Jeremy Myerson
Every once in a blue moon, the British design community comes together and presses the pause button, and stops to reflect on what designers do, how things have changed, and where design practice could go in the future. The Intersections conference at the Baltic centre in Gateshead was one of those rare occasions. So rare in fact that the last time I remember such a watershed event, it was the Design Renaissance international design summit in Glasgow 14 years ago.
Back then, of course, nobody was podcasting. Digital technology was pretty new and untried in most design studios. Designers spoke quaintly about going green in 1993, but the real alarm about climate change hadn’t been raised. Innovations were largely made by scientists and engineers in the labs, and designers just gave them a marketing paint job. Today, things are different. We live, as the Intersections conference told us time and again, in more complex times. And complex times call for design practice with a wider repertoire. Complex times require designers to do new and different things, like branching out into business strategy, or joining multi-disciplined teams to approach problems from a new angle.
But how far can you stretch design? What are the limits? How far can designers extend into other fields? Mission creep was one of the governing themes of Intersections. So was the inevitable one evoked by the title – that things have become so complex, markets so saturated, consumers so knowing, and the environment so fragile, that it is only at the intersections of different disciplines, cultures and fields of knowledge, that you find the really new ideas.
Right at the start of the conference, Tim Brown of IDEO, a Northumbria University graduate and now boss of one of the world’s leading design firms, spelled out just how confused and complicated things have become. Once upon a time, business produced, people consumed, NGOs advocated and governments regulated. Simple, said Brown. Now companies don’t just produce, they advocate and work closely with NGOs. People don’t just consume, they co-create. NGOs don’t just advocate – they establish businesses. And governments don’t just regulate, they set up social entrepreneurs. The result – a richer tapestry for designers but one in which it’s harder to follow the thread. Add to that the economic and financial instability all around us, eloquently described by Sir George Cox, outgoing chairman of the Design Council:
Sir George Cox
It has become unpredictable as well as fast moving, if you had said to me 3 months ago – and I am a director of a mortgage bank – which mortgage bank do you most admire I would have said Northern Rock, great business. What happened there you couldn’t predict what ever the newspapers say, and in this very dramatic changing world, also with completely changing balance of economic and political forces around the world, what does it mean for business? It means that no business can survive and succeed with what it was doing yesterday. No business. Innovation has always been the key to success, and now it is essential for survival.
Jeremy Myerson
How designers contribute to innovation, even lead it, is a big question. Intersections sketched different models of design practice – different roles for designers – to show some ways this could be achieved. The designer as strategist – swimming upstream to work right at the front end of innovation. Or the designer as co-creator – working with user groups in a rethink of the creative process. The designer as rationalist – sticking fast to notion that intellect, talent and knowledge will find technological solutions to modern woes. And, the designer as storyteller – creating the narratives that communicate values and make us believe in our changing world. I want to talk about each of these roles.
First, the designer as strategist is nothing new in one sense. Designers have always jumped over the fence into business consultancy. But it has been given a new urgency – and a new legitimacy – by the social and environmental pressures that now crowd in on business. It also has a new name – Design Thinking. As a result, designers are now clamouring to have a bigger say in the what and why of innovation, and not just the how. Instead of just being a handmaiden of commerce, in a mute service role, design can be a voice of conscience and a catalyst at the first stages of the innovation process. Tim Brown, whose company now has a small but significant portion of its business devoted to design thinking and strategy that have social impact, explained the rationale:
Tim Brown
We can continue to be defined by the design briefs that naturally come to us, the next product, the next advertising campaign, the next range of clothing; or we can figure out how design can be more strategic, and play a part in tackling some of these issues in a way that actually maybe does create sustainable improvements in people’s lives and create businesses that have a net positive impact.
Jeremy Myerson
Sounds appealing. But some worry that an emphasis on design thinking at the strategic front end will come at the expense of design craft – those traditional stand-out skills in giving form and making the details work. Tim Brown admitted that you need both design thinking and design craft. Sir George Cox put it another way; he argued that he’s not trying to water down design skills but simply remind everyone that designers need to do better in dealing with business.
Where design meets business is one of those intersections that gets everyone going. In the conference breakout sessions, debates like ‘Are the D Schools the new B Schools’ and ‘What can design bring to strategy?’ provoked much debate. According to one senior designer, business strategy is too logical and serious, and the role of design is to inject emotion and even humour. Time for the funny hats and clown make-up? I don’t think so. But emotion and humour are a cue for the second major model of design practice to emerge from Intersections: the designer as co-creator.
Could it be that the lone creative visionary, the individual artist-thinker, the sole author in design, is ceding some territory to others? To user groups who will share in a collective design process. To engineers, scientists and anthropologists who will be equal partners in a multi-discipline team. Big chunks of the conference seemed headed this way. Again Tim Brown set the tone when he flashed up images of two of his colleagues, IDEO founder Bill Moggridge and human factors expert Jane Fulton-Suri.
Tim Brown
They introduced me to the idea of design as an inter-disciplinary activity and a collaborative activity and one where it completely disabused me of the notion of designer as the all-encompassing author, as the single person responsible for the outcome.
Jeremy Myerson
Clearly, co-creation techniques in design have resonance in reshaping government services and the health service in particular. Clinical staff have rarely been asked for their say in the past. But is the design that emerges from co-creation any good? How much creative autonomy should designers surrender? Richard Seymour made a powerful case for consulting with experts and with users, to make design more inclusive. But such engagement demands a new approach.
Richard Seymour
Stop asking people in fucking Croydon in a focus group at 7.00 on a rainy November what they’re going to want, because they’ll tell you because you’ve paid them a fiver and given them a Kit Kat. I mean, for God’s sake, if you can’t do it what makes you fucking think they can? It’s so ludicrous. If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny.
Jeremy Myerson
Many of the emerging firms in service design and interaction design are bringing in sophisticated techniques that don’t involve bribing focus groups in Croydon with a Kit Kat. And the Design Council’s DOTT 07 programme in the north-east led by John Thackara, that accompanied Intersections, was full of inspirational examples of co-design with local communities on such themes as urban farming, mental health and alternative energy. But there’s a pull in the opposite direction to co-creation – a pull towards the belief that design is so singular a creative act that it can be seen and sold as art. Blueprint editor Vicky Richardson led a lively breakout session on this subject, reminding people that pieces by Zaha Hadid and Amanda Levete at the London Design Festival had just sold at auction for £360,000.
If art is about aesthetic enquiry and a critical perspective on the world, then maybe designers need to be in that space too. Whether designers should be educated to be artists or as team players equally at home in the studio, the lab or the boardroom, is anyone’s guess. But what was not in dispute was the idea put forward by Frans Johannson, author of The Medici Effect, that design teams with diverse perspectives generate more ideas. And generating more ideas is essential to innovation.
Frans Johansson
If you look at the number of simulations or, or prototypes or copyrights, whatever it is around a similar set of products, either way you will find that there’s a huge correlation between the number of ideas that you’ve generated and try to make happen and your success as an innovator.
Jeremy Myerson
Johannson described an all-woman engineering team at Volvo that created a dream car from the female perspective. What do women hate most about cars? Lifting the hood. Why do we need to open the hood? Mainly to put in windscreen washer fluid. But we don’t open the hood to put in fuel, do we? So why not have a simple hatch on the side of the car for washer fluid? That’s what they decided to do at Volvo. A great solution to an identified user need. The result of assembling a design team with a different angle. But simply meeting user needs also got a bashing at the Intersections conference. Which brings me to the third model of design practice:
the designer as rationalist.
The champion of rationalism at the conference was James Woudhuysen. He argued that designers should stop their handwringing over social problems and the state of the environment, and start working on the real, hard technological solutions that are out there waiting to be fixed. Woudhuysen has little time for the touchy-feely, fatalist, ask-the-audience, co-creation stuff that just drops us all in the mire. Or, as he put it, leads us back to the cave. But he does want designers to co-create with technologists. An advocate for universalism and humanism as well as rationalism, he weighed into how designers have misinterpreted what Abraham Maslow really meant, when he wrote about a hierarchy of needs during the Second World War.
James Woudhuysen
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.
Jeremy Myerson
What separates humans from animals, said James Woudhuysen, is the ability to design and make. A beaver can make a dam but not pass on the blueprint to his offspring. Trusting in human talent and knowledge is all about not giving in to the eco-doom mongers who say we are all finished, unless we rip out the power showers and stop taking flights. It is also about taking control of the situation, a rationalist view echoed by Richard Seymour.
Seymour spoke about the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes whose famous book, Leviathan, published in 1651, set the tone for most western political philosophy. Leviathan described a rational doctrine of cooperation through self-interest as the basis of power, government and law. This Hobbesian world view is echoed in the modern day by Steve Jobs of Apple, according to Seymour. Apple didn’t stand around bemoaning the current state of affairs. It seized control; in rethinking music, it became the law. Jobs, the modern Hobbes, took a rationalist approach.
And so to the final strand of Intersections: Designer as storyteller
Richard Seymour spins a good yarn. So does Frans Johannson, who was able to make connections at the conference between such disparate things as candy and computers, termites and architecture, and techno music and Martin Luther King. But the real art of weaving narratives lies in the role of design as a form of communication.
Nobody at Intersections framed this better than Peter Higgins of Land Design Studio. In a conference dominated by product designers, it was refreshing to hear an expert on the built environment talk about the opportunities of convergence between communication media and architecture – and why, if we want inspirational buildings, public spaces, and exhibitions, it is all too important to be left to architects, engineers and planners. Higgins showed an amazing piece of work by the director Bill Bryden and the designer Bill Dudley, staged in the Harland and Wolff dockyards…
Peter Higgins
The most extraordinary piece of theatre made in space, made by the collaboration of these two thinkers, the auteurs of the piece. Where are these people in our city centres? Where are they in our master planning exercises?
Jeremy Myerson
Where are they indeed? Storytellers through design like these are nowhere to be seen in our mindless new developments and vacuous town plans. And that was Higgins’ point. Standing in front of a giant screen showing Ken Adams’ famous War Room for the Kubrick film Dr Strangelove, he argued that artists, designers, auteurs and scenographers are needed as the new storytellers of our urban realm.
I departed Intersections slightly dizzy and light-headed, feeling the tectonic plates of design shifting under my feet as I made the conference’s closing remarks. Designer as strategist, co-creator, rationalist and storyteller – all these currents came to the surface over two exceptional days. Just like Glasgow’s Design Renaissance 14 years ago – an event which incidentally was the starting point for Kevin McCullagh’s Gateshead programme – Intersections explored the limits of design. Yet it also opened up several new horizons. Briefly, we pressed the pause button. It may be some time before designers do it again.