny, my mate, Johnny. I had a design business with Johnny once, and we were poor, we were young, it was great, and now he’s richer and famous, and that’s fine. But I still everyone I meet that I did know him, and had a business with him.
So Johnny needs people like Arnot, and we all need these little foot soldiers of design, you know, that’s our job, we need those people, we don’t care whether necessarily, whether they can go and sort out the problems in school, we really need people who are very creative, who can go in a studio and create some beautiful shapes. The craftsman side of design, that’s all Johnny’s really worried about. He only needs 10 of them or something, 20, that’s all he needs, but he finds it really tough to find them. So that’s a problem for him, we know what he does, we know he makes beautiful, beautiful objects, that just delight and stun us, and create bedlam in Orange when this turns up, and executives running around like headless chickens. But hang on a minute, just remember that of that image we’re seeing there, Johnny designed about, what, the rim and the bit across the bottom, about 7% maybe of that visual image we’re seeing. Of course, it feels beautiful, but actually that’s a user interface going on there, we all know that, and that’s actually what the amazing thing is. But Johnny’s possibly getting a bit worried that all his play things are disappearing to the back of the screen.
And of course, he’s got an unbelievable boss, a boss who, was it Ideo described him as having a reality suspension force field around him or something? Where he can make things come, he can make people do things. And it’s just astonishing to see the leaders, my leaders, you could not think of anyone more dissimilar to Didier Lombard and Steve Johnson. But we think we’re going to be Apple too, so we’re out hiring lots of people who’ve been at Apple, and hope that by some sort of osmosis, we’re going to become Apple, because we’re Orange, I mean that’s obvious. But Johnny needs teams of brilliant people, but as I say, not a huge team, but he does need people who are really going to give him the craftsmanship that he wants to make beautiful things.
Now Tim, we know, because you saw him, and I didn’t see him, but I can imagine I know what he said. Tim lives in San Francisco as well, just down the way, I don’t think they talk much, Johnny and Tim, but he’s been here, and he realises that, hey, we just can’t keep doing that physical design thing, we can’t. Design has to be about something else than just making things look nice, it’s got to be that, and that’s why we’re here today isn’t it? I’m going to knock that thing over in a minute. So Tim’s smart, Tim’s done the let’s make nice things stuff. I think this is a lovely thing he gave the Queen, the Commonwealth Games baton, I mean. And it’s beautiful, I mean you hold it, it takes the pulse of the runner, all the runners, so it’s like an Olympic flame without being an Olympic flame, but it’s only a baton with a message from the Queen. They turned it into something astonishing, so yes, Ideo, they can do that supremely well. And the Queen was very interested in it, except when she got hold of it, her pulse, it nearly stopped, it was like her pulse was so low, it was like how healthy can you be? She’s well oiled. So he knows, you know, there’s all this underlying process, this stuff going on with design, that is really interesting, and you can apply it to lots of other things. So Tim has done that with innovation, they’ve trade marked innovation virtually, and they’ve created these processes, and they’ve pushed us on this way, away from things to be honest. It’s the opposite of Jonathon, and his gorgeous little seven per cent of the thing that gives you the user interface. It’s about processes, it’s about a different activity. And he’s putting it into a business context, of course, just as much as Johnny is, but he’s really selling that process of design, and he’s really doing it.
Now before we get too carried away with who put design on the front of Business Week, let’s just remember that cover from a few years earlier when I was leading the Samsung design team. But Tim, he has to do even more than that now, because he’ll go to Japan, and he’ll see this recycling centre in Japan, where they’re ripping apart TVs of even 20 years ago. Oh god, you know, this is a new thing for us, what do we do, what does Tim do, what do any of us do about sustainability? We can talk about it at conferences, but what designer is really doing something about eco design? I’ve really struggled to see it. It isn’t actually Tim at the moment, Tim’s company is part of a few good things, they promise to ask their clients whether they really need the shit they’re designing, another remote control. But Tim’s got to step up to that mark pretty soon, as indeed do we all. But Tim of course, is part of an organisation that was started with another one of my people I know, friends I have, and a guy I think, for me, really is my hero, and one forgets about Bill, and about what he did to create that whole Ideo phenomenon.
And Bill, he was like my second dad once, when I worked at Ideo, he was just a wonderfully warm guy, and he did amazing things. He went to America, he had a nice little design consultancy in Kentish Town, he could have stuck with that. He went to America, he thought he was going to go to Massachusetts, because that’s where MIT was, and he went on holiday to Silicon Valley. Okay, he had a friend in Palo Alto and bingo, there’s this whole industry sitting there, making computers, not for the military anymore. Having to make them for people. So Bill said, well you’ve got to make things people can use, do you know about ergonomics? And you’ve got to make keyboards that people can actually get their fingers on. You’ve got to have 12mm from the centre row at an angle of 10 or 11 degrees, the Americans thought he was nuts, we don’t want European ergonomic stuff, that’s so, god, you know.
But he pushed that on, he created a whole discipline around ergonomics. It moved into human factors, because he was doing stuff with the technology, because he was visualising what you could do, you could have those thin little keyboards that are easy to use, you could use that stuff called double memory and small battery packs that are all lying round a table, and you have to configure it, and he creates that completely new object. I know there’s a bit of argument about whether he did, I believe he did, I think that that is an object that didn’t exist before Bill put that stuff together. He invented new, they used new materials, that’s Magnesium die casting, 20 years before anyone else did it. That could survive a nuclear bomb, probably why Nasa and the military had a bit of money in that start up. But it was a real, real step change, except there was one bit that was awful on it, and that was the user interface. The user interface was terrible. They had to design their own user interface, there wasn’t a Microsoft, there wasn’t an Apple, just to go and buy off the shelf. Then he realised, oh my god, that’s what we’re doing wrong, now we need to go there.
So again and again, Bill found new things, he didn’t wait for permission, he saw what had to be done, and developed entirely new disciplines to go and answer that. So with interaction, it became about how do we understand that stuff on the screen, what’s the flow through that experience, how do we communicate that, whether that’s graphically, through words, through a whole time sense. And for that, I think, for all those things he did, I think he stands out to me as a total hero of design. He didn’t wait for permission, he didn’t wait to be asked, he went in and said: ‘This is what we need, this is where my skills tell me to go.’ And I think hearing Richard’s inspirational speech just now, reminds me of Bill, and exactly those renaissance people, Bill was always called a renaissance person.
And another interesting guy who I love dearly, but did do something different to Bill, is Raymond Turner. There’s a whole conference called Raymond in Holland. I don’t think he even knows about it, he’s not here is he? I ought to have checked that none of these people were going to be here before I did this. But Raymond is, he did the other thing, he did the really difficult thing that virtually none of you do. Which he actually went into the company, he’s not just a consultant. And he went into unpromising brands, like Euro Tunnel. It’s a tunnel, you know, where’s design there? Well he put design there, into that whole experience. Where is design in the British airports? Well obviously there should be a lot, but then you see something like the Heathrow Express, and you understand what a great experience can be, and it’s not just about wearing nice purple coats. But I like him as well, because he says things, he challenges us, he challenges architects. On terminal five, the architects wanted to control the lighting, and he said, no, you’ll spend your whole time lighting the building, a designer will spend the whole time lighting the people. We want the people to be lit, not the building, and he’s right. And he said something else, he said design is too important to be left to designers, and what did he mean by that? But I think he’s onto something there, it means that we as designers think that we have to be the people in charge, but it is much, much more important than that. If it’s schools, it’s hospitals, it’s airlines, it’s toilets, that’s actually something we all have to be responsible for, and we only have the tools to make it better.
Now the lovely Dick and Richard, of course Richard is here, another of my heroes, of course, I have to say that. And I like Dick because he used to say things like, gang up against the bastards. And I thought, yes, that is what designers should do. But are they doing that? Well Dick and Richard ganged up against Unilever, but what I love about what they do, is they understand that, what Richard called emotional ergonomics years ago, maybe still does, how can you make two bottles of shampoo be so different because of what you know about people? So there’s a science there, and there’s a science of emotion, that ability to create emotional icons that really work, and I think they’re at the top of their tree in terms of that type of design. And really great news, they’ve made some money, you know, finally designers have managed to sell their business, which is really fantastic. What of us has ever managed to make any money out of design? Very few. When I say that actually, he made loads of money didn’t he, you know, he’s got a big fat cigar there, so sometimes designers do stop just being designers, and stop just worrying about, or being satisfied with their 20 or so people they employ, and they hope that somebody will come and buy them, sometimes they do go further than that.
And Conran, I’m amazed how few Conrans there are. I’m amazed how many other brands didn’t really copy what he did. But there he is with a very design related business into food and all those other things, and Habitat. And then somebody went even further than that, I mean you might argue he’s not even a designer, but he’s got that round his neck somewhere, that design innovation thing, and he’s certainly gone very large in terms of a real. But is he the only one? He might be the only one, which is a shocking thing.
Now this is somebody completely different, this is Norman Lewis, who was the head of research at Wannado and Orange, and Norman thinks that a lot of what we stand for is a load of rubbish. He loves this thing Web 2.0. He is a champion of emerging behaviour, if you like, the way that technology is being thrown at society, but in a friendly way. Web 2.0 is different to Web 1. Where Web 1 was, I’m not going to do the whole Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0, but it’s a much more human focused bunch of activities. It’s much more about let’s put something out there, and watch it change, let people change it. So what is happening is that design is being done by the very audiences that receive it. Norman really loves that. He’s got loads of guys there who are out, like radar, sapping up technology, sapping up emerging behaviour, because they feel that’s where the future’s going to come from. So these kind of weird looking people are co-creating and deciding what it’s going to be. There’s no designer there, you know, Norman is design free.
And he hates Steve Jobs, because Steve’s made a closed garden, it’s a walled garden. Him and his cronies have to work hard to hack into the Apples. I hope they can, because I’ve got an iPhone I need to put the Orange sim into it, but once they’ve done that, they should go no further. But he really thinks Steve’s, oh he said, the world will gang up against Steve, because he’s not playing by open source rules. Because what Norman wants, and don’t get me wrong he’s a nice guy, and he might be right, you know, Norman’s got teams of these guys who are influencing our world in a way that actually really frightens me. They call it democratic, right, but these guys are setting the news agenda. They’re out there on every Beta test, feeding back, everything Orange launches we get a lot of response, you get a tidal wave, almost a Tsunami, from these guys, not from real people, not from my dad who I started with, or my wife who actually has to use the phone, but these guys come at us. They don’t even believe we have the right to do any user interface, because we’re an operator, and we shouldn’t be doing products. Well maybe they’re right, but I don’t think that’s democratic at all, I’m actually quite worried about that. And there’s something even more worrying for design. They’re absolutely free, you know, you get a huge amount of development from an active technologically biased, very bright, Christ knows where they get the time to do all that blogging and feedback on all those forms and all the Beta tests, I never even get time to look at the web at all. But these guys do. They invest a huge amount of effort, and they are now designing our world, right, not you at all. We’re using some little techniques we picked up from design to try and do that, but the reality is 99 per cent of the world is not designed at all by us, it’s designed by people like this, or will increasingly be designed by this. If it’s designed by them, not designed by them, it’s designed by people like Diddier Lombard, who make a whole load of decisions that we have nothing to do with.
So we come back to people, the normal rest of the world, what’s going on there, so we look at the business world. Business, they’re kind of happy that design isn’t so, what’s the word I’m looking for, eclectic or up there, it’s less Philippe Stark now, it’s less about magicians with the magic dust. It’s more about professional, process, Tim Brown, Ideo, really fantastic tools to find the next thing. So they’re happy with that, I think, by and large. They find it more useful, because people who are chief financial officers at Orange or anywhere else, look like that, or the female equivalent, and they’re happy, but what do they really want? They want Business 2.0. They want Business 2.0 that’s going to completely make them look cool and fresh and mean something to all their clients, be differentiated, be competitive. So then design collaboration with customers, yes, that’s a great thing, that’s really important to them, because that surely, you know, that gets over that kind of asking people in Croydon, or asking people do they want a red one or a black one, they always say red and then they go and take the black one later, so they somehow feel they can trust that data more. So design becomes almost a hygiene factor with these guys, they know that design has to be up there at a relevant level, but does it really have to be brilliant anymore? It’s a commodity like everything else. How do we buy design? Hey, don’t we get all our products manufactured in China now, and our software done in India, so why can’t we just out source the design part as well, that’s a real challenge for us. In the public service world, you’ve been talking about that a lot.
And for someone like Gordon, who I don’t know, I did meet him once, he’s jumping on this band wagon, for sure he is. Because he wants to connect, he’s desperate for politics for mean something, he’s frightened of Bob the blogger, he wants people to understand and believe what he does, as does good old Dave. I mean Dave’s no different. Would Dave understand? would Dave do exactly the same things with designers to bring them into public services, to try and make them innovative, interesting, better places? Of course he would, of course he would do exactly the same thing. I don’t think these things are political, they might be desperate. At the same time, designers are being put into places where they’ve got to really stand up to the mark. But back in that real world, with my dad and Janice, driving to their deliveries, not using their digital, they don’t see the world working at all, stuff just doesn’t work.
Lots of stuff looks lovely, and the world is lovelier. We did chuck out the chintz, we did go to a better place, cars look lovely, but it’s not just about that skin anymore. It’s about the password not working, it’s about the process of having to drive to the Post Office. Design hasn’t even got into that real experiential level yet, because it can’t, it’s not invited in there. So these people, they want to shape their world, they want to be part of that now, and that’s really challenging for us.
But here in the lovely Prada shoe wearing design world, well it’s a cottage industry guys. None of you are big, not really big, I’m delighted for the Seymour Powell’s, I’m delighted for all the little design companies out there, I’m delighted for Ideo and everyone else. But nobody knows who we are, very, very few people ever actually see anything we really design, and I’m really worried about that. We live in lovely little studios, we have a delightful life, wear nice relaxed clothes, we don’t have to wear ties, we don’t have to deal with difficult people, apart from the clients.
So I think we have to come right back to what are we here for, and what are we doing, and what can we do with that stuff? Now I’m not going to go right back to first base about what design does, but there’s a few things I think really, really for me it just seems like how do you explain it to everybody? When I’m at Orange, I’ve got to finish now, right now, one minute, okay. We’ve got to think about what things will be like. Design is thinking about what things will be like first, and that’s what never happens. People say, how are we going to build it, how are we going to afford it, how are we going to do all that other stuff? But ultimately designers say, what’s it going to be like first? Yes, of course it involves the people who want to use it, of course you’ve got to do that, it’s absolutely ridiculous not to do that, but it doesn’t mean you resign authorship of everything. Design of course is about the synthesis of all available options. Now these are things that accountants can’t do, these are things that managing directors and politicians can’t do, so what we’re saying here is, there’s a bunch of people called designers, have a bunch of tools that we can take out to the world. We don’t have to ask for permission, we don’t have to say, oh are we in mission creep here? No, these are things that other people just don’t think about in the same way, so it’s very simple to talk about, let’s think about the future and have foresight. But unfortunately, we’re a bit expensive, we have to be invited all the time, we have to wait until someone asks us permission. We’re very cosy in our world, we’re very self reverential, we’re all here loving each other today. We’re very immature as a discipline, as an industry, we haven’t yet really been strong enough, been brave to criticise each other, for example. We are, in fact, very silent in the world of my dad, my mum, the people who are in the real world, I think we are way too silent. Now what we see here today is a pointer to how we could be much louder, because we do have to be loud. Jeremy’s actually cutting his throat here, but Richard had just as long. We can be proactive, we’ve got to be proactive, we must not sit down anymore and wait for clients. We’ve got stop just being designers, we have to be visionary and take it out to the future, and maybe design has to be free, like Web 2.0, maybe we need a totally new business model, and then we’ll be able to go out and actually my mum and everyone else know we exist. The future should be bright.
And now you can cut my throat, Jeremy, thanks a lot.