Multi-disciplinary design education event Novemeber 2010

The missing d: The value of design to STEM and business education 

In November 2010, members of the Multi-Disciplinary Design Network met to discuss The missing d: The value of design to STEM and business education.

Below, you can watch videos, or read a transcript of the discussions.

The missing d: The value of design to STEM and business education: Part 1 from Design Council on Vimeo.

Read the transcript of part 1

 

The missing d: The value of design to STEM and business education: Part 2 from Design Council on Vimeo.

Read the transcript of part 2 

 

Transcript: Part 1

Paul Thompson

Welcome to ‘Putting the D in STEM’.  My name is Paul Thompson, I am director of the Royal College of Art and welcome to this jointly arranged colloquium/afternoon lecture/debate organised by the Design Council and Design London here at the Imperial College, London Business School.  The venue for this session really couldn’t be more appropriate.  We are here in the business school which is one of the very few business schools, Nick Leon and I were just debating, and we are not sure whether it’s the only business school in the world in which design management modules are mandatory.  I have a feeling that Rotman School in Toronto may also have design management as a mandatory requirement within the MDA but the jury is still open on that.

The design management modules here at Imperial are delivered by Dr. Nick Leon and his colleagues from Imperial and the Royal College of Art’s Design London unit.  Design London is the perfect embodiment of the triangular relationship between design, engineering and entrepreneurship embedded within two world class universities. Design London is STEM with the D and it is wonderful to acknowledge, publically, the success of Design London today before one of its progenetists, Sir George Cox, the former Chairman of the Design Council, whose influential review of 2005 really was the inspiration for the formation of Design London. 

Now higher education loves acronyms and many acronyms are flying around these days.  STEM, STEMD and STEAM.  Over in the United States congressman Jim Langevin is leading the charge on exactly the same debate as the one we are having over here today.  While we are talking about putting the D in STEM Jim Langevin is seeking to pass a resolution before the House of Representatives which puts the A into STEM to make STEAM – A being art.  I strongly believe that the T and E of STEM need the D of design if technology and engineering are to reap the commercial harvest.  Sister universities such as Imperial College derive value from partnering with the Royal College of Art precisely because of the creative alchemy that our designers bring which turns the base metal of invention into the gold of innovation that meets market need. 

As James Dyson stated in his report ‘Ingenious Britain’:  ‘the conservative government should learn the lessons from Design London over the next year to examine how the model can be applied to other universities, courses and incubators’.  And, of course, that is our job at the moment, to make sure that those lessons and the models that have come from the Design Network are listened to in this very, very crucial next few weeks before the higher education bill is presented by David Willetts before parliament.  I hope that our panellists this afternoon can help us reverse the decisions of the Lord Brown review and the comprehensive spending review and well and truly cement D onto either the end, the middle or the beginning of STEM permanently. 

Thank you very much.   I’d now like to introduce the Chief Executive of the Design Council, David Kester.

David Kester

Well, welcome everybody to our event: ‘The missing D. The Value of Design to STEM and Business Education’ and Paul I think you put that so eloquently, there is almost nothing I can add.  But I was thinking about what’s almost the antithesis, as I was coming over, of our event and our conversation today and I was reminded of the Philippe Starck programme.  Nothing against Philippe Starck, I actually like Philippe Starck; I even have one of his lemon squeezers. But I was reminded of that programme,  I don’t know whether you remember the moment in ‘Design for Life’ when the one young designer is desperately searching for an idea, he has gone out for a whole day seeking ideas, talking to possible users and didn’t come up with an idea and then gets a bit of a rollicking from Philippe Starck who says ‘you don’t understand what you are doing, when you try to find an idea is you go to your hotel room, you lock the door, you have a drink and eventually at midnight the idea will come’.  How different, perhaps, that is from the real practice of most designers and most businesses in the real world. 

And I was looking, only the other day, I am sure many of you will have followed the launch of the government’s Blueprint for Technology, which I have here.  And it opens with the Prime Minister saying: ‘this government believes technology based innovation will be one of the key drivers of the private sector led economic growth that Britain so urgently needs’.  He goes on to talk about the investment that the government is going to be making.  We’ve heard about Green Bank, the investment bank.  Also the 200 million that he’s going to put into new technology and innovation centres.  And it goes on to cite some business that he wants to see grow and develop in this country and the first one, of course, is Apple.  That is no surprise perhaps.  But all of us here, because everybody here works in some way, shape or form, in the area of design, technology and the links between business and been involved in these extraordinary multi-disciplinary centres and networks over recent years.  We all know that that’s not how we end up with these extraordinary services and products, how a technology company like Apple develops its ideas.  I have had the privilege, on more than one occasion, to interview Jonny Ive about how it works for Apple and he speaks very eloquently about how it’s a team gig, how it’s all about not just his relationship with Steve Jobs but also relationship with the engineers, the marketers, it’s about creating the music and harmony across a team of people.  And of course that starts in education and I am hoping today we’ll not only be talking about higher education, the multi-disciplinary work in business schools and in design schools, but perhaps will also touch on what this means in education more deeply.  And of course D in STEM may have implications much earlier than university post graduate education.

So that’s our topic.  Of course we know that over recent years, it’s actually five years since Sir George wrote his report and submitted it to the then Chancellor, later Prime Minister, Brown.  He’d only just returned, actually, at the point of asking for that report, from a trip to China and had been really so taken, so stunned by the huge growth and changes and, indeed, investment in design and innovation and creativity in China that actually, I think, that was very much the stimulus for the report itself.  One of the key recommendations, of course, was establishing centres of excellence that brought design, business and technology together.  And the Design Council has played a part, I’d like to think, in that, particularly in bringing some of the networks together, us and NESTA and HEFCE and also I think, of particular note, sitting right here in the middle opposite me is Lesley Morris who, for many people, has been a bit of a shining light, a guiding light often, I believe, even when things have got a little desperate in Beijing when storm clouds, or rather volcanic clouds prevented people returning from these foreign climes.  And we have published a series of reports, today also marks perhaps the last in this series but I think we are also hoping maybe there will be many more, but perhaps done a different way and so that may also be part of the conversation – how does this journey continue?  So maybe that is part of our conversation today. 

But how is it going to work?  Well, we’ve got a series of very distinguished speakers, I am going to invite them one by one to come and join me.  We are going to start with Steven Kyffin, and many of you know him as the Dean of Northumbria School of Design.  I am going to invite Lucy Kimbell up, the Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, followed by Chris Wise, Director at Expedition Engineering and then Sir George Cox and then I am going to ask Paul to join us as well and then we will open for a open conversation.  Each speaker, and I say to you all now, we are going to make it very short, I am going to give you a question, we’re going to make it very quick three minutes up front so that we can really make sure that the conversation flows between us all.  I hope that is clear. 

Well, I’d like to start, Steven, with your experience, not at Northumbria but perhaps we can start with Philips and actually what we are talking about here is an educational experience but we are actually, of course, only looking at pedagogic practice following what happens in the real world.  So for you what is happening in the real world? I mean, it’s not like the universities isn’t real world but talking about practice that goes on in creating the products and the services in industry. 

Steven Kyffin

I think I may have to go back a bit before that.  Before I went to Philips I was working at Royal College of Art in the Industrial Design School as it was then.  And even at that time we realised that packaging technology was simply no way to deal with cultural value, to deal with the way people would, could, should be living.  And the vision, the future project, that Stefano Marzano had really was built on the notion that, or an idea that... was built on the inclination that the world was saturated not only with over functionalised products, but it was saturated with technological possibility, it was saturated with marketing means to deliver more stuff to more people who simply neither needed it nor wanted it but were somehow compelled to buy it.  And so this notion of understanding the qualities of human life and understanding how we could build off a cultural driver rather than technological drivers was the way the design should move forward as a strategic tool for innovating and meeting our future.

And so his challenge at that time in 1992 was how do I build a design competence in organisations like Philips which can lead how we make things better, which was their strap line then.  Or we go for a simpler world, or a less totally saturated world of non-sense.  And even ten years ago he understood that we had to understand what the human qualities were, what our values were so that the existing technology, let alone any new ones, or any new or inventive technology could be use, were actually used in a relevant way to realise the ambitions at the heart or the spirit of people in their life.

So although we talk about STEM, if science means natural, as the Dutch call it – natuurlijk – natural science like physics can be biology but it also means social sciences then that’s fine.  But I suspect it doesn’t, does it? It means physics and chemistry, chemical engineering.  So somewhere in there are the natural... are the human sciences - anthropology, sociology, psychology.  Because that we need to understand in order to understand what the needs of people, the unmet needs of people... I know it’s a cliché but the qualities of human life that have been lost through the industrial revolution.  And they need to be brought back, they need to be understood in order that technology and things that we make are actually responding to those needs.

David Kester

Could you say something about what the culture then was like at Philips that would enable the different actors, as it were, to work together?

Steven Kyffin

So I arrived after the Vision of the Future had gone through, I arrived in 1998. Technology was still the driving force in that company.  Although Philips is now a marketing organisation and the technology building what they call lamps – light bulbs – actually it was still a technology driven company.  They’d invented the CD, they’d invented the DVD, they had their own silicone plant, they basically sold components to the manufacturing industry, it was a technology driven company. They didn’t even have a marketing executive until 2002/2003.  So for 100 years it was technology driven and yet they have always been designers.  They have been designers who have worked with Edgar Varèse, Le Corbusier, who would make up Poème électronique in 1958 to show how the future in counting sound and vision in an immersive environment in Brussels in the 50s could be the reality of the human experience in the future. But still, even in 1998 it was a technology driven company. 

So we didn’t understand the future business models, the strategic management of future business service models was not even engaged in the company in 1998.  They knew it in their heads but they didn’t know it in their hearts – they didn’t know what it was to deliver a service, merely black boxes. And so, from a design point of view, we were still fighting against the notion that technology would solve humans’ problems, societies’ challenges.  We were not trying to use different ways of trading, different ways of exchange, different ways of understanding people in order to create new ideas that would release the way they wanted to live.  It took another ten years before we developed this – strap line I called it – TO DO SO, which was sort of an energy the company trying to bring together technology objectives – TO, DO, which was design objectives, so the qualities of life were given form and the strategic objectives which was both the business and the marketing objectives.  But even in to do so we had left out the people objectives, the understanding people’s actual value challenges and what they believed in, what their values were, what type of life people wanted to live around the world in their different context.  Even that was not part of the company’s agenda. 

David Kester

What actually stimulated then, the change in the culture?  I mean, was it the pace of change? What was driving them to change that culture?

Steven Kyffin

The foundational pillar, the fundamental physics and material research was being underfunded, so there was a huge drive from the governance of the company before to say everything you do in research, technology must be sellable within five years and produce big numbers.  Therefore we can get a lot closer to the marketplace.  So because design was very good, Philips was very good at bringing things to market, there was a force, an energy forcing design and technology production into one place.  TO DO we called it - TO DO which means everything on planning etc.  So we were bringing together the technology programmes and the design programmes closer and closer together.   But this was caused, not because of any will to bring design and technology together, particularly, but because the funding of fundamental research which kept the technology so far back in the value chain, was being removed so they had to come face the music in a way. 

But what that did do was that the designers and the technologists really had to start to trust each other that their own objectives in developing new technology or new design ideas could actually facilitate the delivery of the other.  Designers could not make anything happen in Philips unless they had the technology to deliver it.  Technologists could not make anything happen unless they had the designers to help give it human focus.  But we still have a marketing problem because there was no one selling this stuff, there was no one positioning the idea in the future.  Although the psychologists in Philips research and the anthropologists and sociologists at Philips design were starting to move around each other, they weren’t really working together as one people/culture/society understanding team, despite what Josephine Green was trying to do or managed to do.  We were still not being able to bring together the people researchers to give focus to both design and the technology development, let alone strategic drive of the company. 
Once all those four building blocks came together, which is not in D STEM and S means social science as well perfect but it doesn’t, does it?  So once we had marketing and people with cultural research together with technology research, together with design research, together with corporate strategy, working on the future of the company in the growth opportunities in the global markets then it started to happen.  What caused that was a lot of energy from the Head of Philips Research who understood this, a lot of energy from the Head of Philips Design, Stefano, who put his trust in us to do it.  And some guys in the corporate strategy offices of some parts of the business.  And as long as we committed to work together as the Jedi Knights, we called ourselves, it carried on.  But as soon as we got shuffled around the personal relationships and the power of those relationships started to dissolve again.  So personal conviction was the key driving energy in this, as well as the intellectual proof point.  It is down to personality and it is down to a type of personality and I am being slightly arrogant now, the type of personality that allows people to let go of themselves a little bit and give in to the creativity of others and celebrate other people have got creative value to add in their own disciplines.  And that is a whole another story. 

David Kester

I’d like to just move on, Stephen, and just talk briefly about what you’ve now seen in operation.  You’ve moved on to teach at one of the foremost design courses and indeed the very course that Johnny Ive went on.  So is that… what is special, what’s going on there, why does that work, and what are you seeing in the relationship between good practice in industry and good practice in education?

Steven Kyffin

The two, there is one… half an answer to your previous question which I didn’t answer, David, which is the other thing that forced this thing to happen in Philips is to be recognised as growth areas in the Philips market that we could attend to together.  So the future of sleep and stress was one, the future of intuitive living in a digitally connected economy where people can express their ideas was another; the future of the intelligent transportation system bringing content into the car was another, and the future of hospitality in a hotel environment, which were all growth areas that Philips was interested in.  That forced us to work together.  In Northumbria, the reason why I’ve gone there is because the university, very unusually I’ve heard, has decided that there are four or five key growth areas that both North East and England… Britain, I don’t know what to call it, United Kingdom… are focused on, which give thematic centres of focus to all the research in the university.  This is, I think, quite an unpopular or unusual strategic decision in English universities, but it’s something that happens in European universities.   I was part of Eindhoven University and it happens there, very easily they’ve set up research areas and research subjects, thematic research areas where everybody contributes. And there’s a commitment in Northumbria to do that.  So it’s not just research for the sake of the discipline but it’s building the knowledge and the core of the disciplines in order to deliver knowledge and value into the future of these areas, both for the North East, both for Britain and for Europe and the world.  But because of that… that’s why I’ve gone there.  Now whether Jonathan Ive and I benefited from that at the time, doing a study there, I doubt, actually, because I think design has moved on and has a much larger remit, culturally and technologically than it had when we studied.  So what was happening there that gave us what we have and what I learnt at the Royal College when I went there and met Daniel Weil is that we were very, very good practitioners, we knew how to do, we knew how to do design very, very well. 

But override that, Northumbria has what Mark Bailey and Bob Young have set up is this multi-disciplinary innovation programme between the business school, the technology school and the design school.  That’s only happened in the last five years.  That’s something that’s really changing the way Northumberland starts to think.  It’s massively challenging, very difficult to comply with for the other schools because they have their own disciplinary agendas.  But that energy is beginning to show there and our colleagues are trying very hard to pull that together and to keep that going and have joint PhDs now and we have this joint Masters programme, so people who can practice in their disciplines now have the confidence to learn from others in other disciplines and bring it together.  I guess in the way that the Royal College, Imperial College have started to do that, the Royal College of Business Schools have started to do that, the Royal College of Social Science has started to do that.  The fortunate thing about a big university is technically, in theory, you can do it inside one university.  It doesn’t make it any easier but it can, could be done and that… have I ranted on too long on that?  But that’s why Northumbria offers the scope for us to do in a design school what we are trying to do, bringing those four disciplines together.  The other three disciplines don’t much like it yet but that’s… they’re learning.

David Kester

Steven, just because of time I have to suggest that please do, as we go, start jotting down maybe the sort of questions that you might want to pose to all of the panel, or to Steven because I’d love to start talking almost now about some of the obstacles that you might be coming up against across the three different areas.  But we haven’t got time and I’d like to make sure that we get everybody up, so can I just… a round of applause for Steven.

Lucy you’ve been doing this at one of… business schools in Britain, obviously Saïd.  I think certainly, I know it’s very contentious here, which are at the top of the leader board of business schools at any one time.  I can see George grinning as Chairman of Warwick but Oxford is certainly right up there as one of our leading business schools. And we know that introducing design into business schools has a chequered past.  it’s not this is the first time that we’ve tried this and it’s been difficult and it’s sometimes popped in and popped out again.  Think of the work that was done with the Centre for Design Management at London Business School which got off to a flying start and, tremendously well and then somehow it faltered.  So I wonder whether you could give us a bit of a taste of what’s been happening at Saïd and has it faltered, where and what worked, what doesn’t work?  What are the pitfalls?

Lucy Kimbell

The work at Saïd actually predates the Cox Review slightly, influenced and led very strongly by our former Dean, the late Anthony Hopwood.  He went to a workshop in 2002, organised by Dick Boland and Fred Collopy at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western and some of you will recall a book ‘Managing as Designing’ in 2004.  And there was a follow up event this year in Cleveland that I went to.  So Anthony went to that event as not yet then Dean of Business School but very much a mix of people including Frank Ghery, which was the inspiration for Fred and Dick’s growing interest in design situated within management to say, oh, maybe some of the fundamental assumptions we make within management and organisation studies, are they due any revisiting, do we need to really think about the way that we are designing organisations, designing not just products and services but designing strategies for organisation and so on.  So that, I think, was a really important event and because of that Anthony was minded to bring some of this stuff into what was still a very young business school and funded what was later my post, Associate Fellow, which was a five year post.  So it was a prototype that was… I’d agree on open ring, you know, do something interesting and see where it goes.  But unlike other organisations, here there hasn’t a major institutional commitment in this sort of, bit more sink or swim.  However, what that did cause to me to do was being quite creative and find my own way to, first of all, create an elective… so my main teaching and vehicle is an MBA elective which initially had 19 students in 2005.  This year I had 48 and this year we’re going to have 60.  So that’s quite a big number of MBA students choosing to take a course to do the design management and so on. 

But I think one of the things that’s missing maybe… or would you kind of get on including in this conversation is about research, because to teach you need a body of research.  Not just I had a lot of practitioner experience, I had been reading various bits of design theory and I feel that you could put more of that into actually design service and design experience, design… but when you talk to management scholars, a few teach strategy or marketing or operations, there are many, many fields, there’s no homogenous business school, you need to find a way to engage with the research questions.  The history of science talks about what is the research programme in a field; there are multiple fields with multiple questions and actually a lot of them are getting along quite well without design.  So they’d meet me and I’d say, well, I’m here for da da, da, da, and they’d go, oh, that’s interesting, anyway - because they already had a research programme in their field.  It was concerned with this or that or the other, so it took quite a long time to find people who, whatever it was that I was saying or I represented or stuff they heard about outside was something they wanted to engage with as research, which had a relationship to the teaching questions.  So I’d say the teaching went very well, so although my post is ended I’m still teaching there actually in an expanded way but more on a freelance basis.  So the institution, for its own reasons, have not made a firmer commitment, except it has in a sense of the teaching and the research questions forced me to think about the nature of research.  And when we come to talk about the importance of design, in which fields, in which disciplines, within which research programmes, within which intellectual agendas and histories do we want to say that design is fantastic and great, we can change things.  Just talking about it from within design it’s not necessarily going to get us there, so I’m trying to find people who engage… who have a research question that I would say is a design can contribute to, but then in particular I am doing that in services and strategy. 

David Kester

And in your actual teaching because that would be a very interesting point to come back to on the research point because there might be some broader themes in there, but in your teaching actually now as you look back over a period of years presumably you were in touch with some of your alumni.  Has that had an impact?  Do they say this was actually helpful?  This changed my… you know, my perspective’s different?

Lucy Kimbell

Yes, I do get those emails and tweets and so on. I also, amusingly, I got one recently from somebody who said, I didn’t take your elective, but I hear it was really great, and by the way, I work at McKinsey now, and my partner also works at McKinsey and is doing… you know, they want to do what you’re doing. But they’re outside the higher education sector and that’s…

David Kester

And they don’t know how to do it?

Lucy Kimbell

And they don’t know how to do it, so there’s a good deal of interest which links to executive education and other forms of management education and so, I do a little bit of that too. But I guess… well I also built into examination, the marking and one of the things we’ve done is get them looking at collective essays and what they have learned about design in practice, and the way they teach it is very hands-on, any designer would recognise the sorts of things we do. Out of the five years so far, or six years in this, I’ve done two years of collaboration with a student from the Royal College of Art before Design London was set up. I’ve done two years with London College of Communication, with Alison Prendiville’s students and we’re doing it again this year. And one year with Social Enterprise. And I do that because there are no well-known design schools in Oxford, there are great architects, there’s an interesting visual art school, but there’s no easy design…, so again I’ve had to be quite creative with the institutional affiliations.

So those hands-on experiences, what they… and the students say to me are… really it’s… I think, the opportunity to synthesise and integrate the different bits of learning they’ve had across the MBA. So they… I get them to do various things, and they go, oh right, now I see how the marketing stuff relates to the strategy stuff. It’s a bit like what Steven was just saying, it’s that choosing to come together and link up the various things they learned in the different silos, because as all the academics here will know, mostly academics work just in their silo. And for the students, they get a load of this, that, the other. The design projects that I set them allow for them to pull that together. So it’s partly an integrating, synthesising move, it’s partly about a sort of, relentless commitment to visualisation and prototyping very, very early on, when there is no idea yet that work design as we know… but by creating some kind of visual boundary, it moves us along, just teaching them that helps the teams move along and they learn something from it.

So those are the things which are not taught anywhere else, become important practices they can take forward. And also, in turning to the material dimensions of organisational, material and digital, that in business schools, particularly in North American management theory, as opposed European organisation theory, there’s an emphasis on sort of, de-materialised business. It’s… there’s no material, it’s all abstract strategies. Actually, organisations were made to…, strategies are in some way made of things and so on. So what designers are actually good at is things, and then looking at the design and thinking of how to get this thing… and just doing the thinking. But I actually think that’s an important dimension, and that’s what I observe the students are responding well to.

So the experimentation and visualisation, the integrating and synthesising, the materiality of organisations where we are, and a sense of a design as an enquiry; you are… you don’t have the answer. That’s where design theory matters, you know, you know what you’re designing and then you just try and design it. You actually don’t know what you’re designing. It is a… it’s a sort of, engaging, rhetorical conversation with many stakeholders and participants that’s what I hear back from the university, the ones that I work with.

David Kester

Well, Lucy, that’s a good… and I’m sure you’ve got lots of those. Thank you, very, very much, I’m sure lots of questions will follow. Thank you very much Lucy.

And if I could call on Chris Wise, Collective Expedition Engineering. Chris is also Council member of the Design Council, and to some of you he will be known of the telly. Also, many of you will know him, he doesn’t like it if you talk about it, wobbly bridges, but actually he’s…

Chris Wise

I like it when they talk about wobbly bridges.

David Kester

Oh, you do? Because there’s lots of talk about that, and velodromes too, and all sorts of other extraordinary projects all around the world. But of course, everything that you have touched can only come together with extraordinary team work I would guess.

Chris Wise

Yes, I mean, if you take the Velodrome as an example, and compare it with the Aquatics, which was a Zaha Hadid project right next door, same size, I’m not going to give you the figures, but there’s a significant difference in cost, in efficiency, in… maybe not in beauty, I don’t know, that’s in the eye of the beholder. And I think that the reason for that is that they are designed in completely different ways. One is designed as an object, and then they’re a bunch of specialists who are effectively required to make the object work somehow, and the other one is designed as an integrated, collaborative… I heard what Lucy was saying about, it’s a synthesised piece, where all of the people involved in it just throw their hats into the ring, throw their ideas into the ring and work together. And it takes a long time to learn how to work like that, and I think that the… you can’t just cobble together a gang of specialists from different areas and just say, right, I’ve now got an electronic engineer and I’ve got an architect, and I’ve got a social scientist. If they don’t understand each other and they can’t speak each other’s language, you’re going to end up with rubbish, most of the time, unless you strike a happy accident.

So I think that’s important, the projects we do, although each one of them is a one-off, it’s not like designing an i-Pod or something, where you make millions and millions of the same thing. All of ours are one-offs, but the people who work on them tend to learn how to work together through a series of projects and develop shorthand. And that process is… it’s a group, it’s like a group design project at university. You’re doing design with other people who may have a different head on, and a different specialism. But actually, it’s no good, if they’re fantastic at their work, it doesn’t matter a jot if the thing you’ve come up with collectively doesn’t work as a single, synthesised piece. So I mean, I really enjoy the team working parts of it. I enjoy the trying to understand what the hell it is we’re trying to make. I also enjoy the humanity of it, because we… I’m an engineer, and many people think engineers are not human beings, actually, and are some sort of robotic creatures. But we are actually human beings and we design stuff for other people like us, and sometimes nothing like us. I mean, it’s very hard to put yourself into somebody else’s shoes and imagine what it’s going to be like but we spend of millions and millions of Pounds worth of money making things which, in the end, are going to last for 50 years, 100 years. And the design, integrated design, synthesised design proposition comes from an understanding of… a collective understanding of what you’re trying to do, is a part of it. And I can imagine doing products in the same way that you can learn from each product, you can tweak it a bit and you can have another go with this multi-, multi… you know, generation after generation of products, that they gradually evolve, learn from the feedback.

But in most of our projects, we never get any feedback. The people who commission multi-million Pound projects don’t want to know if their projects aren’t going to work, so they never tell you. And so we get very little feedback, except from, you know, second hand.

David Kester

And for your…, you’re a recruiter as well. I mean, you’re an employer. You are taking on young engineers, into your own practice. Do you… you know, are you seeing a change in the sort of graduates that you’re taking on? Have they got a better appreciation how to work, or is it… or do you have to re-educate them?

Chris Wise

The straight answer is, I think that the education process does very little. As it’s currently configured, it doesn’t help people become good designers. I think that the… and if I think to the students that we had at Imperial Engineering School, you could virtually tell on the first day, the first hour, who was going to be the best designer. So they had a way about them, they had a way of working which was nothing to do with their formal education; it was to do with their life experience. It was to do with their awareness; it was to do with their interest and I… you know, you would ask them what sort of things they’d been doing at school, to get this understanding. And they’d say well, I think I… maybe not very much actually, but I got a lot from my dad or my mum, you know? My mum did needlework or my dad built tree houses, or whatever it was. But it was something from their life experience which they had found interesting, and then they brought to the mix. So I think that… I personally… I think that we… the STEM… the S part of stem in particular causes me great distress, because without the D… Because science is an observational process, so what you’re doing is, you’re learning from the world, and you’re trying to work out what the hell’s going on. But it’s not actually a creative act in the self. You might have to be creative to construct an experiment. But these young kids coming through school, I think, really can be helped to cultivate their spirit of enquiry if you like, so that, you know, their natural enthusiasm for it is something which is then helped through the school process, rather than coaxed out of them by the sort of, railroaded through an examination process.

So I think that design is really rather important; I have a couple of young kids, or I have four young kids actually, but the two that I think… the boys, you know, only six and eight years old, but they have as much, I think, virtually as much native design knowledge as the people who’ve come to us from college. It’s not developed in the intervening 15 years, as far as I can tell, very much, which I think is an opportunity personally, for improvement.

David Kester

Well, I have a feeling that this might be a theme that George is going to pick up on with us, but can I… Chris, unless you’ve got anything that you wanted to add, I’m going to suggest that we keep the debate rolling, because I’m looking at the clock. Thank you very, very much.

I’m wondering whether any of that resonated with you and your reflections five years on.

Sir George Cox

Oh yes, I think a lot of what we’ve had so far resonates very strongly indeed. I think, just coming back to the review itself, remember, the review didn’t start out of an interest in design. It wasn’t carrying a banner for design, it didn’t come out of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport or Education and Skills; it came out of the Treasury. And the whole basis for the report came out of a meeting that we had with the Treasury, it was this: how do we as a nation earn our living in the world? Well, we’ve already lost most of low labour jobs to what we’d call the developing economies rather patronisingly. We’re now in competition for the high-skill jobs, the creative jobs, the high-tech industries, the creative industries, which we always regarded as ours, which is absurd. Now, as a nation I think, we have a very long history in terms of creativity, in scientific research etc. We don’t let it flow through into our products and services and whereabouts. We’ll design for the rest of the world, right? And that’s not going to be perpetuated; the rest of the world will start designing for itself. We have no right to this area, and if we don’t tackle this issue and use our creative skills better, we end up in a theme park. We’ll show people around the Palace and they can photograph the changing of the guard, and we’ll talk about the history. It’s as stark as that. And it was on that premise that I carried out my review about how we get more of our creativity into our businesses, whether it’s services or products.

And it only came up with five recommendations deliberately, along the lines that if you come up with 100 recommendations, people can cherry-pick a couple which don’t matter and say: we’ve implemented it. If you come up with five recommendations, you do them or you don’t. And one of them looked at this whole area and said, let’s change attitudes in the people who run businesses and design for businesses. And they’re engineers, and tackle multi-disciplinary education at the higher education level. And not only are people generalists, we think people aren’t aware of skills they don’t have, and how they fit with one’s own, and when you get a fusion of these skills, how it actually produces something. And by the way, as already pointed out by Lucy, there was no originality in my report at all, you know, for a review of creativity, maybe the writing was creative, but the ideas weren’t. Along the lines that I wasn’t going to come up with anything in the course of six to eight months that someone hadn’t thought of already. And one wanted to avoid the silly recommendation that I can’t think of anything, let’s have a Tsar for Creativity or something like that. So I picked on the following things and said these are things where people are already thinking this way, or doing something. If you could scale them up, we’d have some effect. So it’s not that the universities hadn’t thought of multi-disciplinary education, and it’s… well, that’s a great idea. It added a little bit of legitimacy to it, it gave encouragement to people, and it found a bit of funding for it. And I think it’s produced some very good effects.

Now, since the report came out, I think two things have changed looking back over five years. One is, the world’s moved on. What really surprised me, really surprised me and flattered me to an end, was the international interest shown in the report. That’s something I never even envisaged, and I’ve got an invitations to speak in the Far East and in Australia, Middle East, right round the world. And it still goes on that… I mean, Brussels next week, I’m talking to the Belgian government, and you know, spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos. So this is great stuff. And the French even came up with their own review last year which extensively refers to ours. And it was authorised by Christine Lagarde the Minister of Finance, and they’ve just created an Institute of Innovation, which Christine Lagarde heads up the governing body, which have asked me to serve on the governing body itself.

The world is moving on, because the issues that I pointed out to our government are faced by every industrialised nation. So the competition is getting tough. And the other thing that’s happened in the meantime, of course, is that we’ve had an economic collapse and a great financial crisis. And what we see at present is, we talk about cutting the deficit and you can understand that, and I don’t care how you feel about this government politically, you’ve got to say they brought vigour to government when they came in. And I can understand wanting to cut the deficit, whether they’re too fast or not, we can debate, I understand that. But as I point out in my report, you cut to survive, not to succeed. I’ve been through it in business. We don’t cut to grow. You may have to do it, and there’s too little debate at present about, okay, how do you actually generate growth? How do you generate growth? What are you selling to the world? And I don’t think that we’ve still got across with that. So what we have at present is, we talk about re-balancing the economy. Well, if that just means destroying the financial sector when we’re world leaders with nothing in its place, you haven’t created anything. You haven’t created anything, you’ve revamped and you just moved right down the… so I think there’s still this lack of understanding politically, about what we need to do. There’s still a lack of understanding of the importance of the kinds of things we’ve been discussing here this evening. And I think it’s of national significance. So in some ways I’m encouraged, and in some ways I think the situation is more urgent than ever.

David Kester

And do you think that we’ve got any closer to… with… you know, we’ve kind of, started by quoting this Technology Blueprint, but I did note that there is no mention of design anywhere in there, which struck me as… maybe as a failing, or not collectively. But it seems strange that we have a world-leading creative industry, and particularly in design, that our strategies to commercialise our science base are not absolutely founded on those principles. Isn’t that what was the report about?

Sir George Cox

Yes it is, but I think it’s easy to despair of that. I think just looking at working and driving it, and part of the issue we had, you know, back at the Design Council is, we managed to get to all the ministers in the old cabinet, but of course they’re all out in the cold now, and so the process has to start again. So I think you’ve just got to keep working at it and working at it all the time, you spread it. A lot of the people, you know, one of the encouraging things is the other voices, Dyson himself of course. I mean, if you go down and see Dyson, they haven’t got a bloody recession. Their problem is they can’t recruit the skills. You know, they dominated the US market with their vacuum cleaner, and they’ve got great products coming down the line. Their hand dryer is about the only one that works. Their fan is having a great effect. You know, if you’ve got great… if you use design properly, it’s right embedded in the business, there’s no recession, you know? The world hasn’t stopped growing by the way. You know, we’ve got this impression at the moment obviously, with the severe issues in Ireland that all of a sudden growth has stopped. Growth hasn’t stopped. I was talking to the head of one of the biggest financial institutions recently, and he said, you know, he said what about Greece? He says, China exports to Greece every eight months. If it disappeared, it doesn’t affect the world growth. You know, there is growth if you look at China and India and so on, there’s massive growth. The world is going to create more wealth in the next 25 years than we’ve created to date. The world hasn’t ended. The issue is where are we placed in it, and how do we get our share of it? And you’ve got to get this across to politicians. The other thing, you know, we’ve been battling on is with… this situation really should support, is the only way government can satisfy public demand, taxpayer demand, social demand for services when you’re cutting back, to use design in the public sector. Whether you talk about health, education, transportation, any of these things, it is the only answer to it. So I think politically you’ve probably got a bigger leverage now than ever, if you want to get that across.

 

Transcript: Part 2

David Kester

I’d quite like if I may to start with... because I can see him smiling at me, but also he’s got to have a lot to say about this matter, for Nick to come in first.

Nick Leon

Well, it’s actually just a question really to Chris and his comments about his six year old and eight year old. What are the skills that we really need to embed in our engineers, so that when they come to you, they’re able to make that contribution not just about technological inventiveness, but really adding value? And where is the right time, do you think, to do that because you hinted a little bit about that. As an educator, I’d like to know where we should be making our interventions to get the most leverage.

Chris Wise

If I could crack that I would crack the entire education system. I mean, the first thing is, I think, that they need skills and these are not the same for every person. To try and educate everybody to be a sort of universal man or woman in the field of designing things is a mistake and I think that... but in the mix you need people who can look at the planet or look at a part of the planet and understand what its needs are. So you need people who are analytical in that sense and actually have quite good empathy, which can come from everything from a family through to the noise around you as you’re growing up. Then you need people who can respond to that in a conceptual form and I think that that is... to do that you need confidence and you need to try conceiving something and then not worry if you get it wrong, so be supported through your mistakes and not allow the first time you get it wrong, people say, you idiot, you know, that was stupid, at which point you just go, blah, I’m never going to do it, but actually to say, well, that was a really good idea; can you just tweak it a bit and have another go. So, you know, a supportive encouragement to make mistakes.

And then... I think there’s a... the skill of judgement is misunderstood and many people are very good at analysing things. I think in my experience very few people have what it takes to be a good judge of whether a proposition, the concept of a piece of design, is a good piece of design or not. And I think that comes from... you need experience to know... in part anyway, to know whether or not your judgement is going to be valid or not. And the reason for mentioning it in that sort of, you know, conceived test judge, understand the need, because that’s the route for a standard... through any project, at any time, be it from designing a kitchen through to working out have to do a photograph or how to design a next generation iPod or to design a social proposition for how to change the way that people sit in a health service and whether or not they’re going to get mugged at A&E departments and that sort of... I mean, every single proposition needs you to go through that process, and I think that each part of it needs to be supported, you need to practice the 10,000 hours... the [unclear] type thing, you need a lot of practice, and I think that in the end you have to recognise that you need to do your bit to the best of your ability and then we’ll find somebody else who does the bits that you don’t do and link up with them.

So how to get that through into, you know, an education system which puts everybody in silos and, even worse, into a professional design... in my field of engineering, there are 36 different engineering institutions in this country each one of which jealously guards its position, I think is a slightly tougher questions to be answered right now. But I think that if you know what it is you’re trying to achieve, through a conceive, test, judge route, at least you have some chance of then mapping or re-mapping the institutional response, be it educational or professional, through to delivering to people who actually have those skills.

David Kester

Steven, can I... we were commenting earlier whether or not [overtalking]... whether there are other systems around the world that actually provide us with a better benchmark or a better model.

Steven Kyffin

I think what Chris says is actually true and I share some of those extremes [?]. I was really lucky in my own life that I went to a school which, in the 60s and 70s, saw value in enabling people to learn to communicate ideas in a numerical model, a word model, and an image model, and they taught us to do it simultaneously on the same subjects. And when I started teaching in Eindhoven, they asked the students to be able to model complexity in a diagrammatic way, a mathematical way and a word/linguistic way. And when our children came back to live in... came to live in this country just about ten months ago, I suddenly realised they’d gone into this non Renaissance or siloed subjects world that they had not been in before because they went to a baccalaureate school where even at the age of seven, when they took apart the history of the circus... sorry, they took apart the notion of circus performing in the round as a human phenomena, and they’d learnt the history, the geography, the technology, the aesthetic, the performance, the cultural understanding, the theatrical of circus, the mathematics, the juggling, the balance, the physics, suddenly all these subjects were talking about one thing, and I knew that there was a problem when they came back to England because one of my... the son of one of my colleagues said to his mother, Mother, why do we have subjects anyway? And she didn’t know, and nor do I.

But that’s what’s causing all this. Some human condition has invented subjects and I don’t know why. It’s been going on for thousands of years. Why do we do that? Does anybody know?

Paul Thompson

Well, I think the problem is the solution of subjects. I think probably what you’re talking about there is that it’s a composite future and different subjects being brought together at one time. I think it’s when you start to exclude things and that’s what we’re talking about [unclear] and going back into [unclear] that where it probably arises in the baccalaureate, the fact that we have this process in the UK of... I mean, I think it’s slightly better now, but of shedding, you know, the difficult subject as soon as we possibly can rather than pursuing it and continuing to...

Steven Kyffin

Is that where D in STEM comes from?

Paul Thompson

Difficult STEM!

David Kester

Difficult STEM, yes! George, I’ve heard you talk about this from your own experience as a... when you... from aeronautical engineering days and you’ve also got young children going through the school education system at the moment. Have you got a reflection on that?

George Cox

Yes, I think... yesterday someone asked, asked me before, a good question about why do I always just talk about higher education when the problem starts much earlier? And it does, it starts [unclear] because a lot of primary school, which is reliably good now. I think it’s when you get on, all of a sudden you become focussed, as my daughters now are with GGSEs and you don’t waste time on anything which isn’t going to get you marks in the exams and so on, and so it becomes very focussed like that. From my own career, I mean, I remember this... it isn’t just some internal subject, but it’s really thinking, well, if you study science or engineering, you’re going to be illiterate...

Chris Wise

Illiterate?

George Cox

Illiterate, yes. And if you’re...

Steven Kyffin

So if you study humanities [unclear]?

George Cox

You take pride in it. I mean, it’s just outrageous. People want to be... almost brag about their ignorance of such topics. I remember going up to university... I remember I read aeronautical engineering and going there on my first day fresher’s... I mean, they had all of their societies around, the manic society, the political society, and they’d come to the door and say, hallo, what are reading? Engineering. The boat club’s over there. And I think... just coming back to your point, that Nick said, which is really unsettling [?], I was talking to the Royal Academy of Engineering and a lot of people... friends in engineering, who were considered [unclear] studying, because it is a hard... you know, a hard subject. The real problem with engineering, I think, is we are trying to force people to make a choice in their teens and I said to the [unclear], don’t try and commit people to becoming engineers because most people when they’re 16, 17, don’t want to make a career choice, you know, and the only people who then will do engineering will be [unclear] like me. What we should do is get people to study engineering, because it’s problem solving, it’s dealing with the natural world, it’s got a lot of features like that, and it doesn’t matter if they read engineering and don’t become engineers. The persons who read law don’t become lawyers. That doesn’t worry the legal profession. So I think we have a real image problem in that, and with the sciences. People think it’s narrowing and constraining, rather than career expanding. So I think that’s a big element of education.

David Kester

A gentleman here...

Simon Bolton

Professor Simon Bolton from Cranfield University. I’d like to sort of try and reframe this debate. I think there’s a lot of positive things going on and to be honest, Chris, I don’t actually agree with what you’re saying. I think that... I’ve heard a lot of these comments before. I think that there are some fantastic design courses out there. I think... I want to just pick up on a couple of things that I think that... from our perspective at Cranfield and in UAL and LCC is that this debate has masses of opportunities. I think that he picks up on one of the points that Chris was talking about, the fact that we’ve been fortunate to have leadership from John O’Riley who’s engaged with design. I have no problems with engineers. I think the fact that the situation is a little bit... seen as a negative thing. There’s some massive opportunities that I think we have to celebrate. Within this room we’ve got people from design, engineering, who are doing some very, very good stuff, and I think the fact that one part of this whole initiative was to get across [unclear] disciplinary activities, we have shown that growth has been achieved. It’s a difficult task because I think, as Stephen said, you’ve got culture, you’ve got mindset. What we have to do is maintain these activities. Part of our response is to give leadership to make these things happen. But I’d like to sort of just re-frame the debate. We’re asking very, very good things. We have responded to many of these issues. There’s some very, very good examples of practice and there’s people who supported my career, people like Rachael who... I mean, we’ve all been involved with this, so I think we just need to make sure of the fact that, yes, there are still challenges, but we’ve come a very long way and the scientists are really... we’re pushing an open door. There’s massive, massive opportunities and I would concur with the fact that, you know, in a scenario where we’re facing... you know, the challenges that we face are very different and I think the design will be different in the next five to ten years. More and more people and organisations that we’re working with collaboratively are understanding the design agenda because they see the fact that the traditional solutions are no longer possible. So I just wanted to reframe some of the...

David Kester

So, in a way, you’re saying it’s happening, we’re on the move, it’s moving into... can I pick off... before I come to you, George, can I just pick off a couple of people over here, particularly if you’re going to come in on that, to respond to that. Is that right? Yes? A couple of responses there? Thank you. Can I just ask you... sorry, just hold the mike, just...

Tony Hodgson

Tony Hodgson from Loughborough University. We’re hearing a lot about the fact that we are responding to the challenge and the change, and yet we’re also hearing a lot that we’re remaining in silos, a series of lumps in Philips, a series of lumps around London, a series of lumps in higher education wherever we are, and yet there is an alternative argument that we’ve been talking about and that is one of pulling down the walls and the boundaries and the silos and actually working in a more seamless and integrated manner to develop something which I think comes out of George’s report, it comes out of the new thinking about what UK PLC means, and that is that designers, in addition to being designers, are the people who join the dots, who link up the various disciplines, who have the leaps of faith, who are at that high end of innovation and development that we’re looking for, and my belief is that works better if you work to develop that capability... we talked about pedagogy earlier, you develop that capability outside of the silos and incorporate a lot of the skills and understanding from the silos within that remit. So what we have Loughborough is a situation where you have product designers who know probably the useful stuff about engineering, the useful stuff about design, the useful stuff about business and the useful stuff about creative industries. They’re never going to be people who do maths... [unclear] maths, extra maths, thermo dynamics and fluid dynamics, but they can have that meaningful conversation with those people when we need the rocket scientists and they can do it far better because they’ve got easy [?] brain to [unclear]. So I think in terms of alternative models and looking towards the future and meeting the challenges, it’s happening, but it’s off the radar because people are looking to try and join the lumps, see where the lumps exist and join them up. Look for the answers, look for where it’s already into that [?].

David Kester

Can I ask just to pass the mike back one?

Mark

Okay, so it’s Mark [unclear] from Northumbria University. I agree. I think we are making great strides, but I have to question particularly Sir George who was explaining that one of the objectives really was to bring about a change in attitude of our future business leaders and, of course, changing attitudes takes a very long time, so whilst we’re seeing successes and certainly companies and businesses that we’ve working with at Northumbria, and I’m sure colleagues elsewhere will say the same thing, are saying, yes, we really get this, it’s fantastic, you’re doing great stuff for us, we didn’t know what the question was when we asked it but we now understand entirely what now you’ve showed us the results. The issue is really about how long this takes to percolate through and how real an impact... we have graduates doing good things [unclear] programmes, but it’s going to be a while before they’re real movers and shakers in their organisations. So the question really is, what do we do now to sustain what we’ve started, bearing in mind that on the demand side, organisations seem [unclear] and on the supply side, I think it’s still really, really had to explain to students why they might not [unclear] them to the postgraduate study in mixing it up with other disciplines.

David Kester

Brilliant. I’m going to hold fire there, keep thinking about that, George. If you can just pass the mike two over, there’s a lady [unclear] that last question.

Ann Priest

Thank you. Ann Priest, Nottingham Trent University. I’m going to just pose a bit of strange question to you because listening to Lucy and Stephen, you both alluded to problems with acceptance in business schools, science areas, people not quite being able to embrace what you’re offering. I agree with the speakers. We’ve come a long way and we’re offering some fantastic projects, but do you think that perhaps part of the problem here has been use, because there has been a culture of keeping people away from something that we can do, something that we have the judgement for, that we can design, and you very often hear, well, I can’t do that, I’m not creative, I leave that to someone else. I went to do accountancy. I love design, but I can’t do it. I know that I’m not good at it, and I think we have been gate keeping... well, certainly we had been gate keeping for a long time, and I think it is going to take us a long time to open the doors and appraise the opportunity, to have that engagement, that discussion, that sort of [unclear] discussion where we actually say to engineers, we understand what you do as design, you know, and we’re here as equals and we [unclear]. So I do think that perhaps if things are slow, we must take a little bit of the [unclear] and perhaps open the doors wider for people to come in.

David Kester

I’d like to pass this on, in fact, to the panel. I’m going to suggest that the question about what next, we leave right to end because I think that might be one that we should dwell on, we should take on board some of the thoughts of the whole of the debate and maybe pass that back to the panel, but I would like you to respond a little bit to these points about, are we... you know, is there too much whingeing here when actually we’re winning, this is working, this is happening? What about our... how long it takes to percolate through and actually change our future business leaders and is that actually what it’s all about? And what about our problem with acceptance within our business schools themselves and, again, some of those problems? Is that really a very significant issue, the actual siloed education system itself? George, can I start with you?

George Cox

Yes. I think... coming back to the point just out there, you’ll gather that I feel very impassioned about wanting to see faster progress in the whole area. That’s not to say if I don’t see a huge amount going on that is very positive and very exciting. I must have spoken to a dozen universities since my report, and perhaps more, and I’ve always come away, you know, feeling inspired and, indeed, if you look at what’s happening here at Design London, it’s inspirational, a new kind of research. I talk to other people who are campaigning out there, so a lot is going on, a lot is going on, but don’t think that’s universal. We were discussing this evening, upstairs, you know, in the Green Room before we came down here, and someone made the comment, the problem this evening is the audience – not that you’re not an excellent audience, but the people that ought to hear it aren’t here. You know, this room is full of people who believe in what’s being said. You know, no one’s got up and said, this is a load of crap, we could play [?] silos with it. You know, that is... it’s really... you know, don’t think this is typical and so one’s got to keep pushing at this, using the exemplars. There are a few people in Parliament who actually, you know, David, that do actually see the importance of this and are struggling to get it raised with their colleagues. So I think it’s... we are making progress. The question is, how fast are we making it?

Now, when you come back to business leaders understanding this, the business that can’t innovate continuously and successfully, that doesn’t mean just embracing your ideas and working out which ideas we embrace and implementing them well. The businesses that can’t do that will die, so a natural selection means, you know, down the line and in a generation’s time, there aren’t any businesses around. The question is, do you just wait for that and lose an awful lot of companies and industries in the mean time, or do you try and change them? So I think we’ve got to keep pushing on this, people here, and I can talk of an awful lot of business leaders who feel like this and who are passionate about it. You’ve got high profile people like Dave Dyson, you’ve got Geoff Kirk at the Institute of Engineering Designers, pushing this all the time. So I think just keep pushing it, driving it, using the exemplars, showing other companies who embrace this do succeed, getting it across the important public sector. So I think the fact one’s going on about it doesn’t mean we’re not making progress. I think it’s very, very exciting. It’s not fast enough and if you said to me, how do we compare it with my report, well, I keep drawing an analysis with, say, sport with the Olympics coming up. You know, you can look at an athlete now and you can say, how are you doing? He will say, well, I’m running a lot faster than I was two years ago, much faster, look at my times; my training programme’s improved, much faster. That’s true, but are you running fast enough to win a gold medal? So things are certainly improving, but so is every other nation.

Unidentified Male Questioner

Can I just pick up on a point there? [Unclear] Department of Industrial Design Automotive at Coventry University, and picking on that, you say Z file. Now, I’ve been involved for the last few of Lesley's very excellent initiative on this, but we haven’t got any [unclear]. If you want to say, the digital revolution works, you say Google, and if you want to go back to the 80s when I was designing products, working for Philips, you know, and you wanted to say, [unclear] interface works, you said Apple. But this principle that we’re talking about, we all agree, as you say, but we haven’t got anybody. We can say, look, it works and as soon as you say the name, they say, ah ha. Who do you think is going to be the example... and thank you very much, but I’ve finished!

George Cox

I think at present companies that one would admire... I think Dyson is a great exemplar.

Unidentified Male Questioner

But Dyson keeps referring to himself as an engineer.

George Cox

That’s all right.

But what Dyson has shown is that if you do embrace good imaginative and creative design and link it to brand, you succeed. If you want to talk branding, talk Branson, talk in America. There are examples like that and in many smaller companies around this world. They’re having a tough time at present. I think Rolls Royce is a terrific company, absolutely terrific, due to the way they develop their people, how creatively they design and their engineers, world leaders. So there are a few, but you’re quite right, it’s not embedded in the culture. If you talk to the public, they wouldn’t spot such things. Many smaller companies too. Part of our problem, and this is a whole another topic, is too many of our... too much of our emphasis on innovation and creativity and entrepreneurship in recent years is on start ups. Well, start ups are great, but they don’t grow the economy. It’s the company which grows that does that, and we’re not good at growing companies.

David Kester

I’d like to come... I’m going to hold that thought because I’m sure that others... but if I may come to Lucy, because Lucy... in a way, you know, people say, well, it’s all working and it’s all going fantastically, but actually you gave us a different picture...

Unidentified Male Questioner

No, we didn’t say it was all working. What we were saying...

David Kester

No, it’s working. You’re there, part of one of our leading business schools in the world. Now is that just there’s been a shift in provision [?] because obviously what you’ve been doing... I heard you’ve been on a research [unclear], which I’m very interested in exploring, because is part of the issue this lack of a research base? Is that actually something that needs to be addressed more fully?

Lucy Kimbell

I think the research question that I mentioned earlier is really important, partly to prove, you know, to be exemplars, George’s point, and we’ve got this and this... but if we look at it just from the design point of view, we need those stories to prove how great multi disciplinary design can be and, in effect, we’re looking already in a way we want to find the happy answer, whereas in a way what I’ve learnt from being around management organisation researchers is that they already have their research questions. Quite often I engage with all sorts of people from very, very different fields with very, very different sets of concerns, and I hear them talking about something or, you know, I read a paper, and I think, well, that’s design. They’re just not using any of our literature, any of our terminology. They don’t know, they don’t know that I could help them with that. My students could do something... so it’s about partly the frames of reference and this is not just about skills, it’s about what are the histories of those disciplines, what those disciplines think they’re concerned with and finding places to work with them, and not necessarily call it design, and we shouldn’t be going in and claiming [unclear] and saying, that is design, you idiots! They are already busy doing all sorts of things, so in a sense we can find exemplars by being slightly more modest perhaps and I know the Design Council needs the exemplars to make a case strategically and nationally, but as a research question we need to go in in a more open-ended way and understand what actual disciplines are doing, how they’re doing it, what has meaning in their world, and then how that might relate to our own teaching, because, of course, we need to advance what we mean by design as well and move our own disciplines forward.

Steven Kyffin

Now I find that Lucy is actually right and we... I struggled in Philips’ designs and what it was to frame a research question and design a research question. And [unclear] the design in a research question is, how do people interact with digital media or what is the digital media that we should be interacting with to improve the quality of life or what are the qualities of life that we should find things to attend to? Which one of those is the research question? Tell me?

Unidentified Male Speaker

All of them or none of them.

Steven Kyffin

So what we tried to find at a mega level in the company, the research question is, where are the growth areas where Philips can play? And the growth areas where Philips could play were areas where they already had some competence, some knowledge, some understanding, some capability which they could bring together and then build a new business to go into the future. So we were looking at what technologies we already had, what human understanding we already had, what design capability you had, what logistics and mechanisms we had in the business, and how they would come together to respond to the issues of sleep or the issues to convenience food or the issues of preparation of food for diet and diagnostics or the understanding of stress or what it was to be self managing and healthier at home. Those were the sorts of questions we were asking and when we asked those questions, there were technology questions, design questions, people questions, business question, which then came together and that’s what brought... many people brought together. And I think Ann Priest’s question is absolutely right. It was all our fault actually, because I’m a very internal [unclear] control, and I always assume it’s my fault, because my daddy taught me, it’s all your fault!

Ann Priest

I don’t have that problem!

David Kester

Actually, that’s another event!

Steven Kyffin

But for some reason I always think it’s our fault as designers because we do do what I think you were suggesting which is we think we can solve all the problems, but actually you can’t... I can’t, and so by... actually what I was alluding to, again, what I tried to communicate was that by giving the creative contribution, giving it from myself, instead of trying to control it, to everybody else, it became clear that people could contribute creatively and technologically, creatively from a human sciences point of view, creatively from a business modelling point of view, creatively from... and how you bring different design ideas to make new solutions in sleep [?]. And then you all start to contribute, because they were free and without being judged you see.

Lucy Kimble

Can I just add something to that just so... before I taught at... before I joined Said, I was teaching at the Royal College for... at [unclear], two years in interaction design, and I was really happy there, I loved it, the students were brilliant, the thinking was very deep and big questions about the nature of technology and our interactions and well being and blah, blah, blah, and I was very happy there, and I was a bit intrigued about going to a business school. Then I found the MBA students are very global... we have a very global... they’re not British, they’re much more global than that, but they... what was interesting is that they might lack in certainly design skills... oh, they are already designers, they are already designers of ventures, of high level services, of new concepts, but they’re not designers in the sense of a design school designer. But they go out and they have ambition to do things at scale and I found that most design students or design consultancies didn’t have that ambition for whatever set of reasons, and so there was something about the different between designers and people who want to scale and make things big and repeatable, which is a problem more... not so much in the sort of work you do, but repeatable things that work every time in the NHS or in Virgin Atlantic or whatever it is. And so there was something about what is the purpose, what the literature is, it’s about finding the people who are going to not just have ideas and develop and test and so, but actually… and then make them repeatable and growable in different organisational context. And I didn’t find the designers generally had that ambition or interest, but the people who were paying a lot of money to do MBAs and certainly senior execs in organisations absolutely are. So, there’s something about the way of operating in organisations, the way you want to operate.

David Kester

All your students aren’t ambitious enough.

Unidentified male speaker on panel

I was actually going to follow you to the [overtalking], plus the fact that I need to be careful in front of our imperial business friends. And I’m pleased [inaudible] our partner for engineering is leaving. We tend to find… and I think it’s true to say in Design London that the kind of creative, the really… the breakaway ideas are coming from the design students. And it’s the MBAs that make the thing stack… I mean, as you would expect the MBAs are things that are meant to be stack up in a business plan, scale it up, make the thing pliable and the engineers are the guys that actually make it work. Take it from somebody, it’s really quite a crude, very often quite a crude student project into something that, you know, can get through proof of concept and then be trialled and get through electrical safety testing. So, it really is that triangle project. It’s the fact that you’re bringing… as the colleagues from Northumberland, Northumbria said, I mean, it’s bring together experts. I think nobody wants to see multi-disciplinary mush, I think that that is a disaster. You’ve got to bring together deep specialists, people who are real experts in their field, and put them together. And that is… it’s that triangle that is formidable.

Chris Wise

Can I just… just briefly just say, I think that the… you need a specialist, I agree with you. But I don’t think you need them all the way through a project. I mean, I think what you need… when you’re trying to frame the project in the position in the first place you need people who can say… I totally agree with the chap from Northampton, I think it was, who said, you know… or Nottingham was it, sorry. Wherever it was, somewhere beginning with N, I totally agree with you.

Unidentified Male Speaker

It was North of London.

Chris Wise

North of London somewhere, not here anyway. No, but I totally agree with you that you, you know, you’re looking for… you’re looking for a specialist generalist or a systems integrator, somebody who can understand how to join stuff together. It may not even be an individual; it might be a group of people in the conceptual stages of projects, in the schematic stages. There comes a point where you want the bloody thing to work, at which point you need the world specialist in widgets to make sure the widget is going to work. And there’s a role for both players to try and educate people in the design and technology and engineering sectors on the assumption they can do all of that, is just a foolish trivial misunderstanding of what we actually do on projects.

Unidentified male speaker on panel

An equally foolish and trivial misunderstanding is what’s going to happen potentially in a few weeks time if the Government passes its Education Act. Because we are suddenly going to find we have a tremendous body of STEM educated folk had absolutely no sort of creative designing arts and humanitarians.

Unidentified male speaker

I entirely agree with you.

Unidentified male speaker on panel

And we’re suddenly going to end up with a Soviet Star. I mean, we’re doing what the Soviets did in the 1960s with nuclear. We’re making more nuclear scientists than they’ve had the potential to [unclear] employ in the nuclear industry.

David Kester

Can I go back to the question that we were asked about these exemplars, because I know on our website we have one of the projects which came through Mick’s outfit, through sort of… I think it was through Design London, but it was the Sue [?] Group Project which…

Unidentified male speaker

It wasn’t one of ours, no.

David Kester

It’s not one of yours. But it’s a great [overtalking]. But it’s a really interesting project of a designer working with engineers coming up with a new sort of glue type product that can be moulded and mend things. And it’s now… I believe it’s just gone into the Time Magazine top 100 products of the year. And it’s exactly, I mean, those are great examples of designers, engineers, others working very smartly [?]. This is a start up business for the next RCA student. But where are those… I mean, have we got exemplars coming through from our multi-disciplinary centres.

Unidentified male speaker

I mean, there are, we are all working on this, we have our exemplars. But the thing is…

David Kester

Are they good?

Unidentified male speaker

When you look at… they are in design. I’m not denying I can’t tell you [inaudible], but the… when step change happens there are things that happen which suddenly everybody said, wow that this thing works. And we haven’t yet, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get that. We have always had one but the whole world… the public is looking at, and we can say, look that’s it, like for instance Google and the digital web.

Unidentified male speaker

But frankly that’s because the whole world doesn’t care actually. The world only cares about the outcome, not how it got there.

Unidentified male speaker

If you make a step change everybody is looking at them. So, that’s only my point, I’m not trying to knock it down.

David Kester

I’d like to… I’m going to come back to you. But I just want to get some fresh voices in. Were there some hands that were going up? Naomi over there, Andrew over there. Naomi.

Naomi

Yes, I don’t know where I will start actually. I think first of all to carry on the theme of the successes you’ve had so far in education. I think there are pockets of excellence and work that makes them [inaudible], with some very excellent graduates doing very fine work. What we’re really talking about is critical mass, we’re talking about are there enough graduates out there working in companies creating and contributing to innovative ideas in those companies that actually improve the economy. And I think in a way this is what the Sir [?] George’s report was all about. How did we get that number of people? We’ve got them out there and they are performing extremely well. But it seems to me coming back to Sir George’s comments and the report, I’ve been working in this field for quite some time, and it seems to me your report was excellent, I approach them all the time. And you’re absolutely right, there were reports before that, quite a few from the Government, from DDI [?] that was, from CAN [?] and from the Design Council when it was the Council for Industrial Design. We are very very good at doing these surveys and carrying out these reports. It’s part of our culture and it’s absolutely right that international business and international education would look at us for examples in all that we do. But what we need to do, it seems to me, is take the content of those reports and start experimenting. Because it’s fine… it’s fine to write and it’s fine to collect information, and we do that excellently and everyone admires what we do. But now isn’t time for us to say, okay we’ve now got to work on the signs.

David Kester

But Naomi, isn’t almost… I mean, sorry to… it feels to me as if actually that’s almost the opposite of what I think one of the arguments here has been… but actually that’s what you’ve been doing. The last five years you have been experimenting, and then maybe there’s an argument from Lucy we haven’t been writing it up well enough. That we haven’t actually been… I mean, if we are so good at doing the research, the writing it up, why haven’t we been doing that and getting those off, you know, from the last five years of experience. Maybe we haven’t got the killer argument that’s actually going to break through.

Unidentified male speaker

But also many of the people who have come through those…

David Kester

Question... sorry, just trying to get [overtalking].

Naomi

No, I think you’re absolutely right. Perhaps we don’t record enough. Actually a lot of these enterprises are in individual places all over the country, and we don’t know about them. You know, in different schools different activities are taking place and they’re starting and stopping as Lucy and I both know. And we need to know about things, we need to know much more. So, you’re absolutely right, we’re not recording enough for the outcome.

David Kester

Rachel.

Rachel

I think you’re right Naomi, and you said why don’t we write about it more. We do write about it. From somebody who’s spent – it seems like years reading research output from the designer [?] sector, we do write about it, but we write about it in general anthropology [?], general electrical engineering, general biology. We do research with lots of other places, and if you were to look where maybe the last research set of exercises, where we published the papers, there are only a few handful of design journals. And also when we’re working with other disciplines, we tend to want to write with them in their journals as well. So, we do actually work across the sector, but we use scope [?] works often to work with them and to liaise with them. And so it depends, do we spend our time just proving that we’re working effectively and that we’ve been successful, or do we use this sort of [unclear] sort of activity that we’ve been doing for quite a long time over the last 20 years. Most design schools have tried it [inaudible]. But if we were to take it forward, there are some structural things in the Universities that are still barriers. Five years ago I went to the lecture for the EPSRC on breaking down silos at Universities. Universities are structurally very difficult to move around in terms of working across boundaries. One thing I want to [inaudible], we’ve talked a lot about engineering, now I taught a course in design business and engineering in 1985. So, I know what we’re talking about some of the time. I think we should bring up science more. There’s so much emerging on science from computing, from the whole environment in terms of nano, etc, that we really need to get designers using their imagination with a scientist to do research there. And I think we should be hearing more about that.

David Kester

Well, on that note please pass the mike back, we’re going to Northumbria.

Raymond Oliver

Hi, my name is Raymond Oliver; I’m a Professor at a school for design in Northumbria. My [unclear] is I’m a chemical physicist and I was Head of [unclear] and Material Science in ICI for ten years. And George talked about… he used two words, he used a word like stark early on and then he used the word exemplars. I have to disagree with exemplar, I think STEM without design has created little or no value in the UK in the last 30 years. And why? Because there is no basic manufacturing industry left in the UK. So, STEM subjects, or STEM as an academic set of words has very little meaning for me in terms of its value. Therefore as a chemical physicist, I started to work with leading edge designers at central [?] St. Martin’s and at Royal College in sort of sensory systems, [unclear] environments and systems biology. And I’d done that to try and escape from this idea of projects… the word project is anathema to me, we are dealing in platforms here for the long term. And if we’re not putting design in the same… in an integrated fashion on a long term basis, we will keep having these meetings every single year and nothing will be going forward. What we are trying to create with CSN, RCA and now Northumbria, is how do you bring… and this is the thing, for me this is what’s been missing, how do you bring leading edge designers and high quality scientists and technologists from the very first day of open section of ideas to actually work together, and to work together over a three, four, five, six year timescale to actually start to understand each others language. In my case this idea of looking at design STEM with puppets is key to me. And we’ve started to look at a really exciting area, and that is active materials which are the liquid equivalent of silicone. So, silicone has been with us and has generated most things that happened in technology for the last 30 years. We are now moving into the realm of liquid or water like silicone which allows designers to play a key role on day one of how we make new materials, new products, new systems, new experiences. So, I agree completely with what Paul said about we are right on the brink of maybe losing out here. If design goes, everything goes.

David Kester

Now, what I’m going to do is, I’m going… because we… I’m watching the clock. So, I’m going to pick up a few questions round here. We’re going to pass back to our panel. I think we hopefully have got enough time to go round twice. So, I’ve got Andrea up here, a question over here, and I’ve got two over here. So… oh gosh, we’re all going. So, Andrea.

Andrea Siodmok

I’ve just come up from Falmouth and I want to kind of pick up a couple of points that have been raised about the silo nature of higher education. Because Falmouth is building, you know, let’s add up about £100 million worth of new estates, and it’s got a new sustainability engineering centre, it’s got a new design school, new innovation centres and so forth. And they’re combined with [sound slip]. But the only bit that I can see of that plan that is common and shared is the cafeteria. And so, you know, you go in there, you know, it’s all on one campus, they had a brand new build opportunity and we haven’t done it. So, I’m wondering how do we kind of knock people’s heads together a little bit on this. I mean, particular interest in the role for Government and the Research Council. So, you know, I recall the very successful – I believe very successful design for 21st century programme bringing the EPSRC and AHRC together. From the panel’s point of view, are Research Councils interested in this; is it something that’s going to qualify for the REF? Is it going to… can we drive it from that end, in the funding end rather than necessarily from the discipline end? And if not, I think we have to go with… where Steven was saying, which is, you know, what are the big challenges. And then actually it starts to become a full alphabet of disciplines to solve the big challenges that we face nationally. So, there’s two little questions in there I think.

David Kester

That’s brilliant Andrea. Over here, you’ve got two over here and then we’ll pass back.

Unidentified male speaker

Just dwelling on that, I was sort of comparing the fact that the scientific challenges are the ones that are really going to drive where we’re going to go, because really what we’ve been talking about design enabling. What does the panel see as the most significant technical or scientific challenges that we’re going to face over the next five years? And how do they see it engaging with Government to provide funding through the Research Councils to address these challenges?

David Kester

That’s very good. Over here, the two ladies… the lady in front.

Corrine Wilmot

I’m Corrine Wilmot. I’m a graphic designer teaching in the Business School at Kingston University. And prior to moving to the UK I taught design in the US for six years at a University there. And I didn’t hear the phrase silo until I moved to the UK.

David Kester

You didn’t fall into one. What do they call them in the US?

Corrine Wilmot

We actually don’t really have them. And following on from some of the other points that have been made, it really surprised me when I moved into the British educational system how difficult it was for students to be able to take classes in other faculties. Whereas in the US system the political…

Unidentified male speaker

The student centre of learning, isn’t it, that’s what’s different, the student centre of learning, not the professor centre of learning?

Corrine Wilmot

Exactly, and the political structure in the US is that 50% of your Bachelors degree is outside of the discipline. So, you’re constantly engaging with people outside of your discipline which is a very natural process. And you’re allowed to take credits outside of your faculty because you’re actually required to. Whereas in the UK, as early as 16 you have to decide what your University education is going to be, and it’s very much deeply structured in this way to pull that apart. So, my question would be to the panel, the Government’s role in setting up a [overtalking] that’s much more flexible, perhaps with REF in the way it’s structured, for instance with research, if I want to publish something about design in my faculty I’m only allowed to do it for business journals or I’m not qualified for the REF. So, you see how these causes kind of work, hear how these causes could be adopted to be more flexible.

Alison Penfold

Alison Penfold, Deputy Director of C4D. Exactly a week ago I was in a Rodger Martin talk from the Toronto school. And it was interesting because many of the examples that were here at that talk have come up today, such as Richard Branson, P&G. One of his points – and I think it’s something that concerns me, is that most companies he was stressing really put too much emphasis on share value. And as long as you do this, in fact what we’re doing is denying really a lot of opportunity for creativity within organisations. And as designers how do we start addressing again organisations who really are working on very short timeframes in terms of delivering a share value to shareholders?

David Kester

And thereby hangs the financial crisis.

Alison Penfold

Yes.

David Kester

I’m going to pass this back; there are a lot of topics here. We are now in the twilight zone, we are heading… we’ve got so… you know, I’d like to suggest a minute each, no more.

Lesley Morris

Can I just request that in the responses that people think about what we should be doing next?

David Kester

That was my question Leslie, yes, which is what next, absolutely? So, where are we going, where do we take this. And you might like to think about some of these issues of research, has been raised. We’ve also had, you know, is there a step problem here. So, political… is this actually about political change, institutional change? We’ve got the D [?] in STEM piece and what do we do? So, there are quite a number of questions here, what’s your view, what next, where are the priorities? Maybe we’ll start over here.

Sorry. George is ready.

George Cox

Okay, I think a lot of these questions relate to the same thing. There are exemplars, but exemplars to whom, who’s taking any notice of them, who are they influencing? And you talk about, you know, publishing in magazines. What we’re short of is stuff in the Daily Mail and on the Today programme, you know. And if you want to influence Government, Government is [unclear]. And I think… I don’t think I brought much to the Design Council except my contacts in Whitehall, Westminster, which is what the report came out of, why we’ve got so many things going. That’s where you’re going to get things changed. And so I think much greater emphasis on getting the message out to the general public, to the Government, and say Government response to public things. And it comes back to the point you said about, what’s going to be the big advance. I don’t [?] think it’s one big advance, I’ll tell you the area which is really full of opportunity and matters to the public and myself [?], health. There’s so much can be done in health. You see that we’re designing our bugs, you see lots of… we spoke about engineering and science, medical schools working with design. I mean, there are so many things which would appeal to the public; it would be a great exemplar. So, I think they’re the areas where we really should push forward.

Chris Wise

I’d say, and I can only speak in the engineering world, I apologise to those who think engineering is not design because it is. I think that there needs to be a much greater connection between the people who practice it and the people who teach it. So, the industrial players who are happy filling the pockets of their shareholders need to recognise their responsibility to help educate the next generation. And I’ll give you an example of a conversation I had last week with I think probably the next chairman of a very large engineering global consultancy running in the tens of thousands, who said that they have spent the last ten or 15 years positioning themselves to produce a commodity which maximises the amount of income, which has deskilled their people. And that they’ve realised rather belatedly that actually the single thing that they had, which was setting them apart from global competition, was their ability to do design. And they are going to re-centre themselves back towards putting design at the heart of what they’re doing. That may mean that not all of those tens of thousands of people actually carry on working there. They may not be able to do it. But I think it’s… I thought that was a particularly optimistic… I mean, for me I love design, and I think it was great to hear that from somebody who comes from a sort of industry conglomerate. So, more connection between industry and academia to get the knowledge and put design back into it rather than stop being a commodity.

Lucy Kimbell

And I think just drawing the agenda towards looking at 2015 that somebody said the next five years or so, I think the major challenges are a change in peak [?] oil as well as all these other issues around chronic health and so on. I think in the UK we have two vehicles that we can work with and act on to help us engage with that challenge. One is obviously, since I’m kind of in a University context, mostly the Research Councils and getting them to change the way… change the way that funding is allocated and evaluated and assessed. I know Rachael has been involved in trying to… UK Cell C [?] don’t think differently. The PSLC has been an exemplar through the sandpits [?], but nonetheless the way that research is reviewed in a sense is still pretty much within a disciplinary base. And for us this sort of thing to take forward we need to change some of that and the way that academic careers work as well. And then perhaps slightly more surprising, a vehicle that we could use is the big society. All sorts of questions around it, but it is potentially a large and long term commitment over the next… the lifetime of this Government and possibly the next one around engaging with stakeholders, users, citizens as co-designers and so on. And ultimately it’s the citizens who are paying for it all. So, I think that is a context in which in different ways we can find ways to work together.

Steven Kyffin

There are so many answers to all these questions. I think engineers and designers together are… have the same ambition, that’s to change the world, not to merely understand it. So, there I think we are the same in trying to create a new world. I think we should lobby in the way that Rachael has done inside all the Research Councils in this country. I haven’t even started on this; this is a whole new world for me. But we did it in Europe because Phillips was part of… we’re one of the biggest beneficiaries actually in the EU anyway, tens of millions a year income. But I think the other thing that we can do and we should do, is to lead from our own positions. And one of the things that we’re committing to doing now is to building Research Centres which are integrating teaching researching inside our design school, which brings together the sciences of active materials to understand what the future of living is. The big research question we should be asking, I’m not quite sure where Rachael was going, but she looked at me that moment, is how then should we live? Is to ask the questions about what it is to be human, what it is to be living, what it is to be creative, have an identity, have a sense of direction, be part of the community. If those are the big research questions, what is the future of living? Bring together a scientist of active living, put them together. We’re going to have a go at this in Northumbria; it’s going to upset the University. We’re going to put scientists inside the Design School, we’ve got anthropologists, we’ve got psychologists, we’ve got business model people. We’re going to try a different type of thing, if it doesn’t work, fine. And if it does work we’re really going to go for it and we’re going to try and lead by example and try and do this and challenge people even though no one quite understands yet. And it’s my communication problem, I know that, to try and do that. So, we want to… I think we should just simply lead as we mean to go on and produce more and more examples of how together we can field the new circus.

Unidentified male speaker on panel

I agree, I think the science and nano are linked to design; it’s going to be absolute key. I think that particularly at undergraduate level that your model of kind of the American liberal arts tradition is very very commendable, but I do think that the big leap forward that we’re going to take, and that we have taken over the last few hundred years have been in very very deep specialist boreholes. And I think that we should never lose sight of the fact that those deep… we can call them pejorative terms, but I think that deep deep specialism is what we need in this country, and it’s getting the personalities to link from silo to silo rather than… I’m very apprehensive about trying to repeat that kind of multi-disciplinary model at a higher level of education post doc or whatever. I think that finding how one can scale up so that we do have the exemplars, but we’re not very good at scaling up some of these very very small, you know, SMEs. And it’s how one can try and do that, um, that I think will unlock some of the creative and economic problems that we have in the UK.

David Kester

I’m not even going to attempt to sum up, save to say that if we started with a challenge 2005, George, a lot has happened. Maybe we aren’t running fast enough in your race, so we need to sprint a bit more. Maybe we need to write it up a bit more so that we do actually make sure that people are understanding it. There’s something here, isn’t there, about the big joined up challenges. And I think that… I’d like to think that the Design Council can help, but I actually think it is big society, and actually we in the way that we’re moving this forward needs a think big society so that it’s not a small network that’s working together to develop small centres, but it’s actually a much bigger society. I thought it was really interesting comments earlier about humility in the way that we approach the whole essence and idea of design’s role in the multi-disciplinary scene. And I think that’s going to be very important in the way that we narrate our future. There did seem some really important things about research here, and also about the sort of institutional changes and how we get round those. And in a sense something has started, there is a lobby here and we have to make sure that not only does the knowledge here continue, not only do we continue to move forward, because actually we’re delivering really great work, but also that there’s a voice here we should make sure is heard. And actually that’s not for the Design Council to do; it’s absolutely for all of us to do together. So, there’s a challenge for us all. Can I ask you a huge huge thanks, I think, to a tremendous panel. So, in the traditional way a round of applause please. Thank you also everybody here because I think you’ve been a fantastic audience and also thank you of course to the Design Council team who pulled it together once again. Thank you.

Unidentified male speaker

David before you go, can I just thank Leslie on behalf of everybody because she’s been like the lynchpin on the team, bringing it all together, and obviously a very unsung hero. So, can we give her a big hand.