Jeremy Myerson
Welcome back to the final session of Intersections 07. With me is a trio of luminaries. Peter Saville, whose career, as you know stretches through Factory Records through Pentagram and beyond. John Thackara, the Programme Director of Dott 07 up in Newcastle. I hope you’ve all seen it, and Richard Seymour with whom we’ve all become closely acquainted with this afternoon. Thank you all for your questions, there are too many to read them all out, so I’ve bunched them into various things. Some of them are comments rather than questions and of course we have been dealing with the big, seismic changes in design practice, so I want to get straight to the heart immediately. This is a question from a delegate called Alan Shearer and: ‘Is Big Sam the man to lead the Toon Army to glory after decades of pain?’ Alan where are you, put your hand up like that. Anybody got any comments on that? Is Big Sam the man? They looked stumped. I’ll take this one Ladies & Gentlemen, are Newcastle the new Bolton, that is what I ask. Oh, oh. I’m a Liverpool fan, but am I bitter?
Richard Seymour
You are about to be lynched.
Jeremy Myerson
Oh right, I’m about to be lynched. Ok.
John Thackara
What was the score last week, I’ve forgotten Jeremy
Jeremy Myerson
Don’t go there. Ok, so we managed to flummox, we managed to absolutely flummox the panel with the first question, so lets go onto this one. There has been quite a few around this theme, but the most succinct was by Georgie Holden for the Open University, are you still here Georgie? Yes, you are. If there were one change you could make to the design education system, what would it be?
Richard Seymour
I’ll take that one. Mandatory Mandarin. Because otherwise you are comprehensibly fucked, children.
Jeremy Myerson
Ok. John, what do you think?
John Thackara
I would close down all design school buildings and compel design students to go into the world and study there.
Richard Seymour
Will you supply the money?
John Thackara
I am already.
Peter Saville
No, I do have an opinion about it. I would like a course called something like ‘Why things look the way they do’ to be part of the secondary school curriculum. I think why things look the way they do is something that all young people in this country ought to be learning, that is.
John Thackara
Do I need to explain my answer?
I just think that I’m not the only one to say this, institutions in general are the greatest break on design collectively raising to the challenges that we face. Not just design schools, but the professions and organisations that represent designers and the only occasion in the last five years where I’ve felt that people were really making a breakthroughs and connecting and changing realities is when they were in non design school situations. This is not to say that the people in the schools are in some way to blame for that situation, it’s the nature of institutions. They freeze thinking and physically segregate people from contact with the realities that we are having to deal with.
Peter Saville
Again, and you can’t have good work without a good audience and a good market, so regardless of the quality of the outcome of the creative industries, unless there are people who actually demand those qualities and expect those qualities and appreciate them, they are not really going to happen.
Jeremy Myerson
Ok. Thank you. Some of them are directed to individual members of the panel. But, other panel members feel free to chip in. This is from Ed Martin, are you here Ed? There you are, hello. This is for Richard. Considering that you got me into this racket, by inspiring me as a teenager when you were on TV, do you feel responsible for the other countless designers out there who are making landfill?
John Thackara
It’s too late.
Jeremy Myerson
I think you’ve raised a very important question.
John Thackara
Come down here and raise it again in front of Richard.
Richard Seymour
I’ll happily address it. You are an adult I presume. Did your mother ever tell you about not listening to overweight guys wearing motorcycle logotype. The, I’ll tell you what is interesting about the first part of the question is, when we, Dick and I done that series, someone came up two years later and said, did you notice the glip in the admissions into product design in the UK, to which I said no. And somebody was suggesting it was partly attributable to that and I think maybe you are backing that up. The, it’s, I have to say, it is something that does occupy my thinking. That if you are genuinely enthusiastic about what you do, like I am and like Dick is and you put us on telly being enthusiastic, hopefully it will look like an attractive thing to do.
But, it uncovers a much more serious point which is, I don’t know how many, after two years of their course or three years in their course, product designers are graduating next year, but I suspect that it is at least 10 times the number it was when I graduated. I didn’t do product design at college, I did graphics at the Central, but I do know that the year that I graduated from what was then called Central, 16 of us graduated from that year. I know that much and I think my colleagues to my right know this point. And I know now that there are probably 10 times as many or 8 times as many graduate from the course.
So I’m not sure exactly what is going on there. I do know one thing is, when it comes to recruiting young designers, that are coming out of design education, I’m finding it progressively more difficult to do it and I’m wondering why. And I’m wondering about the match of experience that they’ve got or the duration of the training that they’ve got and also why they sometimes went on the course itself.
No names, no pack drill, but someone I respect enormously who runs a very very good course in the UK, referred a student to me about four months ago, saying could I give him a placement and I see a lot of students coming through obviously, and we do give placements. But I looked at the student’s work and I thought, I can find no worth in this, and that was terribly shocking to me, because apart from trusting the instincts of the individual and the person that had put this forward, it did find me worrying, a worrying thing. It’s a, I think when I graduated in the 70s, I did a post graduate, so you were already packed with six or seven years of training before you even went into the business and even then you would take another couple of years before you would be a profit centre and a product agency and I’m finding it more and more difficult to do that and finding that we are more responsible for training, the consequence of which is that we tend to take on more experienced designers and I’m very troubled by that.
Jeremy Myerson
Actually somebody, just an adjunct to your question. Somebody said to me we’ve had more pictures of landfill at this conference than we’ve had of products. A lot of people showed landfill.
Peter Saville
They did, yes, and your point is Jeremy?
John Thackara
I’m going to stir things up a bit here because we spent two weeks in the festival talking about projects that were raising question about the traditional things that designers might do and some of them were sensitive, personal things like illness and health issues, others were more mainstream. We had a project about mobility and movement, we had a debate with people from about nine different countries from around the world on the subject of movement and whether perpetual mobility was sustainable given the challenges that we face and I think there was one student from the local design university where there are 2,500 design students and I’m just worried about this lack of reflexivity in the schools is one of the things that makes people that are not so helpful to you. You want people to be critical about the status quo, rather than going with the flow.
Richard Seymour
Yeah, I think that is a very important point. Going back to this thing about the 70s again, when I graduated at the RCA, Jeremy you remember this, do you remember Design for Need?
Jeremy Myerson
Yeah, 76.
Richard Seymour
This was unbelievable thing, this epoch making moment where you got the likes of Victor Papanak, this sort of high priest of lets divert design thinking into things that really matter.
Jeremy Myerson
But then we had the 80s
Richard Seymour
Yeah, but wasn’t it, and I remember coming out of that singing a strong song about all this. I can’t give, I can give you the figure of one business that we worked with that they consume in their packaging 600,000 tons of plastic a year. Do you know what 600,000 tons looks like? Any ideas? That is two Eiffel Towers a year.
John Thackara
I didn’t know that was made of plastic.
Richard Seymour
It is now. It’s a temporary structure. But that is enough plastic to make a shampoo sized bottle for every man, woman and child on the planet, every year and it goes straight in the ground, so the second part of your question, yeah, it does trouble me. Not in a sort of tree hugging sort of anxious sort of way, but more in a galvanized do something about it.
Jeremy Myerson
On the eco theme, we had a number of people ganging up on John Thackara.
John Thackara
Is he called James by any chance?
Jeremy Myerson
J Woudhuysen, East Putney, London. What gives designers the right to order me to use less water when I clean my teeth and on that theme, Nico McDonald, where are you Nico? Yeah, you’re there. In your panel John, Andy Mace talked about individuals reducing water consumption. Would it not be preferable for designers, engineers, business and government to solve current macro problems around water supply so we can use water without having to think or worry about it, rather than having to reengineer micro infrastructure and culture?
John Thackara
I think I half agree with the point. It makes me extremely angry when politicians and designers and environmentalists say it’s all about personal behaviour and use guilt or hectoring or just plain bossiness, telling people to make decisions. All of which will change about two per cent of the problem. The way we use water is determined over whelmingly by the way that the water systems are organised, notions of hygiene, the way the building industry operates, etcetera. Ditto the subject of moving around, the reason that we move around too much is because schools and homes and work are spread too far apart from each other, and so, so yes I do think that we should look at the big picture. I just happen to believe that they way you change the big systems is by doing interventions in a small way on the edge of them, seeing if we can make a model that is better and then allowing that to spread.
Richard Seymour
Can I come in on that? The thing I’ve seen that I love the most in my entire design career is a plastic bag. It was created by a design company that was in the Design Council’s Millennium Products List, it was a plastic bag which was a laminate and when you put it in water, this filthy, pathogen riddled puddle of whatever, it worked automatically, as the water passed through into the bag and within half an hour you had a bag of pure, palatable water and I remember seeing this and thinking, God has come. This is a 21st century issue, God, this is amazing and then followed it up on behalf client last year, as to what had happened to it. And finally, it was the Cellophane Company in Switzerland and said what’s happened to the bag and he said, nothing. We’ve given up on it. I said what? And he said, yeah we couldn’t get anybody interested in it. I said, well I’m interested in it.
John Thackara
I mean, bags are a big part of the problem when you add them all up together. But the other part of it is, if you think about just the bag, it’s a classic end of pipe question. How do we make the thing at the end of the pipe, the bag, less damaging than the bag that proceeded it? But, that’s two per cent and the other 98 per cent is the way we organise space and time and logistic systems so that supermarkets and houses and food and production are spread all over the world, and low and behold, that is where all the costs are. You can make a bit of difference with the bag, but how do we get designers at all scales to think about space and time and distance as well as the material artefacts that we are creating?
Richard Seymour
Back to my point, it’s about bandwidth. You know, I agree with James, why the hell do you want a politician or designer instructing you to do something? Shouldn’t you be interested in it at the first place? If the people who have got their hands on the levers are more excited about what they are doing and have a broader understanding, then they are going to do it.
Jeremy Myerson
Ok. Here’s one for Peter, this is from Richard Eisermann from Prospect, where are you Richard? There you are. How do we reconcile the desire for visionary design, as shown by Peter Higgins this morning, with the emerging need to be co-creators of design or do we even need to? So where do you stand Peter on co-creating?
Peter Saville
I’m not sure if I fully understand that one actually
Jeremy Myerson
Well visionary design
Peter Saville
Yes, that bit I understand.
Jeremy Myerson
I think, he’s answered the question don’t you? With the emerging need to be co-creators. Co-creators involving users and you know.
Peter Saville
Oh, co-creators, you mean actually with the market or the end user? Ahh, I’m not sure how you rationalise that one. Visionaries tend to be 10 minutes or more ahead of their time, so therefore it’s difficult to engage an audience with that. Of course that is quite a demanding question actually.
Jeremy Myerson
Especially at 5.00 on a Friday night.
Peter Saville
I think it’s an inherent responsibility of designers to pre-empt the ways that the world is going, to predict what is coming next and to some extent feel what is needed next and to try to find the opportunity to make a gesture towards a more desirable goal, which is of course within itself a moving target all of the time. I was talking to somebody just before we came in and I said obviously my concerns about the world around me were markedly different 20 years ago to my concerns around the world, my concerns about the world around me now. So our response to the environment in which we function should be a kind of constantly changing response. It would be nice if designers are able to sensitively predict and feel what people need, so therefore the take up of it is not, is kind of not too challenging for them. There is a good David Bowie quote which is that there is no point in being more than 10 minutes ahead of your time. A lot of this, kind of just, a brief moment on the two things that came up before, I’m not actually sure what we do with 1000s of designers and with regard to more ecological systems and design’s ability to address those, designers can face those challenges and may have answers to them, if they are instructed or guided or briefed to do so and with regard to lets say issues such as water, there is socio-political decision making that has to come first, before actually creative thinkers can address the problem. It is one of those things, it is difficult to adjust from the middle. It is a top down issue which I think creative thinking can empower.
John Thackara
I think that there is a false dichotomy emerging, maybe we can just hit it. I don’t think it’s either you have co-creation or you have visionary, provocative or plain irresponsible designers, I think you need both. I completely accept the criticism that some people have made that in dot for example there was not enough space for people to make completely mad proposals. Partly because we ran out of time, but partly because we started off in too responsible a way. But to give you and example of where co-creation really just works. When we did the Alzheimer’s project, we had designers, we had people from the Alzheimer’s Society, people with dementia, their careers and so on and untold suppliers of services ranging from the health service to care homes. There was no way that any of us had the foggiest idea with the issues were about. We said it’s an interesting subject, statistics being given to us by policy makers, it was absolutely essential to spend a year talking to people and with people about their experiences and to give them media tools so they can tell their stories rather than be recorded by third parties, to even make any progress at all to getting a hold on the issues which are fantastically varied and challenging, this would be a very good moment for designers to come in and make completely wild proposals and not be responsible all the way along, so I think it’s a fair complaint that we shouldn’t be too responsible at all stages.
Peter Saville
Ok, Jeremy, I mean there are different time frames involved in all these things. I mean, I currently have this role as Creative Director of Manchester.
Jeremy Myerson
Which, it’s a tough job, somebody’s got to do it.
Peter Saville
Exactly, somebody does have to do it. Which is of course, significantly, a co-creative act. In this instance I have a million people on the board. There is a minimum of one million shareholders and a further six million in the North West around them of which Manchester is the hub, capital city. And, the initial, my initial findings and idea for it took three months. But I’ve now spent three years talking to people about it, trying to see what it means to them and in a way, discussing the possible solutions with other people and interpreting, helping them interpret the meaning to them. So obviously in something like that, a great amount of co-creation and coordinated thinking is required. But actually somebody has to have an idea and we all know that it is very difficult for a committee to come up with an idea and actually ideas do tend to come from singular sources and then it’s a matter of how that idea can be inculcated down, out amongst people.
Richard Seymour
I’m having trouble telling the difference between this co-creation and good design practice. I remember working on a train about 15 years ago. It’s when I learnt this thing about having to build a receiver into a client, was that, we looked at the money that we consumed on the budget after designing this train and about 75 per cent of it had been consumed liaising with people, the drivers and what have you.
John Thackara
You do know how to drive the train, I can imagine
Richard Seymour
Yes, you do it like this, all right. But the extraordinary thing is that was good design research. What I call good design research. We were doing it, we were finding out about the problem and since that moment, I’ve always believed, in any project that we do, that usually three quarters of any design product is finding out what the problem really is, rather than what the client thinks it is. So, having done that, what we then found is that most of the design designed itself virtually because of having found the real problems, or the real issues, that is what came out. So, again maybe I’ve spent too many times wondering between the disciplines, but I don’t see the difference here.
Jeremy Myerson
Probably just new terminology, that’s all it is.
Richard Seymour
I agree with the point that was made, this could become another buzzword and how fucking useful is that?
Jeremy Myerson
And we’ve had a lot of buzzwords
Richard Seymour
Yeah. Do your job. Research what you are doing as well as you can, talk to people who are going to use it, but watch what they do most importantly, and then get the hell on with it with your bright idea.
Jeremy Myerson
I mean, I think what you are saying picks up on a couple of other comments, questions from people. Christina Bilsland, I don’t know where you are Christina, there you are. She said do titles, I’m not expecting you to answer this, but it’s a comment really. Do titles service design, interaction design, product design etc? You know, help or prevent designers doing what they are really good at? I think you’ve answered that question. Tim Parsons from Camberwell, Tim where are you? There you are Tim. This was directed to John and I think you’ve already answered it. Where are the moral and ethical lines to be drawn in design today? Vivid intention was set up yesterday between freedom to design with an unlimited palette to explore technological solutions, the kind of thing James was talking about, and constraint implied by sustainability and the Dott 07 agenda and I think you’ve kind of addressed that John.
John Thackara
Except I don’t agree with that last bit of your sentence, which is that it is about constraint and less.
Jeremy Myerson
No, it’s not my sentence, it’s Tim’s.
John Thackara
Yeah, Tim, really, calm down. I think that sustainability, we will never get to it, whatever it is, unless it’s a recreation of the ways that we live, and therefore it’s a really creative and exciting journey that we’re going on. I’m just don’t believe, it’s not about less and having less, that implies it’s all about consumerism and consuming less and that is not what I believe it’s all about.
I think the ethical dimension is just to be aware that all design actions have consequences, some of them good, some of them bad, some of them we anticipate, some of them we don’t. But to imagine that it is a neutral activity I think is, that is where it is unethical. I’m not saying the therefore one has to stop trying new ideas out, but just to be aware and try and think of what might the consequences be which 100 years ago we didn’t know there were unexpected consequences and today we do.
Richard Seymour
I got a brief yesterday from a client and one bullet point said, solution must reduce our carbon footprint. I said, that’s nice, this is the sort of 26 year old French marketing doyenne and I said, and how do we do that? Well, this is up to you. I said thanks a lot. I’m not taking the brief. Go on.
Jeremy Myerson
There is a lot more that we could talk about, I just want to read out just some of the comments. Some comments are general about design and some of them are about the conference. Just to get a couple more in. Yvonne MacKenzie from the Lighthouse, Yvonne there you are. Said, how can we expect to advise on strategy when we insist on saying that we are not good at running our own design firms? I think there has been a bit of a theme of people being self effacing as usual and saying well actually I’m lucky we didn’t go bust last year and you know, Clive was saying I’ve never made any money out of design, so that is a good point from Yvonne. Ian Worley from Flow Interactive, there you are Ian. A question of risk, if business is about don’t fix it unless it’s broke and design is about getting it right the first time, then how do designers and design thinking genuinely have an impact on the future beyond the aesthetics of experience? So that is one to chew on.
Richard Seymour
Actually, it’s a haiku that, it’s not a question it was a haiku. Go on.
Jeremy Myerson
Yes, beautiful actually. Do it in a lovely little book. This is from Janet Paul from the University of Dundee who I know has gone back to Dundee, because it’s a long way and this is a comment really. Design is for everyone. Richard referred to recognising differences between men and women and designing to meet these needs so why is there a noticeable dearth of female key speakers at Intersections? To the all male panel. Is this a reflection of the conference or the design industry as a whole? And what can be done to address this? Clive and his friends were male, except his wife.
Richard Seymour
Actually, that wasn’t even Clive’s wife.
Jeremy Myerson
Yeah. That, well, yeah, I mean.
Richard Seymour
Can I answer that one, can I spend one minute on it? As an employer of designers, 63 people can see my pack, trying to find female designers, it goes back to the beginning of time and training and all things like that, really really hard to find them. Please come out of the woodwork now and be good at it.
John Thackara
Two thirds of the Dott team are women.
Richard Seymour
So you’ve got them you bastard.
Kevin McCullagh
I’ll be super brief, yeah, this reminds of the 80s student union debates. It’s very simple. I went for a dream list, I went for the best people possible and for example on the services that I’m planning, two out of those three were women and I think to do anything otherwise would have been sexist.
Jeremy Myerson
Thank you Kevin. This is a comment from Ian Potty of Nokia, where are you Ian? There you are. Big business does understand design, that could be why it’s big business, which is great. And there is one from John Thackara who sent a note to his own panel. If people here, oh right, if you would like to see an example of Peter Higgins, Land Design Studio’s work, they designed our exhibition of cyborg future in the great hall of the Discovery Museum here in Newcastle. So if people have got any time here this evening, go and see Peter’s work in the great hall of the Discovery Museum. So there are tons of other things that I could talk about, but our time is up. Can I just say thanks to our panel, to Peter, to John Thackara and to Richard Seymour for being such good sports.