Jeremy Myerson
Well good afternoon everybody, welcome back to the final leg of our journey, Inter Sections Conference, I just want to remind everybody that at 5.00 at the end of the conference, there is a bus that is leaving for the other great design exhibition in the North East at the moment. This is DE 07, Design Event 07, the North East’s annual design festival. It encompasses film, fashion, product, graphics and illustration and it will, the bus will go on a tour visiting our friends in the north, including work by Build, Richard Fenwick and Vaughan Oliver and Launch 207, featuring new products by regional designers, the plastics recycling and something called ‘If I Could’. So lots more exciting things to look at. So if you’re not rushing to a station to leave the North East and you’ve got some time, the bus leaves at five o’clock and I do recommend it.
Aside from the festival I’ve had today a really great opportunity to see two fantastic things very close to this exhibition. One is the new design school at Northumbria University which I had a tour of this morning which really is a terrific facility, built around how the design education process works and I wish them well in this new building. And the other, John Thackara showed me around Dott 07. If you haven’t, and I know a lot of you have, but if you haven’t yet gone next door, just in front of the Baltic, and looked around the Dott 07, low carb lane, the project on dementia and the various other urban farming, various other projects in Dott 07, make sure you have a look at that before you.
I’m now going to going to hand over to the three chairs of the three break out sessions from this morning who is just going to fill you in on the key highlights and I gather, three very very lively sessions. So I’m going to ask Kevin first to tell us about the business stream.
Kevin McCullagh
Ok, our session was called What Can Design Bring to Strategy. It was with John Sands, Richard Eisermann and Ed Silk and it was basically addressing the question, basically that strategy is one of those big words that people use when they want to sound big and expensive and we got down to actually, what does it mean and actually what parts of strategy are designers good at and what parts of strategy do designers need to actually stay away from and what parts of strategy could designers get involved in if they brush up on their skills a bit more? So, Jonathan made the point that he thought that strategy often falls into the trap of being overly logical and that designers could inject more emotion into strategy and develop strategies that made clients smile.
Richard began quite contentiously by saying that product design was dead and what he meant by that was that products now had to be designed with business constraints in mind, with service considerations in mind, with brand considerations in mind. I think probably designers would say that they have been considering those for quite a while, but that was his contention. He also claimed that no strategy is worthy of that name unless it mentions money at some point and how clients could make more of it and he also made the point that the biggest question as far as he was concerned was that designers used to think of themselves as the mighty creator, as he called it, and that now the big question was how the designers step back and involve other people in the design process.
Ed made the point that strategy is a mix of objectivity and subjectivity of IQ and EQ. And that designers are very good at bringing strategies to life, embodying ideas at the early stage of the process. However, intuition isn’t enough, he said, and listening to clients, really understanding their business needs, stepping back and bringing more objectivity to strategy and not getting too emotionally involved in one particular idea, but being very clear about why it’s a good idea from a client’s point of view is really important.
We had a really good debate. I think two of the key issues were strategy and tactics. James Woudhuysen made a great point about reminding us where the whole idea of strategy came from and that was military theory and that the ultimate thinker in that sphere was Carl von Clausewitz who basically made the point that tactics was about winning the battle, strategy was about winning the war and Richard Eisermann chipped in later on and said that actually, you also need to know your enemy before you go into battle and he claimed that designers were good at doing the research on that kind of thing.
Another really important question that we got a lot of input on was what is the different between designers and management consultants? And we got, again James made the point that we don’t want to go too far into management consultancy fields because there are largely hated, so why go there? But also there is lots of what management consultants do that designers just can’t do and we should be clear on that.
George Cox is not only the Chair of the Design Council but also former Chair of the Management Consultancy Association and reflected on what he thought were the key different between the two and he basically said that management consultancies are really good at networking, of influencing clients, of pricing themselves properly, knowing their value. He claimed that designers under price themselves massively. They are very good at listening, really understanding the client’s needs, they are good at analysis, argumentation and I think by implication, designers weren’t very good at those things. And he thought what designers were very good at and he thought management consultants weren’t, were on the creative factor obviously, but also the wow factor of really having an impact on the client with a strategy rather than a dry report and also seeing the big picture.
So I think there is general agreement that designers shouldn’t kid themselves that they can get, they can become business strategist at all and that we should be a lot more focused on the elements of strategy that designers can get involved with and then focus on that.
Jeremy Myerson
Vicky. But is it art? The culture thread.
Vicky Richardson
Well this was a really great session, you should have been there. The other way of posing the question is, but is it design? And I think we did come at things from both view points. We had Peter Saville, obviously on the design side, Matthew Collings, the artist and writer, who most people probably know through his TV programmes. Allan Chochinov from New York, from Call 77 and Richard Shed, product furniture design, interaction designer. So, some really, a really broad prospective on the subject. Just to give you a bit of context, we did, the current debate about design art I think has really gripped the imagination and if you think that we’ve just come out of the Frieze Art Fair where Phillips de Pury, the auction house, had its first design auction in London and two pieces that were produced for the London Design Festival, one by Zaha Hadid and one by Amanda Levete sold at auction for £360,000, money which goes directly to the London Design Festival to finance next year’s event. So, I think that’s a kind of interesting symbol really for the current type of relationship between design and art.
What we started to look at is, and I think if anything a sort of critique started to emerge of interconnections, of hybridisation in this context, which is kind of interesting because I think the rest of the conference has been a real celebration of crossing the boundaries, if anything what was coming out of our session was that where designers try to do art and artists do design, you just, you get crap basically. But, obviously not always and there are pieces that work.
To begin with we did look at, we started by looking at definitions, but I think we moved on from there. I mean, Peter Saville was great and he was talking about, to him, the avoidance of reality within a lot of design art and the fact that designers concentrating on producing limited edition pieces is basically abdicating responsibility and these pieces are failures as design.
So, his position was very much that hybrids fail in both camps. They don’t work as art and they don’t work as design. To him art is very much an enquiry into aesthetics and that was a view shared by Matthew as well, that traditionally art has engaged with testing aesthetics and experimenting, but to him, the art world at the moment has a sickness and he ended his speech by saying down with art and up with design, so he was a lot more positive about this new area of design art. Because he felt that designers are now the ones dealing with aesthetics, whereas the art world is just awash with conceptual ideas and in fact dealing with everything apart from aesthetics so the impulse of the designer to the art world, he sees as a really positive step.
Alan’s perspective on it was that it is a good thing if designers are starting to work with ideas and are starting to be critical and discursive about the world, so that is another way of seeing design art, it’s not just design that functions on an emotional or practical level, but it’s art that is design as social commentary and in that sense it’s art.
So, then Richard’s perspective, again fairly critical because he, I mean on the positive side he was saying that limited addition design pieces that are selling at auction, the kind of couture of design if you like. It’s where the designer has the time and the money to experiment with testing new ground and those pieces which do represent that, are the positive side of design art.
On the other side, the negative is where designers are producing design art pieces to fulfil the needs of the art market. So limited edition art pieces which are being produced simply for dealers and collectors looking to make an investment. So, as you can see, it was a really good debate and certainly for me it clarified a lot of confusion on this area and hopefully we can write it up and I think it would be good for everyone to be part of that discussion.
Jeremy Myerson
Thanks Vicky. Finally Nico, the Interaction thread.
Nico MacDonald
So, the title of our session was Can Good Design Be Co-created? With Joe Heapy from Engine, Lynne Maher from the NHS Innovation Unit, based in Warwick and Austin Williams from the Future Cities Project who is also writer on architecture, design and innovation.
So, the question of co-design is a very interesting, conflicted question. I’m just going to quickly report back on what the panellists said and then just look at what co-design is and where it leaves designers and what the dangers are.
So Joe talked about whether good design could be co-created and said that it could be and it could even be used to transform individuals and communities. The question he asked as how to enable other people to design stuff. The challenge for government is, designs about agency he argued, but in government there is a key question about not deciding about solution at the start and using co-design to effectively develop the solution through a process of interaction with users at different levels.
Lynne talked about things having improved in the NHS, which obviously is up for criticism in much of the media, a lot of the time, but said that they need better tools to get where they need to be. Past models produced good results, formal metrics perhaps, but not a good experience. So she talked about the example of cancer patients who had redesigned a leaflet that they wrote, for cancer patients, not only redesigned it but rewrote it and looked at other aspects of the whole process of interacting with the cancer care service. She also noted that we don’t listen to our own staff in redesigning services and I think it’s interesting to identify whether co-design is then about, well it could be about all these groups, but, consumers, other stakeholders, workers within a service and so on.
She talked about the value of design methods. She said, I’m a trained medical clinical observer, but I can’t see what designers see and she talked very enthusiastically about design methods of observation that she had learnt. Austin Williams was the contrarian on the panel, so to speak and made three key points. He distinguished co-design today from the tenant participation that characterised Erskine’s Biker Grove, and estate development 30 years ago, which were kicking against state intervention, where he argues today that actually the state is right behind the co-design process. This is a social policy issue and a political issue, he claimed, design is not talked about in its own terms. It is always ‘something’ design, co-design, sustainable design and so on. Designers have lost their critical edge and are hiding behind the public, rather than asserting their own expertise. We are being encouraged to participate in generating positive outcomes, citing from Joe Heapy’s publication with Sophia Parker, ‘The Journey to the Interface.’ But what if I don’t want to take part in these positive outcomes? He said, where will I stand?
So, briefly, what is co-design? Well I get the sense that it is still a very confused area, if it’s an area at all. Between basic research methods, design techniques such as ethnography, interview methods and participative design and co-creation, which was a term that was raised in the discussion and it was very hard to pin people down on this. Examples were creating and writing communications I’ve talked about, drawing patient health information or working with patients to draw the information that they might want to see and then designers having a role making that more visually strong. Doing workshops with Post-its to help work out scenarios for possible services and designing a website by having patients or potential users block out in a sort of prototype model how the website might work.
What’s the role of designers then if everyone is a designer? It was claimed by a number of panellists. Well, to Joe they are an extra resource for lateral thinking, they give a sense of direction to projects, they bring quality and he noted that if someone draws something, it doesn’t mean that it has to be built. So these are ideas and inspirations. Take the ideas to the point they are compelling, that is what designers might be doing.
One of the possibilities talked about in the discussion was co-creating as a possible bottom up process, rather than a top down process in government, both local and national.
Dangers, criticisms, questions. Why is this a job for designers? Lynne argued that in fact designers weren’t helping redesign the NHS, they were actually helping people in the NHS acquiring tools they could use, nor were they running projects.
What is the point of training for design of people can learn these techniques so quickly? Is it maybe a superficial use of design? Austin argued that some of the examples given were over-egged and over-worked solutions that a crowd of blind monkeys, I think he said, could have come up with and he talked about being aware of the direct political repercussions of the co-design methods and movements.
Lynne talked about the risk of co-design becoming a catchphrase, which perhaps it already has. Joe talked about it being a shiny new label for traditional public consultation or the possibility that it might be that and he talked about purging yourself by working with real people and he also talked about the danger of co-design being used to manipulate behaviour, though he claimed that in their projects, that was not the case.
Lynne concluded, well she didn’t conclude, but she observed that she is a sort of advocate both in the design world for designers being more engaged with the real world and she talked about designers having a great opportunity to learn to talk better to government and I think in her role in the NHS she is also advocating design as an interloper in that environment. Thank you.
Jeremy Myerson
Thank you very much indeed. Thanks very much to all three Chairs for not only chairing, but summing up, thanks very much indeed. Thank you.