Jeremy Myerson
Moving on to our first speaker of the afternoon, James Woudhuysen, who’s going to talk on Mission Creep, the Limits of Design. Now James is really the best boss I never had because he hired me into the design business, on Design Magazine, a million moons ago and then promptly left and went off and had a stellar career that’s taken in Fitch, the Henley Centre, Philips, Seymour Powell, DeMontfort University, and now his own very successful consultancy. James, as I am sure you know, is never less than forthright and I am sure he will be able to tell us where the limits of design are. James Woudhuysen.
James Woudhuysen
Well, thanks for that tepid applause, everybody. It’s a great start! I know some of you have kept the tomatoes back from lunch as well… Well, welcome to Europe. This is how it looked to Herodotus. You’ll see that Libya, which we’ve just decided is a good place, is there. Arabia, we’re not sure about that. Persia, we’re not sure about that. India, we are pretty keen on that. There’s no China and that’s because we in Europe invented civilisation, didn’t we? And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything?
Just to kick off… what are the merits of design, I want to say first. Well, I like all of these things, in terms of illustration I know I'm in wrong town and I just wanted to talk a little bit this afternoon about the future. That’s my business, you’ve got to wear clothes like that and also when I was at the Henley Centre for forecasting, that’s a rear view of me there. And I just want to say, I’m not just a consultant or some wally like that. I was, for two years, in Philips and the inter-galactic headquarters at Eindhoven, The Netherlands, the Columbus Ohio of the Low Countries, the Milton Keynes of the Orange State. On the left is Howard Philips, he invented the compact disc, the compact cassette, the light bulb, he invented everything. And as we know Philips marketed nothing. Why did I leave Philips? Because most of my colleagues looked like the people on the right.
So that’s enough about me. I bow to… if friends can do it, I can do it, even quicker than friends. Let me talk about the merits of design. I think going back to Jeremy’s point about Design Renaissance in Glasgow. I know none of you were born then, but I made a speech where I said that the renaissance, and especially the enlightenment, had three particular values, if you want to adopt that phrase, that are important for me in design and they are universalism, humanism and rationalism. And I just want to run through those.
You heard it here first, the big discussion that’s going to open up, and I think we heard it from Frans’s bit about his grandmother or somebody like that, is of inter-generational differences. And you can see this article in the Harvard Business Review forecasting how we are all going to be in 20 years. You know, there’s the hip young guy with the headphones, the old guy who’s still working off his demographic time bomb, the slim woman who’s a slim woman and then there’s me pushing the pannier bag at the back. And I think you can see that this is much more a snapshot of today rather than how people are going to be in 20 years but I do believe that hostility between different generations is entirely exaggerated but it’s something that’s… the talking up of it is growing. You heard it here first; those inter-generational differences are going to be the subject of a big media hype. I think as designers I’m not interested in segmentation, I'm interested in what is common to different generations and that’s one of the things I mean by universalism.
That’s in time. If you take universalism in space, it means that the Chinese, ladies and gentlemen, are human beings with design and innovation talents. We always hear of the Chinese as sort of… you know, they’ve all these mouths to fill and now they want cars. God, how can they be so awful? What about their contribution to R&D? It’s already RD&D which is how I would like to situate design within the context of R&D, so I put RD&D, did you get all that? No?
Research, development and design, they’ve got a great contribution to make. They are the largest producer of solar panels in the world; they’ll probably be first into commercial and successful carbon capture and storage. So I think universalism means that they are part of the picture too as active agents not just wasters and carbon polluters. And I must say that next year’s going to be very important.
This is the Bird’s Nest Stadium at Beijing for the Olympics, and it will set new standards, I should have said that’s new standards for the design and for mobile TV and for facilities management, they’re really going to be fantastic about that and I think all the discussion about the smog is completely forming a smog over their innovative talents.
I might add that they’re also good enough at design nowadays to sell, well design and sell, General Motors Buicks back to America. And these are the things we don’t hear enough about, the talents of Chinese designers.
Just on this point, we should know that in Germany magnetic levitation trains between Hamburg and Berlin were banned by the Greens and their protests and Shanghai, as you know, they’ve got a little stretch of it, 17 kilometres, goes at about 430 kilometres an hour and the only person to defend something similar in Britain is John Redwood MP. Vulcan! And I say, and I hope you say, you know, yes we like the deckles, we even like the curves of that little machine but we stand for everybody being able to move around and we want to draw lessons from the Chinese, we’ve got plenty to learn from them, in terms of the greater social intercourse that we all need and that Maglev can provide. For Britain to do it, well, you’ll have to deregulate the planning system so you can actually build a high speed line to the North East. Hooray! And out of the North East. As John Perry Barlow said, I digress, the Grateful Dead lyricist, he said ‘A community is something you grow up in and get the hell out of.’ And I think that’s also a bit universalist for me.
Now, just some predictions for the future. There is a device at the moment that will translate Arabic voices to English voices; it’s a hand-held iPod. I’m sure Tim Brown’s behind it, but I hear he’s not… and what is that device, does anybody know? How many of them are there, and where are they? There’s a hundred of them and they’re in the hands of the US military in downtown Baghdad. So, you show it to somebody and the Iraqi says I do not want to be shot and it gets translated into American and then presumably he gives a reply.
The voice is an enormously powerful instrument and we need more machine translation, there’s not enough of it happening. We probably could be amused by Digilog’s ability to track whether Clinton is lying or not about Monica and you’ll find that lots of financial services companies in Britain are detecting whether you are making a fraudulent claim for a fire or a flood in your house by the quiver of your adam’s apple.
So I think that universalism is also about recognising the power and the expressiveness of the human voice and getting over the barriers that language and also inter-generational language… we’ll need some translation and we’ve got to get behind that and we’ve got to understand the interfaces and the interaction design that would accompany better use of the voice. I say that because the telecoms industry is always saying voice is in the past, data is the future. Voice remains the future, especially when it’s accompanied by the face.
And here’s another example of universalism, if you have a look at one book by Charles Darwin, he asked all his friends who were holidaying abroad, what do Papua New Guineans look like if they’re pissed off in Papua? And the answer is, like us. They look the same, they look furious. And in this regard, understanding the face and how to do interaction design around the face, it’s going to be more important, especially as we’ve got a global division of labour nowadays. So, if you’re congratulating a Chinese designer over a video conference about that new design of his or hers, you say ‘great job’ which is what they say in the States. And he may have no English or even no American but he will be able to read your face. So working with that is pretty important for the on-screen experiences of the future. And again we can get round the segments, get round the languages, get round the different cultures and try to bring out what’s best in all of us.
And if you don’t believe me, take a look at what not Facebook is doing but About Face. They make a little display like an HR directory here, and they give you a little thumbnail and an email and a face there. Imagine that, and you giving a clip to your staff or your colleagues, every Friday night a five-minute video clip, where all of these faces are animated, that’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to have a movie version of Facebook, about faces still not movieised but managing that and working with it and laying it out properly is going to be one of the big technological developments over the next ten or 20 years. And there’s a great amount of opportunity for designers, especially interaction designers, and graphic designers and animation designers and all of that to make the most of that in the cause of, as I say, universalism. The only thing is, especially if you’re a corporate lawyer, which is what they’re showing now, do you have anything to say?… but we’ll leave that.
Second thing is to do with humanism and we don’t hear enough about it. We hear a lot about users and one of the things that I agree about with John Thackara and he agrees with me about is that we’ve got to stop that term users and start talking about human beings because human beings are much more than users. Marcus Aurelius brought that out a very long time ago but the chief culprit in seeing us all as users who have needs, you know, latent needs and on the surface needs and wants and so on, is a man that everybody invokes in marketing and nobody has read. His name is Abraham Maslow and if you read his September 1943 article from the Psychological Review, which is on the web completely unread, he’s the man who in the Second World War, for natural reasons really, reduced us all to needy animals. If you look at hunger levels in the Second World War, it wasn’t surprising what he said. But I want to say that we are more than needy animals and this is what I mean by humanism; we are not all designers but we have the potential to design and that’s something that places us above beavers and fish. I know this is deeply insulting to fish rights, but a beaver can build a dam but he never does version 2.0. He never passes on a blueprint to his son or daughter, he doesn’t discuss the matter, he doesn’t have that capability to move ahead.
And, in this respect, we need to remember that design is going to be about, not just serving needs but developing people’s talents. You know when Sergey Brin and the Google people, came out of that garage and came up with Google; they didn’t do a Peter Mandelson focus group about what people needed. What they did was they came up with some technological leadership in software and now we all have a new talent to search the world’s information. And we express that talent maybe 10, 20, 40, 60 minutes a day and that’s something that we need to remember. Not just needs, but our capabilities, that’s what I mean by humanism.
And I just want to say that, you know, in case any of you were worried about that sort of animated Facebook or About Face that I showed, can we handle it? Don’t we need a new etiquette in the office to handle all of these multifarious communications? And don’t designers have a big role to play in that? Well, I don’t think so. I’m not very interested in etiquette. I think, if you look at the precedence for that, nothing to write home about, and all it amounts to is you’re saying well, my Dad just sent me his first text and it all came in capitals. Don’t we as designers really have to show him how to do it in upper and lower and I say get a life. Move on. If that’s the etiquette that you’re worried about we’re better than that, we can do better than that. And this is what I mean by humanism, that from nuclear waste to new media, mankind will grow new talents to solve problems through the right kind of research, development and design.
Now for the mathematicians in the audience I’ve got to tell you that all the intermediate waste of nuclear sort and the high level waste in Britain amounts to 450 cubic metres. Sounds a lot, do a cube root of 450 thousand cubic metres I should have said because I’m nervous up here, 450,000 cubic metres. And I’m hoping you’ve got your calculators. You’ll find that it’s about a room of this size; it’s about 72 metres by 72 metres by 72 metres, that’s the power of cube root. Are we really saying that nuclear waste is too hot to handle? That we can’t… I appreciate you can’t get it all in one room, even in Newcastle, but are we really saying we can’t handle that in the 21st century? We’re just going to give up on all of that? No. In the same way as we can handle capital letters on a mobile, we should be able to do that and we’ve got the talent, we’ve got the capabilities. We will make new problems, no doubt about that but as Tim Brown said so eloquently as you adopt new problems and you adopt new approaches you go up the learning curve and that’s how we got out of the caves, we should not forget. When we created fire, we created a whole new problem as they’re finding out in California right now. But we also created a solution, so let’s not forget that.
The third one is, perhaps, the most important one… no, I’ll just stay with humanism a bit. I talk a little bit about energy and a little bit about IT and a little bit about housing nowadays. You might not think this is very humanistic, what I am going to show you here, but just let me remind you that the one thing I agree with United Nations about is that there’s a need for at least 100,000 new houses around the world every day. In fact, their figure is 110,000 houses a day to house the world, probably an under-estimate. And I’ve got to ask our Green friends, are you for moving towards that figure or are you against it? And if you’re for it, which would be a change for our Green friends, then let’s get behind what humanism really means, in particular the R&D, the technology and the engineering sides of what we’re doing not just the interaction and the pretties. And… just… I thought I’d show you this; this is partly the work of Arup. It’s a container that comes from the Pearl River Delta and it’s moving through the West Country in England without a police escort, can you imagine that? And then, it’s let down on a site and, of course, we have that obesity problem with which we’re very familiar here in England. And then, of course, being English, you know, you put some bricks round it, because that’s what you do, and then being poor at graphic design like myself you put some jaggies round it, which is not very good. And then you get inside it and it’s actually bought by TravelLodge as you can see, and really, you know, it’s… would I like to live there? Hmmm, I don’t think so. Is this the way things are going and do we need bigger and better and more innovative and better design solutions than this? Yes we do. We do need that. Now somebody will quickly say, ahh James, Ronan Point. Well you talk to my daughter; she thinks it’s an Irish boy band, Ronan Point… But not every piece of system building in the 21st century has to collapse and I think when we’re talking humanism, we talking about housing the world’s masses and designing, working with technology to bring that about.
I might add that Toyota is already doing something even more advanced. I don’t like the Tudor beef and aesthetics here. In fact, even the Japanese look pretty sick as a dog about it, but Toyota is making these houses at £100,000 each. It’s had 50 months straight growth doing that as a target from one factory making a mere 7,000 a year by 2010. And what happens is, you do it all, not in the rain and the mud, you do it under a roof. It’s all customised so you can have your iPod fixtures built-in, you dial it up like Dell and it’s made to order. If you want a bigger cupboard or a bigger window or wardrobe, you can have it done. How long does it take to build? Is it six weeks, like in Sweden? Is it six years like in England? No, it’s six hours! It takes only six hours to build and design has an important role in this, it’s not the whole thing by any means, but it’s certainly a very critical adjunct to can ban just-in-time production and all the things the Japanese are still taking American car makers to the cleaners on. So, I think that is part of humanism and we need to remember that.
Now I’ll turn to rationalism if I may. I was struck by how Tim seemed to feel so bad about all the toothbrushes he’d left around the world and I’ve got news for him and for you, that’s not your only appalling sin. You know, there are these things called mermaid’s tears which the BBC Environment correspondent has been bringing to our attention and they’ve been found everywhere and they’re clogging up our oceans and they’re pieces of plastic, not nearly with as good styling or ergonomics as what IDEO did with the toothbrushes. And when we think about this, the portrait of human beings as wasters, as wasteful people, as kind of contaminants, like the Chinese, on the planet, although if you watch what Mattel had to say they’ve found out it was a design defect not Chinese contamination that was the problem with their toys. I don’t like that. I do not think that is very rational and I think Tim also mentioned, quite interestingly in one of his great Venn diagrams, NGOs (non-governmental organisations) I think a rationalist approach would sometimes, in my book nearly always, question the approach of unelected, non-governmental organisations. And let me give you an example of that. The nice Panda, friendly, cuddly, World… life… Wild… WWF anyway. Because that’s how they want to be known, anyway. They published this report just a few months and there’s a critique of it on my website and it’s quite interesting. If you have a look at what they say, I don’t know if you can read it, according to research by the Energy Foundation, the external cost of coal in China will reach at least two point four percent of China’s GDP in 2010 and two point eight percent, that’s two point eight percent, in 2020. Not two point nine, not two point seven, although they do say it’s an underestimate. Now that’s very interesting. The Energy Foundation did that, they know what China’s GDP is going to be in 2020 and they know the cost of coal in terms of lungs and healthcare and all of that, and soot and everything. They got a computer model to actually work out that it’s two point eight percent although that’s an underestimate. Who is the Energy Foundation, ladies and gentlemen? Well, you can’t find their report on the web, but it happens to be a coalition of many foundations including the David Hewlett Foundation, or the Hewlett of Hewlett Packard Foundation, it’s an eight billion dollar endowment. Eight billion. It’s specific task: to research and advise on energy in America and guess where: China. So before we rush to buy the NGO vision about China being a contaminant and so awful, let’s do a little bit of conspiracy theory of our own, find the money, track the money and let’s take our distance from some of the more irrational formulations because I’ll tell you Hu Jintao doesn’t know what Chinese GDP will be in 2020 so I don’t know how David Hewlett does.
So, when we think about rationalism we need to remember that recycling, for example, is a pretty silly exercise at the level of the individual consumer, makes very little difference. I know I do it, Pavlovian style, every time I peel a banana I’m looking for the right container on the tube, and stuff like that. I know that Wandsworth Council mixes it all up anyway but industrial recycling is a sensible and rational enterprise and since you’ve had all your lunch just now I must tell you that in Carthage, Missouri, where they do these things they’re recycling dead turkeys, or the bits you and I wouldn’t eat, and they’re making three tankers of low sulphur oil a day. So before we all rush to agree with the Greens and their blinding insight that there’s only one earth and that resources are finite, let’s remember that much can be done with carbon-based resources. Let’s remember that the incident sunlight on the earth far outweighs man’s energy needs. So they can repeat ‘only one earth’ as many times as they like. I find it rather one-dimensional and I find it rather insulting to our powers of rationally being able to find new solutions to the energy crisis.
And when we’re talking about that, let me say that as far as I am aware when we’re talking rationalism, when I’m using my Philishave in the morning and when the women here are doing it as well, no carbon is emitted from that device. I don’t know if you know this, I have a Physics degree so I think I’m right about this… there’s no carbon coming out of there. The carbon comes out of Drax B and it’s around Drax B or nuclear power or whatever that graphic designers, in particular, have a job of work to do, not in raising awareness. We’ve had enough of that, but in increasing knowledge and insight and depth of understanding about where the carbon emissions problem is. They could also assist in trying to do a good graphic campaign around Battersea Power Station. What should that campaign for rationalism be? It should suggest that Battersea Power Station should be a power station, what about that? You know, that would really make a change. None have been built in Britain since the year 2000 and I’ll make you another forecast, there are power cuts coming in this country, it’s going to be a big panic that it’s all to do with global warming, it’s all our fault. There will not be much discussion on energy capacity and a big graphic design (and other kinds of design) opportunity to explain what’s really going down is going to be lost unless we take the offensive.
So now I’ve pissed you all off for the last 20 minutes, let me just say that the… if I could just read my summary here… the merits of design are to do with our talents that are universal. But interestingly enough, the French Revolution, which side you were on in the French Revolution, of the Republicans and so on, was very much to do with what attitude you took to the slaves in what is now the Dominican Republic. If you thought they were human beings you were on the left. If you thought that they were dogs you were in the middle, and then there was the Irish vote. So whether you believe that we’ve all got these talents or not, rather important in terms of the future, humanism, rationalism and I don’t have a problem with design being, in may ways, as hubristic as it likes as long as it’s working with our with R&D and technology to move us all ahead. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with ambition and might return to that.
Now, let’s look at the limits of design because I thought I’d start on an upbeat note, try to get you on my side… no chance of that and no change there, then! So, we’ll go and on and we’ll try and do their limits which is what I take to be the establishment, the elite and Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary in the US, who’s the biggest green on the planet, really, and our limits which is the more plebeian, humanistic, designer approach that I think we should have.
Now let me take you back through a little bit of history. If you go to Design Magazine, we should get that out, Andrea and David, you should get this out, the interview that I did with this man, anybody know his name? Because you’re all so good at history and forecasting and all the things… Jeremy, you know who it is? Herman Khan, good, well done. Herman Khan was the original think tank. As soon as you came in the room you knew he was a think tank and he also knew that he was $10,000 a day because anybody that fat had a lot of problems. He was a guy who used computer models to work out which Vietnamese village to bomb next and I interviewed him. He’s a complete racist, and put a Portuguese business man down in 1975, I remember when they were just trying to get capitalism in Portugal, he said ‘shut up I’m an expert’ and that was very interesting, an interesting moment for me. Now, when he did his computer models it was followed quite quickly by the Green sort, the limits to growth and in those days the Club of Rome in 1972/3, when the system was facing many problems of legitimacy and modernisation, it failed to modernise, the Heath Government, hot autumn in Italy, events of May in 1968, the Watts Riots in the US, the ability to say well look there’s more to life than consumerism, there’s the planet, was quite important for elites then. And that’s why the Club of Rome did all its computer models saying: ‘We’ve only got one earth.’ Fantastic. And it looked a bit like the NASDAQ charts that we’d been seeing. And when I was at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex that was at least critiqued. My boss, the doyen of innovation studies, Chris Freeman, said that really the Club of Rome report was Malthus with a computer, you remember Malthus or maybe you don’t, the English parson who said: ‘agricultural productivity can go arithmetically, the working class is breeding like rabbits geometrically, so we’re all doomed and the working class must engage in less vice’ and all of that. And at least in those days, computer models, the technocratic approach, was criticised.
When we look today, I think we’ve got a different picture. And if we just move it forward to the German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, in 1986, the year of Chernobyl, he put forward a sort of Australian theory of the future, the boomerang effect. In effect, what goes around comes around but anything we do today will have consequences that are completely unforeseen on future generations and the line between that and Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘there’s the knowns, there’s the unknowns that we know we don’t know and then there’s the unknowns that we don’t even know that we don’t know them’. You know, there’s a strong red thread, actually blue and green thread, going through all of that and it’s interesting particularly that Beck concentrated on children as yet unborn, future generations, because as our mentor, Tony Blair, told us a few years ago, ‘children are the future’. Did you know that? Some of you might have thought they were the past, but I’m here to tell you that they’re the future. So you leverage all of that and you say look, anything, you know, you go out the room now, you could cause a massive traffic accident on the bridge out there, so hold back, don’t be too ambitious, too much ambition leads to a fall, it’s hubristic and so on. And, I think you know, Frans was right to say that we should think about risk in a different way. And I think one of the ways we could think about it is, is thinking about history a little bit, it’s important for forecasting, is the 80s is known as a period of privatisation, marketisation, deregulation, and so on, atomisation. Also generated therapeutic reaction to that. Because in the 80s under Thatcher, if you remember, that child abuse in the family became a big focus for discussion. It was in the 80s that octogenarians throughout Britain got a little bill through their door saying do you know the facts about Aids? And they all went down their GPs saying, you know, I had a roll in the hay in 1936, have I got it? And it was in the 80s that Thatcher herself became the first Prime Minster to talk about sustainability or sustain-a-babble as I prefer to call it.
And I think when we think about that we can say that the tendency to see the future as doom laden and basically very, very risky is something that preceded 9/11, that was well before those buildings those demolished in America’s Pompeii. And I think when we come to today’s conditions, this risk consciousness and this belief that we’re all awful and doomed is really very strong and it’s very irrational and it very much speaks of a sense of limits on the part of establishment, Greens, and nearly everybody really nowadays. And you can see it in the government’s work that, you know, they move us out of the realm of production to the realm of brands, well that’s one meta-physical jump in my book, and then they say well look you’re brand could be at risk from climate change.
And so this sense of foreboding, this feeling that we’re all, you know, in for it some how, is very much taken up in this world of over-sensitivity to limits which downgrades our human capabilities. And you can see it very clearly with the carbonistas, heathrowistas down there who say: ‘look the science has spoken, complete consensus on global warming and therefore if you take a plane back to London from Newcastle, you are a fascist pig.’ And that’s what they’re saying. Now, if you bother to read the Stern report you’ll find not much of it is about climate, a whole lot of it is about economics, neo-classical right wing economics actually, and also demography. If you read the IPCC, the Inter-governmental Panel for Climate Change, report you’ll also find a big sense of limits but it’s much of it is again to do with economics and demography. And they have some astonishing assumptions in those reports, from the economic point of view, that carbon will be universally traded, without transaction costs, and mitigation measures will be perfectly implemented throughout the 20th century. And like Maslow, what we find is people say oh well look the IPCC said, although they’ve never read the report. There’s seven hundred pages in the Stern report, I’ve read 70 of them, probably 63 more than anybody here has read. So, before we rush to accept the sense of limits, let’s understand that there is anthropogenic climate change, there’s even man-made climate change. But the mechanisms by which that’s happening are still under debate, there’s no consensus on what’s happening in ocean mixing and stratosphere dynamics, just to mention two things, and the extent to which we are responsible for global warming is also under debate, both the mechanism and the extent, and even if we were responsible for all of it, it wouldn’t mean that designers should spend their time getting over to people, these thick masses that exist in Harlow, Essex or Stevenage, otherwise known as the working class, that they ought to be more aware of their basically contaminating nature. Why should designers join a finger-wagging, guilt-tripping campaign, which is based not on science, but on scientism, it’s the new Herman Khan, and this time it’s completely unquestioned.
Now, I think all of this is quite important really because Tim, in his eloquent speech, I thought he was very measured about what he said that design thinking could do it was one tool and not the only tool, not the dominant tool. One thing… I agree with all of that, one thing I didn’t agree with him was that we could do a better experience with fewer resources. We’ve got a whole lot of resources, we haven’t begun to recycle them or tap the sun or many of the things that need doing and I want to ask, is the future of design going to be limited to experiences? If it is, is it going to be limited to lowering our impact on the world? I thought design and architecture and all of that was about maximising our impact, about getting out of the cave not going back to it. And I make this point because everybody today likes to talk about the non-ecological aspects of design as something better. This limits innovation and you can see what I mean if you look at Coke in Germany. You know, when you buy a Coke you can get a new ring tone. Never mind that mobile phones don’t work on the London Underground or anything like that, no, a new ring tone is ecologically correct because it’s not really screwing up the planet or anything and therefore shouldn’t we limit ourselves to that kind of thing, you know, better experience with fewer resources. I’ve got to say also that I thought Frans made a very inspirational speech but when he was talking about, with those lovely stats he showed about the different combinations that music can bring up, especially if you mix rock with classical like Mike Oldfield, you know the ring tones thing for me suggests that really music is a dodgy metaphor for really thinking about the future of innovation. Music is about combination although it’s actually a very humanistic thing but I put it to you that innovation is more than combination. And in fact I wrote an article titled that just a couple months ago. So, you know, to his credit, Frans said that combination was one of the best ways, not the best way or the only way to come around with innovation but I thing that depth in the discipline, not just the promiscuous mixing of them, or I should say the playful mixing, because when you’re at play, and I’ve written about play quite a lot, you’re moving things around like Solitaire, you’re collecting stamps, or faces on Facebook, you ram certain things together and see what happens. There’s something in it. It can bring innovation. You know, James Dyson got his vacuum technique, his cyclonic technique from the building industry and what they do to cement and materials there; he moved out of his sector into another sector. Of course, that’s a part of it. But we also know, don’t we, that it’s not just a permutation of the existing, you know, that when Einstein did what he did he was not permuting different aspects of Newtonian science with something else, he did what he did because he had a lot of human capabilities and a lot of brains. So I don’t think innovation is combination actually, that’s part of it, only quite a small part.
So let me say that these limited conceptions of design, limited conceptions of the impact that we want to have on the planet, limited conceptions of innovation, are something about their limits that I don’t like. And why do I make this point? I make this point because another thing that Frans said was that companies are desperate for innovation. Well, Frans… where are you, Frans? Is he still here? No, he’s gone. Well, you know, in Britain they’re not desperate for innovation, they may be in California a bit more. But what I find, and I’m sure you find, is what they are desperate about is the risks attending innovation. And if you want the proof of it, take a look at the numbers, not enough numbers at this conference so far.
If you look at the OECD main science and technology indicators you’ll find that government expenditure on R&D is declining or stagnant in every Western country bar Japan and the Department of Defence in the US. Now, we know that government R&D isn’t the saint of the whole thing. But as a fraction of GDP generally R&D is stagnant or declining throughout the West. And we also know, don’t we, that you can spend a lot on R&D and it doesn’t guarantee you an outcome. As Frans rightly said an experiment, you know, cannot be de-risked, or he hinted at that. So I don’t think we are desperate for innovation and I think if you look at what the Economic and Physical Science Research Council, I think it is, last year gave out to support robot research in this country, it’s about the price of a new house in Clapham or Putney. And this is at the moment when iRobot in the States is able to sell floor-cleaning robots to old people that cost about 200 bucks and they do the whole thing in about ten minutes.
So I don’t think that we can afford to be complacent at all about the technology side, the R&D side, of innovation just as we shouldn’t be complacent about design. Let’s really inspect their limits and talk about what we would like to do and what… how design does play a limited role in relation to the technological investments that are now required.
Now I love Gordon Brown and I was vastly intrigued by his proposal for eco-towns in May of this year and he’s announcing a 100,000 new zero-carbon homes and this is a tremendous thing where design is going to play a big role in raising awareness and doing all sorts of things. Now, let me show you what role it is playing in terms of controlling us and being brought in by the Government not to do engineering but to do social engineering.
First of all, we’re going to have to install windmills à la David Cameron, you know, the sort of dung-driven, methane-powered, rubber-band operated hamster device of the future. And we’re going to install them on our roofs, or something like that, we’re going to meter them, and then you’ve got to be certified because of the Home Improvement… the HIP packs that you get, have been such a great certification success. And then we’re going to maintain them, which means you’ve got to get up on the roof and clean the birdshit off the windmills and the solar panels. The great thing about a mains socket, you never have to do that because it’s connected to Drax. But, no we got to do all of that and then even more magically we’re going to get into a negotiation with PowerGen or Centrica about how we’re going to sell the energy back to them because we’re going to be so much more efficient than them and they’re a great negotiating partner. And all of this is modelled on the eco-villages of, you know, the Buddha of Balmoral, Prince Charles.
We love all of that, and we’re dying to do it and designers can play a role. You know how? Well, they can design the experience. Now if you look at what the Government said about micro-generation, it used a report by Hub Consultants in the Energy White Paper of March last year. I just thought I’d read it out to you what Hub said after some pilots: ‘While some installations only produce very modest levels of energy,’ in other words none, ‘the behavioural impact in terms of energy awareness and efficiency were often still considerable. The qualitative impact of micro-generation can be substantial presenting a living, breathing and emotionally engaging face to energy consumption.’ And although this is on Croydon car park, most of them are going up on schools, you know why? Because parents don’t get it, but kids do get it, you know, they’re loving all of that stuff. And they’re going to change their behaviour and then eventually they’re going to educate us thick adults or maybe as a historical precedent might remind us, inform upon us thick adults, and I think we’ve got to draw the line about…. it’s a really interesting statement, it says that design and technology for experience, you know, is more important than any power output, never mind the wattage, just the feel good factor, that’s what counts.
So now you see why I’m talking about rationalism and humanism and are we all wasters. Now, I don’t have a problem with wind energy although like everything else that’s at all Green, Greens are now getting hostile to it at scale, you know, bio-fuels, bad idea. Large windmills, you know, they look unsightly and they’re going to mess up the atmosphere as well, they can generate a large amount of energy if you do it at scale. Scale is beautiful in my book and I don’t hear that from designers. All I hear is Schumacher for the 19th time about small being beautiful. If you look at the numbers you’ll see just… I know you can reinforce the point, of just how rational we need to be to work out what works and what doesn’t work. What is a gesture, ladies and gentlemen, to do with our sense of limits and what do we need to go beyond? In a promethean manner.
And what it means for Gordon Brown is, to go to the zero-carbon eco-park in Galleons Housing Association, Beckton, it used to be the headquarters of the National Front, Beckton, I know because I was there and I wasn’t marching with them either. And, you know, they’ve got a lovely visitor centre, it’s really sort of science museum hands-on, great experience, lots of buttons, really a gas. Just one problem – shame about the houses. And if you look at the numbers, you look at the new Government Green Paper on housing, the word square metres is not in it and there is one mention of hectares. You look at the actual numbers you’ll find that you’ve got to have a three-bedroom house within 90 square metres where you can’t swing a cat, you can’t have a power shower, you’ve got an ultra-low flush loo, and you’ve got small baths to save the planet. Fantastic, this is really humanistic, this is the way that we can make a design impact, this is how we must limit our ambitions and in Australia I think… I don’t know if there are any Aussies here, but I think New South Wales has legislation saying you can’t stay in the shower more than eight minutes. Is that what we want to do? So these are their limits and I want to say that we don’t know much about psychology, we don’t know enough about it. We don’t know enough about engineering, we certainly don’t know enough to critique computer models and what is lied about so easily in environmental matters and instead we’re signing up really to go along with this man, who’s another man who designers don’t know anything about, BF (Bloody Fool) Skinner, the knowledge economy. And if we’re in the knowledge economy, then why do we have such stupid kids and great inflation everywhere we go. We’re not in the knowledge economy. We need more knowledge, we need more wisdom, more insight and instead we’re told that in a McLuhanite way that all we’ve got, all we need to do is just sort of distribute knowledge, you know, the medium is the massage and we can bang knowledge together like Nester, for example, gets an astro-physicist together with a surgeon or a sculptor together with a surgeon and they have a communion and sort of intersectional discourse about what kind of scalpel they are going to use on my appendix. I’d rather that a surgeon did that, thanks very much. No intersection, no, let’s have a surgeon design the scalpel, not some sculptor!
So, don’t just ram the disciplines together. I’m all for the conference, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t and I do think that there are some innovations that come from intersections but the inter-disciplinary mentality which we heard plenty of times under Thatcher from Wally Ollins and Michael Peters and all of these people, and Fitch where I was, it’s alright but it’s becoming a substitute, if we’re not careful, for genuine, in-depth innovation, experiments that go wrong. And Tim was quite to say that pilots, mock-ups and so on are very important in this regard.
Innovation is about tracking finally user needs and non-user needs but also eliciting user talents and, you know, the playful combination of old disciplines will not do. Something more insightful and more counter-intuitive will do and that’s just about all I got to say. There’s enough resources, stay away from Skinner and what I’ve forgotten is… I did… sorry, the typography, the last one… stop the hand wringing, start being the handmaiden of technological what? Can anybody give me the noun? Stop being… yeah, who said that? Stop… well done, Gus, Gus from Alloy. Stop the hand wringing, start being, properly, the handmaiden of technological progress. Let’s keep on getting out of the cave, let’s remember that the Chinese and the Indians are the first back to the moon and let’s see a proper role for design: ambitious but within certain limits and that way we can really make a contribution, do more than make a difference, make a real contribution.
Thank you so much.
Jeremy Myerson
Well, thank you very much James, very wide ranging, very provocative as always and I think the reception from the audience… you shook them out of their post-lunchtime torpor.
Just time for one question before we move on, so who’d like to ask it and make it a killer?
James Woudhuysen
Since it’s not a Labour Party rally, I’d much prefer a criticism to a question. If you make one, you will not be hauled off by a security guard. So you all agree, right? Just like with Tony or Gordon.
Jeremy Myerson
So, a question for James. Yes, go on Gus. Gus from Alloy
Gus
James, aren’t you really just saying that actually there’s only so much designers can do? That there’s a lot that has to be done by people who know in-depth but that actually you should be satisfied by only making a certain level of contribution?
James Woudhuysen
I think designers are never satisfied, you know, and it’s quite an interesting dialectic about being ambitious which I’m all in favour of and even being hubristic in relation to the earth, because I think we’re above fish. But not being hubristic in relation to psychology, forecasting, engineering and all of these things. And especially not being hubristic that we, middle class people, have the right to determine what people in Stevenage do. We say you’ve got too much stuff, well go to Stevenage, you’ll find that they don’t have enough stuff actually and the lack of contact with the real world, that is hubristic. So, let’s know our place, not in a Uriah Heep way. No, get out there and if you over-step it, I’ll be around to say you’ve over-stepped it.
Gus
Aren’t we dodging a duty by saying it’s not necessary? And aren’t we missing the real issue which is to help the people that are interested do it just a little bit better?
James Woudhuysen
Well, that’s right. When somebody says I’ve got a plan working with engineers to house a 100,000 new people a day, then I’ll really get out of bed and go to work with a smile on my face. But that’s not what we’re hearing. What we hear, I’m sorry Tim, but just in DMI Conference, Design Management Institute, in Virginia and two Europeans, Giancarlo Zaccai and Hartmut Esslinger came on and all they showed in their presentations was piles of waste, you know, all the phones that they’d designed that they felt bad about and so on. Oh dear, get a life, guys. We can recycle the phones and make a better phone and if I had my way we’d have it implanted on all of us.
Jeremy Myerson
On that note, James Woudhuysen. Thank you.