Richard Seymour
Thank you Jeremy. Someone’s been playing with this. Right, we’re back to the beginning again. Legend in my own lunchtime? You bastard. I want to be really practical if that’s ok. I’ve heard lots of exciting things in the few hours when I limped off the aeroplane this morning from London. My voice is going, I’ve got a chest infection so if I suddenly keel over just talk amongst yourselves.
Thirty years before the mast basically is a designer starting training in graphic design, then into disciplinary, then going out into the world as a graphic designer, then in advertising for five years as the Creative Director of an agency, then film production design with a partner then called Anton Furst, who then unfortunately died, and then onto Seymour Powell for the last 25 years. So I don’t know about discipline-busting but certainly discipline touring.
One of the things that has given me, I think, is to see where the walls aren’t in creativity. Because if you walk between the disciplines in this way you do get the chance to see where the illusions are of where one discipline is the same as another or where it is not. But one of the things that I’m passionate about is this and it’s scaring the crap out of me at the moment. Do you think that people at the beginning of the 16th century in Italy were sitting around going this renaissance thing is great isn’t it? Or do they have to wait for ten years and go what the fuck was that? We’re doing it right now. The reason I put Renaissance three is I think there was another one that we missed, which was from about 1875 through to 1920 or 1915, where the most extraordinary things were happening. For me the whole concept of a renaissance was the fact that what we could do in terms of our visions spread way beyond what we could imagine. It was very strange, you get this sudden opportunity to reinvent or bring things together or pull disciplines apart and a freedom around you to do so. And then there’s the restriction aspect which is our ability to imagine what we should do with it. We’re facing this now with Renaissance three, this time it’s personal.
Let me put it another way. We’re talking about the whole idea of coincidence and I bumped into somebody a couple of years ago who said to me, “Design, that’s interesting,” he said, “what does that mean?” I had a go at it and he said, “Why don’t you just say designing? Isn’t design like a word like love or new labour, you think you know what it means until you think about it and then you find you can’t define it at all? Isn’t it the process that’s easy to get your head round.” That was an epiphany for me because it was absolutely true in understanding the process. When we look at how we assimilate things, how we learn, how we as designers are trying to put form and understanding into things, I always go back to the beginning of the 20th century for another reason where Westinghouse and Edison were slugging it out as to who had put electricity into the East Coast of America. Everybody was saying The Electricity is coming, we’re going to get The Electricity. Then electricity turned up and then people saw that it was The Electric Light or The Electric Heating and then they finally dropped the electric after all. The fact is that for the first years of a new thing coming we talk about it as if it was an It. Electricity is not an It, it’s a how. Internet is not an It, internet is a how. So we’re still struggling with dumb words like the web or internet and digital and stuff like that as if they mean anything, they don’t, they’re how, it’s the how we do something. The Its are other things. Email is an It, internet is a how. To be able to integrate this extraordinary, astounding thing that’s happened to us, very few of us are able to get any sort of grasp on the full reality of what it is, and that’s what earmarked the Renaissance, the ability for certain people to suddenly be able to grasp the larger aspects of it.
Da Vinci was an extraordinary man but he wasn’t that unusual at the time. There were many other practitioners no where near as feted as he who moved seamlessly from painting the odd Sistine Chapel ceiling to moving on to the odd siege engine, or cutting people open to see how they ticked. History tells us that Da Vinci was the man that did it but the fact was that at a time when all of these disciplines were fused, astronomy and art and technology and mathematics, were all part of the same thing – this seamless movement, this broader bandwidth of understanding was there and out of it came new things. One of the things that happened was we found thinkists, we found that people that formed on the left of the board there who are getting the broader picture and understanding how things could work, some of them were practitioners, some of them were not. On the right we had the guilds, they were the craftspeople, the articulators and, again, some of them were also thinkists but some of them were not. But there was this polarisation, I see this polarisation happening now again and in fact it’s a necessary part of Renaissance three to do that because unless we have the thinkists, as I shall explore in a minute, expanding the bandwidth of understanding and naming the beasts that we have to deal with in the future, then the whole thing will tumble into chaos, which is why I bring up Hobbes.
Leviathan you’ll see on your piece of paper in front of you, Hobbes is a political philosopher at the beginning of the 17th century and his masterwork was Leviathan. I won’t bore you with what all that was about but what was fascinating was he was dealing basically with social contract between the masses and the fact that, left to their own devices, they would dissolve into mayhem and an inability to do anything to the basest animalistic levels and then Leviathan itself takes the form of the State, of the governance, of the sovereignty, but most important to me that it would be this, the organising principal. This is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the future. How the organising principal works and where the organising principal is because if we can get the great understandings of where we move in the future with organising principals then we won’t get the kind of chaotic bullshit, the other side of Hobbesian thinking, where the whole thing decays. Has it surprised any of you that Wikipedia did not collapse immediately into the most prurient, bottom of the food chain sack of shit? Has it surprised any of you that it did that? Obviously not. It surprised me because that’s what happened as soon as internet capability came on board we got pornography, that was a thing that happened. Why is it? You can say because there are governances, there are organising principals that sit over the top of Wikipedia, but in fact that’s not the case. What’s happening is the most extraordinary thing, the organism itself, and these are organic systems of finding ways to find their own levels and their levels are not the most base, I’m delighted to say. Their levels are higher. We actually like truth if we can find it sometimes.
So watching these organisms as organisms, which is how Hobbes did it, hence Leviathan, looking at the organism of this gives us truths, we can start to spot how the future is going to happen. I want to develop that thesis because I’ve heard lots of things in the few hours I’ve been here, some things about strategy, how we form strategy, how we think about the future, how we as designers have to go and talk about the future. Have you the faintest idea how to talk to the client about the future? Have you the faintest idea about walking into somewhere and saying the world is going to be like this in ten years? How would you do that? Unless you’re actually involving yourself with it and broadening your bandwidth as a designer you haven’t a prayer of doing it. And jumping into the some of the other points that have been made, and I think although I missed James’ point yesterday because I wasn’t here, a lot of the opportunity to overshoot your mark and end up causing an awful problem at the same time.
I grew up on this. I’m 54 years old, and I want you to look very carefully at this picture. This is Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Look at it. Mars 1997. This is 1953 this was done. I want you to look at the top picture very carefully, that’s the Astral Queen, that’s a spaceship that can go to Mars. That was Hampson’s idea of what 1997 would look like. Look at the leather steamer trunk on the left with a Mars sticker on it. Look at the fact that you have to walk up a gangway to this super fucking technical spaceship. Look at the fact that all of the splendid gear that the pilots are wearing are green versions of RAF uniforms of the time and that when asked how good the Astral Queen is Dan Dare says, “It’s wizard, Sir.” Look at the wonderful blending and mismatch.
Now you could say, oh he got it wrong. All futurists get it wrong in one form or another, but what is wonderful about it is the blue of the sky. What’s wonderful about it is the unbelievable idealism. If you could have lived through this, and some of you in the audience, looking at your craggy brows, did, it was optimism, full-on, post-war, half the place is in ruins yet it was, it can get better. Not the sort of Tony Blair ‘It can only get better’ but a real we’re going to build it back again. A country fit for heroes. And stuff like this got into the psyche of people like me of my age and filled us with joy and a fierce, fierce sense of mission, a fierce sense of mission that if we could go out there we could make it work better.
My Dad said this, this is Major Bertram Seymour, he told me this when I was a kid, ‘When I entered the Army in 1939 one man could know everything there was to know about radio, its theory and its practice.’ He was talking about himself, he thought he knew everything there was to know and he probably did about radio. ‘When I left after the war no single person could no even a fraction of it. In just five years the science had grown like toxic, it had got beyond a single person’s ability to grasp it all.’ Not from a, how can I put this, not from a philosophical point of view but from a technical point of view, that you are going to have to do what some of you are talking about with co-design or collaborative design or whatever it is you’re calling this damn thing, is that of course you fucking collaborate in design. Of course you do, you think you know everything? How can you not? How stupid is that whole idea that you could not do that?
Here is a few pointers that me as a practitioner have found are very important for the future because most of what I do now isn’t design, I’m a corporate electrician. I rewire businesses, I decided to step into the furnace of Unilever, for God’s sake, and stand in that raging design-resistant monster and try and rewire its metabolism so that it can work with design, so it can understand design. It is in part a thankful task, I’ve actually managed to make some headway with Dove for instance to get it to work in a different way, to understand how we can emotionally communicate to people when the fact that above the line advertising and the product are actually all part of the same communication continuum. Where I stand from advertising, product design and graphic design it’s all the same stuff in that regard, it’s all about communicating. Joy or whatever it is you want to communicate. But most importantly, point one, we live in a post-convergent world we’re in divergence now. Convergence was eight years ago, you missed it, it’s gone, don’t tell anybody we’re about convergence because we’re not, it’s divergence. And have all the best Greek words gone? Look at the beginning of the 20th century, let’s look at radio, gramophone. All of those things were named in a way that inspired and told you what it was and we have to know what something is intellectually before we can understand its use. You can’t just give someone a plate full of crap and say, ‘Sort it out yourself Jack.’ You’ve got to have understood what it was. So naming the beast is our job, it’s our job. Here’s an example of one of the few true post-convergent products, a divergent product, the iPod. Everybody talks about Apple and I’m not ashamed to talk about it for several reasons, but one of them is that by naming the beast, by actually determining what something was it propelled our understanding of it. But actually in the case of iPod, what is the product? Is it the physical object or is it iTunes? The fact is it’s iTunes, it’s a superior way of buying product.
So if I go back to, I think it was Richard Eisermann who was commenting in the morning session, that we have to learn to understand that we can’t do it on our own, of course we can’t do it on our own. Who the hell gave Steve Jobs permission to reinvent the music industry? Who gave that bastard, that impudent bastard permission to do it? Nobody did. Back to Hobbes again. Hobbes would have loved Jobs. He would have loved the idea because of the way Leviathan works, the fact is that you are the law by seizing power, you become the indisputable law. And an awful lot of that at the moment is in his hands. Half of the competition quake in fear, in fact most of it does, of Apple. It just delights me to watch it. People quivering in their boots about what the hell they’re going to bring out next.
Digital? PDA? Pathetic! Can’t we do better than that? We need definitions that are meaningful. So how are we going to do them? Well, maybe we’re not the best copywriters in the world or the best poets, so find some and sort it out in your collaborative co-designing. Sit down together and work out how best we can do it because that’s the job to do and if we don’t do it and if the intelligent, humanistic people don’t do it, some evil bastard locked away in some business is going to do it and you’re probably going to hate it. The last thing you want is the VCR debacle all over again where you can’t make anything work.
One of the things that we looked at SP over the years was taking an existing paradigm or a new paradigm which was the post-it note and re-harnessing technology to let you do it in a different way. So this is something you just write on it and draw on it, whatever you do, and it just appears immediately somewhere else, instantaneously somewhere else. So on your new screen that you’ve got on your fridge that Wal-Mart has sold you that restocks itself, or on your secretary’s screen or whatever it is. So it’s exactly the same paradigm but moved using a different technology. Technology is there to assist you to give you what you want, it isn’t there as an end-on in itself. This lets us do other things and this is something that really fascinated me, was within about four years or five years from now you won’t erase anything. Have you noticed how your hard-drive on your computer is so big now? Look at the exponential curve, by the time we’re writing at a molecule level on a cube of lead glass with a laser, indelibly which will happen quite soon, we will never erase anything ever again. So that whole idea of it going away will have gone. How will you work out about whether something is new or not new other than looking at a date? Just that lack of need to erase will invert your understanding of how things can happen. One of the things we played in with that little post-it was how can we tell that something was a few days old or in fact had disappeared or was not there in a week? We came up with the idea of fading which was that when you look at something after a couple of weeks it has faded a bit, actually what it’s done is it had halved the amount of compression, and then it goes in again and again and it gets to a final point when it’s hardly there at all. So you can look at a screen and immediately judge in an analogue sense what the brand new and sparkly that you’re dealing with and some of the stuff that’s less so. So finding new ways, especially humanistic analogue ways, to work with this is very important. I mean, I think it was Ideo that started the talk about interface design, it’s all interface design, everything we do when we deal with anything is interface design. So we have to remember that.
When we were doing this for Casio a few years ago, these are just some watches that we did, but we debated on the concept of the whole of idea of what is on your wrist. We thought a next generation, of which these are not, one thing that would be really rather nice to do maybe was to sell them in pairs and to put one on your wrist and give the other to somebody else and then if you stroked your watch in the evening, say, that the other watch no matter where it was in the world would react at the same moment. We loved that idea, in fact several designers had a similar thought at the same time. The limit was how it was done. But of course you do this every day, you just don’t know you’re doing it. When you text somebody that is exactly what you’re doing. But it’s a text message so it’s slightly klunky and dopey whereas this is a purely emotional message. This is the difference between what it’s made of and what it is. We’re trying to, in this case, there’s 100% emotional message being conveyed but we’re selecting the technologies we need to use for it. We need to think about the dislocation of these two very carefully. What a technology can do is not what it must do. We can repurpose it to do what we want with it.
We’ve been looking at footwear for Doc Martins, for instance, this is a world shoe that we did. It adapts to any foot size so you can buy it over the internet very easily because sizing doesn’t become an issue. But one of the things that was done during the discussion was the idea that embedded in it was one of these little RF chips, one of these little things that cost nothing, that at the moment tell you whether you’re stealing something from a shop, and that every time we walked around what could happen is that it would be informing the mainframe back at Doc Martins as to the wear characteristics of it, how long it was being worn and what have you. Now, that’s not an Internet product, it’s not a digital product, but it’s using Internet, it’s using wireless, it’s using all of these hows. So, again, back to that point, we must dislocate the hows from the its. We’ve got to understand what the its really are and then we must name them.
The second point, again, from constant working in these areas is for God’s sake jam with real visionaries. Unfortunately they are usually not designers. It’s very disappointing to me that some of the true visionaries are not designers. There are all sorts of people out there. There’s some experiences I’ve had recently and there’s a movie which I worked on two years ago now which you may or may not have seen, the script is appalling but visually it is a delight, it’s called Sunshine, Danny Boyle did it. Where I was involved with the idea of how would you design a spaceship that would go to the sun? It was a lovely project to work on but what was really fascinating was to be working with the top scientist at the CERN accelerator. To be hearing how you actually would do it because he fucking knows. And you go, I’m a product designer, I design aeroplanes, I don’t think we could get that close to the sun. And he whips out a calculator and he says, ‘No no, we can already get a satellite to within the orbit or Mercury and if we do this…’ And you come away shining, you haven’t become a physicist, you’re no longer, you haven’t become the guy who is working on the new Hadron Collider. You’re not that but you’ve been informed and intoxicated by it.
So that is what co-design is, think about that as well. Immerse yourself with these people, find the best brains you can. This is the most exciting thing I’ve read in ten years. Has anybody read Snow Crash? Do you like it? Did it blow you away that’s where Google Earth came from? This guy imagined an entire world not far in the future. If you haven’t read it go and read it and go, oh he doesn’t sound too futuristic, we’ve got that already. This sucker imagined the beginning of the 21st century very, very, very vividly and extrapolated it in terms of a wonderful piece of fiction into something that we could understand the social consequence of all the things that are happening to us right now. Please do this.
We developed a technique at Seymour Powell which we call the Star Chamber which is when we want to think about something with a context so broad that we can’t grasp it is that we bring brilliant futurist thinkers in from all of the disciplines and concentrate them in one place so that we can think about the problem. As far as I’m concerned that is not a dispensable confection for design, it’s a bloody survival thing. We can’t embrace the future if we haven’t got this kind of fire power behind us.
The third point is the future is encoded in emergent behaviour. 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. Because so many businesses are guiding themselves with the output of this kind of ‘fact’ because it can be put on an Excel spreadsheet. Here we are business, look, it says here that 37.6% of ladies in Croydon at 7.00 with wet hair like this colour of tin. Fuck off. Use the force, Luke, for the love of money. Look, we’re empaths designers, that’s what we do, that’s why you are one. If you’re a good one it’s because you’re a really good one, it’s because you can understand that design is about other people. It’s not art, it’s not about, oh I’ll do this for me, isn’t that nice. It’s not about that, it’s about other people. And while we’re at it it’s a brutal, penetrative, financial act. So don’t go hiding it thinking that it’s a nice place where I play with colours. It’s business. Thank you, Richard, or whoever commented on it. It’s a fiscal act, it’s adding value to something so it will outsell its competition, and at the same time it can be other things, but that’s where your money comes from so don’t be afraid of that.
If we look at emergent behaviour, and by that I mean if we look at what people are doing now, how they are adapting to new things that trip them up, that they’re buying in the shop, that’s where you’ll see the future. You will see people’s attitudes changing and being modified by the eternal sea of the things that are coming. If you learn to look properly you will see miracles, this is something that we did a few years ago, proper ethnography, with the sand off, looking at something where a guy said that his favourite feature on a stair lift is this wonderful lockout feature that stops his grandchildren injuring themselves on it. Look at him. He can’t fucking do it. And he doesn’t know he can’t do it. And even if he did know he can’t do it he wouldn’t tell you. Can you imaging how humiliating it is? If you buy a stair lift and put it in your house it will reduce the value of your house, did you know that? Age is a funny thing, it’s something coming to you real soon.
At the same time let’s talk about emergent behaviour in this concept. We were around when Nokia was first putting together it’s thinking on how text could work because SMS was originally about reprogramming your SIM card from a distance over the network. But then something happened and it go turned into a product. Do you know why text is only 160 characters long anybody? Do you know why it’s 160, you know it’s 160 don’t you?
No, it’s the number of characters in the Finnish telecommunications system before the price goes up, it was something really surreal wasn’t it.
Audience member
Telegram.
Richard Seymour
Telegram, yeah, on the telegram before the price went up. So you’d have to pay more if it was more, a standing wave, something from the past. It doesn’t actually matter. But the repurposing of text is that last year in the UK over 60% of all text traffic was sexually related or flirting. Nokia didn’t do that, you did that you prurient suckers. You did that because you think it’s private and one-to-one and secret and terribly intimate. It’s a legitimate new form of communication. But you repurposed it in terms of its content, that’s the eternal sea of emergent behaviour. Spot it and understand it because then you can see how these changes work and how we as designers can then be informed by that. Wholeism, not holistic. Wholeism. If we can, as designers, begin to broaden our bandwidth and see the truth of the whole then we can help to stop businesses turning themselves upside down. Because the client may be an idiot and in this particular case he was an idiot. I’m going to show you an example where from my own experience a business says we want you to redesign the packaging on our frozen lasagne. I know it’s glamorous isn’t it but someone’s got to do it. So you go, I’m going to look at that and then you go, they’ve gone mad because this lasagne is shit. Two for £1 already on what they call a BOGOF, Buy One Get One Free on the end. It’s two miserable pieces of expanded flannelette with a couple of miserable bits of ground up quorn in it, it’s a complete piece of shit. They say, we’ve got to get our margins up so we think we can take some cost out of the packaging. So you go, look, and forgive me for a second, let me explain this. I said, ‘Have you noticed that your food is shit?’ And they said, what are you talking about, simple Italian. It’s shit, I wouldn’t give it to my dog. Look, it’s awful. Don’t you believe in the idea that if you make something better people will want it? This company have been going on the idea that it would cut away the cost of production to the point where they can get their margin and then they’ll sell it by advertising it more. Advertising plus shit equals sales. Enjoy.
So I said, look, here’s an example. This is a company that made fish fingers over here, they made frozen lasagne over here, they’ve got what they call yellow fats over here, delicious isn’t it, that’s what you call butter. Diligent man wants to make good lasagne says, ‘What would it cost to make that piece of shit into something delicious like Mama used to make?’ He said, two and a half times the cost of goods I can make a lasagne like that. I said, go and do it. Over his shoulder he was saying, it’s still going to be two and a half times too expensive. Go way and do it and freeze it and I want it this big and that’s it, this big. So he goes and does that. By the way a fish finger is made by getting a big slab of cod and putting it through a band saw again and again and again all frozen until it becomes a fish finger. Delicious isn’t it? So he goes off and does it and here it is all frozen, he said, it’s still two and a half times too expensive. I said, right, now I want you to saw it up into pieces that are yummy lasagne pieces. So he does that. He said it’s still two and a half times too expensive. I said, right, okay, do you know what you’ve created there? He said, well it’s a delicious frozen lasagne. I said, no it’s not, it’s a bullet proof vest. Have you noticed that you’ve made a frozen laminate that is so strong that you couldn’t put a bullet through it. He said, well I never thought about it like that before. Take that thing that cost two and a half times too much and take it to the yellow fats division and instead of putting it in a plastic container with a plastic laminate over the top and putting in a full colour cardboards box, I want you to wrap it in a single piece of greaseproof paper with a beautiful photograph on it with a little seal and do that. He said, now I understand. I said, I think you’ll find when you put all that together that now we have a lasagne that cost less than that piece of shit you do at the moment because we’re taking all the packaging costs away because it doesn’t need to be like that. He said, that’s great because that means we can still do a piece of shit that big and wrap it like that.
You can take a horse to water…You can gaffer tape it’s fucking head under the surface… But, and back to my colleague’s comment this morning, you must learn to communicate. And it doesn’t take a bloody business set-up to communicate, that’s what we do. We’re designers, we communicate. So we have to find the right story to do it. I’ve been bursting my brain for the last six years with a lot of these companies trying to do that because I walked from being a designer that went, I don’t understand why these companies don’t understand, why do the really cool things bounce off the surface of these businesses? Why are so few businesses prepared to do it? Then you realise they can’t really receive the new, it’s violent. The better and most incredibly knowledgeable and forward thinking it is the more violent it is, it’s scary, and it brings the famous word, risk, into the equation. Delete the word risk, find a new one. Any poets in the room? Write it, change it, new word please. You can introduce new words into their vocabulary at the same time.
So that could have been better and that’s what I call industrial judo. It’s taking the problem, all of the problem, and using your enemy in this particular case, and it was a fucking enemy in this case, and using their strength against them. If you get the story right and if you couch it in the right terms and, yes Richard it must have money in the discussion, yes you must, it’s design, it’s a commercial act, then talk about it in that way. Show them how it can be better and that they’ll make more money out of it. Do that. But don’t sit there with your arms folded and your lips pursed expecting them to somehow come to your stratospheric high ground of understanding.
Or maybe we can turn people to the light side. Maybe you can get in there on the inside and you can make people think in a different way. This is a wonderful opportunity here where the client came and said, they made fuel cells, and said we want you to design a demonstrator for our fuel cell technology because it’s really good. We said, what would you like us to do? They said, well we would like you to do a box and then connect it to a traffic light and show how it can drive traffic lights. I went, okay… A visionary. So we said, look, what’s the most exciting thing you could possibly imagine? What is the promise of the hydrogen economy? What would be the thing that would thrill you the most? He said, it’s distributed energy, I suppose making it at home, exciting. We created this electric fuel cell, hydrogen powered motorcycle, with a cylinder that big of compressed hydrogen that could take you from here to London actually on that amount with speeds up to 50mph. Sitting in the middle of it is that which is the power station itself. We were terribly excited because this would be a technology demonstrator that people would get excited about. But the really cool thing is this. The thing that makes it work is this, the core, because you can supply the hydrogen to the core in a number of ways. When finally the big gas giants decide that they want to distribute hydrogen you can do it but until then you can do this right now at home. You take something the size of a show box, you put a glass full of water in it, you plug it into the wall, you switch on the mains, overnight it splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen, it takes the hydrogen and compresses it and the following day you’ve got enough to run around all day for about a penny. You can start the hydrogen economy at home all on your own, you don’t have to work for the politics, we don’t have to wait for Leviathan to make a decision that that’s what is going to happen. We can fucking do this on our own.
The greatest forest fires as we’ve seen that are happening running in the West Coast of America at the moment probably started with a single match. This is the brilliance, this is the wonderful thought of design, especially for me, for product design. If you get it together in the right way you can change everything. You really can. You can be back at the beginning of the 20th century or the beginning of the 16th century and you can be in a place where you can change things. Knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not good at is one thing nut ganging up with other people who really know the other things that you don’t know are fantastic. Design thinking, I wasn’t here to hear Tim yesterday, but I was in San Francisco at the conference last week talking with him so I think I know what he was talking about. All right I’m thinking get on with your business, do your design thinking. I want to see more design thinkists. I want to see designers thinking harder and more and deeper and broader and establishing more bandwidth, can we have more bandwidth. The designs that seem the most brilliant aren’t the ones with the largest number of neurones necessarily or the best synaptic links to that mouse hand, or even to do with their imagination, it’s how cross-connected they are, exactly what this conference is about, into the other things that give them enthusiasm. The things that inform them and get them up in the morning and excite them. Us-ism not them-ism, I’m going to go back to this thing about studying people.
We’ve got to engender a sense of empathic humanism. We’ve got to do this for us, for people. I’m not going to go off on a green thing or anything else, I’m just going to talk about people. If design isn't about people what the hell is it actually about? If you use the C word, the consumer word, you immediately shiver and break the link between you, the human, and the human that you’re directing this at. Most of what we need to know we actually already know, if we can find our way into it. Us and them is very important in the future. Whole corporations, whole brands, are starting to migrate from them-ism to us-ism. You’re looking at me as if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Let me give you an example. Who’s been in to Pret-A-Manger recently? Anybody? Have you seen that tiny little sign underneath the till? It’s only this big, it’s deliberately hidden. It says, ‘If you eat your sandwiches here the Government says we have to charge you 17% VAT. Nightmare.’ That’s us-ism. That’s we together, as opposed to you’re the consumer and me over here. Us-ism is really important for the future because if we can bring this together where we are serving, if you like, where the brands are serving in a part of what we’re doing we get to a different place.
Let me give you an example of this. Working recently with Ford and looking at the AA at the same time, talking to Ford about it, poor old Ford in Europe never making any money, terrible state, virtually chapter 11, oh dear oh dear. What happened to Ford? Well, what happened to Ford was all their brand pillars, all of the things that they stood for have become everybody else’s deck. Right price, car for the people, good dynamics, that’s now everybody’s deck. So they lose their identity at the same time. I was talking to them about us-ism and I was saying, isn’t it about us? Couldn’t Ford be us? Couldn’t you take that view? To give an example I said here’s a crazy one, imagine a radar detector built into the front of every Ford car. They said, well yeah okay, so…? I said, yeah but it will tell you obviously if you if it sees a gap. They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know about that. I said, yeah but the real trick is you put another light from it in the back window of the car so that if the Ford picks it up it tells the guy behind, no matter what car he’s in, that they’re running into a problem with the radar. So what that is, is you then become part of that overall community.
The AA were looking at a similar way, while working with Ogilvy the advertising agency, was that simple technologies, terribly simple things like thermachromics which actually isn’t saying, ‘Join the AA’ what it says is the temperature is now below zero because if the temperature drops because then you can read the sign and if it goes up then you can’t. So taking this social responsibility, coming within the ‘us zone’ is something which is going to become more and more important because it is linked in to how brands are going to have to function with web 2.0 and the future of content. There is nowhere to hide anymore, who knows what happened to Kryptonite. Kryptonite locks, anybody? Let me tell the rest of you that don’t. Kryptonite locks posted on the web a year ago was it? That you could open a Kryptonite bike lock with a biro, and before they knew it their business had gone straight down the toilet. There’s nowhere to hide, there’s nowhere to go. Who has seen the Coca-Cola and Mentos thing, have you seen this thing? Do you al know about that? You put a Mentos in a coke and it goes bonkers. Do you know what those two companies did after it? Mentos went, woah fantastic, free global exposure, let’s completely change our marketing strategy so we’re in line with that, we’re really experimental and interesting, Coca-Cola, they’re still trying to sue the arses off the people that did it. Which one of these is the right picture for the 21st century?
Inclusive or universal design, shouldn’t be lowest common denominator design. As we globalise and as we’re more interlinked, that does not mean that in the search for making things broader that work with everybody that they have to lose their independence, their individuality, their excitement. On work we did recently, a few years ago now, for Jaguar to look at the different ways in which one would handle the details for a car where the average purchasers age is 54 years old. We looked at a number of different things, that’s a gear stick there that’s got an electric switch in it because that’s how they work now. But that’s not how you work, it feels like you’re moving planets around in Vaseline on your racket. It feels like the action of an expensive hunting rifle. Or that door handle bottom left which is glass and opens with a cybernetic sigh when you hit the gripper and goes back again and illuminates a cool blue at night. That’s so stupid old farts with arthritis can open their fucking car door. But actually what it is, is it’s really cool and it’s really nice. These things can be better for all of us. Name one thing in the modern car that’s designed for somebody over 50. One thing. We’ll be here all night. You’re looking at the top of the food chain here, 54, top of the demographic spine, I am at the top of that spine. This age. I can’t see the screen on my bloody cell phone, especially in sunlight. I design them and I can’t see what the thing says. I can’t get in and out of some things as easy as I could do, partly due to my size I suspect. But this is where the money is, this is where the political power is. Most things are designed by people in their 20s or 30s, most things that are consumed in the West are consumed by people in their 50s. Work it out.
While you’re at it, do this. I can’t bear it, if I hear more politically correct bullshit about what is and isn’t right to say… We’re different, get over it. Our brains are different, our needs are different, our priorities are different. For crying out loud, do not hide behind the daintiness of trying to produce something that works for everybody when sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s make sure that we hit the right notes. And get the best design brains on the hardest problems. Here comes the criticism of my own domain. Some of the best people in the business, the ones whose brains should be about forging the future and determining where we’re going are doing fucking cruets for Italian luxury goods companies instead of focusing themselves on the really big things that we’ve got to deal with. How nice, let’s go hide there instead of tackling the really important stuff. There’s some huge stuff to tackle, so let’s not get the best and most illuminated brains hiding somewhere else.
Do or do not, there is no try. Whether you like it as a product designer, and they are not dead, not yet, I’m on my way Richard wherever you are, product design is not dead yet. Soon but not dead yet. I’m afraid you do have a responsibility. You may easily be the brightest, most concerted, most well informed, broadest bandwidth thinker amongst that team. You do have a responsibility. But then when the question came up earlier today, which was about should designers lead? Leadership is a personal attribute, some people lead and some do not. Should a street sweeper lead? I don’t know. Yes sometimes. But let’s have a little bit more boldness please and let’s get people who want to lead, let’s get people in there who can see further into the future and who want to do and who can help to shape the world when we need to do it. Do it or don’t do it but don’t fuck about with it because it’s dangerous. If you feel you’re up to it then step up to the plate and help, if not, don’t get in the way.
21 years ago I did my first ever public speaking engagement and I was bricking it. It was for Blue Print magazine and it was the Moving Up conference and I was asked to talk about the evolving product designer. So I did this, a reworking of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It’s interesting to not the things that I’ve had to change. This is 20 years ago and still I needed a really long arm, that one there, to make sure I got the taxi before Ross Lovegrove did. But look at the second one down, that larger, bolder hand. That’s the improved client interface, that’s the firm handshake of the confident. Then look at the third one, this direct CADCAM interface. 20-odd years ago CADCAM was all in its infancy. It was marginally there at all. You’ve got a client ringing up saying, have you got CADCAM, and we’d say, no we don’t we still use pencils. Now we don’t or we should, I do. On the other side because we’re using magic markers at the time we’d have to evolve the hand so that it would take the stubby thing or maybe change the hand so it could do that wonderful two finger bloody typing that designers still do. And then the bottom one which is now completely redundant which is the limb suitable for carrying the AO portfolio. It’s only 20 years and look what has actually changed.
It’s a theme I return to every time but I can’t help it. I don’t care whether you’re a designer, I don’t care if you’re an industrialist, I don’t care if you’re a street sweeper, we are facing the most appalling negativism in much of what we see in the media. We are looking into worlds where we feel things get worse not better, where we’re scrabbling for grip, where maybe we can’t intervene in a meaningful way. I didn’t hear James’s comments about this but I can imagine I probably share them.
If you’re not an optimistic interventionist in design, fuck off, and do something a lot less dangerous.
Thanks.