Unconventional wisdom

Left-field ideas for redesigning home entertainment, local councils and the NHS.

Brazilian politics

Democracy gone mad?

Local government: it’s the province of the terminally dull, isn’t it? Dog poo, street lighting – we’re only really bothered about it if we step in it, or it doesn’t work. But if you could have a say on how your local budget is spent, wouldn’t that be a shot in the arm for civic pride?

That’s what they’ve been doing in Brazil’s southernmost state, Porto Alegre, since 1989. And this exercise in ‘participatory democracy’ – okay, so it’s not the world’s buzziest buzzword – is not quaint village elders stuff. The metropolitan area of the city numbers 1.3 million souls within a conurbation of 3.3 million – roughly three-quarters the size of outer London. Alongside the municipal council, 50,000 burghers of Porto Alegre, rich and poor, left and right, now have their say in a cycle of assemblies starting every January.

As you might expect in a nation noted for its inequality, the basics come first. In 1989, only 1,700 families received housing benefit; these days it’s 29,000. The number of public schools has shot up from 29 to 86: literacy now stands at 98%. The experiment has spread to more than 140 cities in Brazil and to Uruguay and Argentina.

But could it happen here? Well, in that hitherto unheralded hotbed of socialist experimentation, Harrow, the Conservative-run council is giving the notion of direct participation a whirl. In a pilot scheme in October 2005, the first ‘Open Budget Assembly’ attracted a crowd of 300-plus, who met for more than six hours on a Sunday afternoon. It led to the formation of a 32-strong panel to liaise with the council on 2006’s budget.

In an age where a recent YouGov poll showed that 54% of Brits want to change channels as soon as a politician appears on radio or TV, Harrow and Porto Alegre may point towards one small way the political process can be redesigned to re-engage a bored, disenchanted and slightly guilty public.

Best practice

Can Ferrari save lives for the NHS?

A speedy recovery has taken on a literal meaning at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, where Formula 1 pit-stop practices are proving to be  a potential lifesaver. After a heavy day at A&E, Professor Martin Elliott and Dr Allan Goldman turned their tired eyes to the telly, where they caught the split-second precision timing of a pit-stop team in Grand-Prix action. What, they thought, wouldn’t they give for those crucial life-or-death seconds that could be bought in the handover procedure in their own jobs?

Heads of Great Ormond Street’s surgical and intensive care teams hooked up with McLaren and Ferrari’s technical experts to revamp the switch from operating theatre to recovery, based on the racing teams’ expertise at fitting a car in four to six seconds. “We thought we were pretty good,” says Dr Nick Pigott, another member of the project, appropriately dubbed Operation Pit Stop. “After seeing the Ferrari team, we watched videos of ourselves at work and it was quite a shock to realise the lack of structure in what we were doing.”

After watching Ferrari take six seconds to turn around a car, the doctors were shocked by 'the lack of structure in what we do

Ferrari’s pit-stop procedure could be drawn in a single diagram. The hospital’s emergency handover was far more complex but Ferrari concluded that, with an ever-changing personnel and unpredictable demand, the hospital’s team needed a formula they could all understand and work to. It’s too early to quantify how many lives Operation Pit Stop has saved but, Dr Pigott says, “there’s no doubt we have a reduction in morbidity – that is to say, illnesses that the patient did not come in with.”

Climate change

A new mission for designers

Tom Jennings, director of Edinburgh design firm Blue Marmalade, answers a few questions about how global warming has changed his approach.

Why did you set up Blue Marmalade?

We were feeling guilty about the amount of waste, so we started out in 2002 making products that were easy to recycle and now work, mainly, with low-energy work processes and local resources.

Which processes did you abandon to stay green?

We don’t use injection moulding, because it has energy-intensive machines. It uses a lot of hydraulic oils, the tooling’s intense and there are high transport costs. We work incredibly hard to steer clear of chemicals, glues, screws and that kind of stuff – most of our materials are single process and single material. At first, we looked at various materials including commercial coarse timber, which seems really green but uses a lot of energy. It needs to be cut down, transported to the UK, dried, washed up, processed, transported again, washed again, reprocessed then turned into furniture. Then there are the lacquers and varnishes. Polypropylene is much simpler. It melts at a low temperature, so it uses less energy, doesn’t have any nasty emissions and is 100% recyclable.

Has using recycled materials restricted you?

We have a limited choice of colours and surface textures but, as we know that from the start, we can design for it. To me, that’s the essence of design: working within boundaries and solving problems.

Has it been hard to stay environmentally aware?

It has been hard balancing our environmental aims with competitive products but it is possible. We have a zero landfill policy. Setting that up took a lot of work. People told us to get a big skip and chuck it all in there but we didn’t want all that waste.

How can designers reduce their carbon footprint?

While the design industry has a small carbon footprint, the manufacturers we deal with have a huge one so it depends if you draw a distinction between the two. But the designer is firmly in the driving seat so they can guide the design processes and help steer the choice of material and effects. We should look down the line at how people are going to dispose of products – there’s a massive amount of waste in the industry and these are questions people should be looking at.

What could be done within the industry to improve environmental policies?

There’s a lack of proper education in what consumers buy when they look at a product. They need to be aware of just what goes into it. The government has introduced legislation so we know what goes into food, but we need to know what products we’re buying. For instance, some bright coloured plastics have heavy metals in them, which has a nice pigmentation but it’s toxic and a hard material to recycle. We need to educate consumers. That’s what we try to do with our products.

Research

New evidence suggests that design can help firms add value and make more profit

Added value has become a cliché and the trouble with clichés is we stop taking them seriously. But, for businesses today, added value isn’t an optional extra. Relying solely on your core product or service, a Design Council study suggests, is, at best, a recipe for stagnation.

The Design Council surveyed 503 UK firms of all sizes and in all sectors to find out how many added value in various ways (through, for example, customer service, online development or design), what difference that had made to their business and how influential design was in helping them add value.

They found that 21% of firms don’t add value, with 90% of enterprises who say they stick to their core product being small- and medium-sized. But 30% of firms that did add value felt it made them more competitive – and this figure grew to 36% for companies with an appreciation of design.

Reasons why businesses don't add value to their products and services	%
Don't believe it would benefit them	38
Don't believe it's relevant to their core business	27
Already meet customer needs without adding value	15
Other	23

Over a third of businesses (38%) who don’t add value to their products or services say its because they don’t believe it would benefit them. Twenty-seven per cent don’t believe adding value is relevant to their core business, while 15% say they already meet their customer needs without adding value.

Businesses who believe design is integral or significant to their business	%
Businesses who add a lot of value to their core product or service	43
Businesses who add some value to their core product or service	42
Businesses who add no value to their core product or service	15

Of businesses that add a lot of value to their core product or service, 43% see design as integral or significant to their business. Forty-two per cent that add some value – and only 15% of those that add no value – agree.

At what stage of the manufacturing process do businesses consider adding value to their core product or service?	%
During the design phase	62
After products or services have been designed	24
After products or services have been launched	14

Almost two-thirds of businesses (62%) design their products and services with added value in mind. The rest consider adding value after their products or services have been designed (24%) or launched (14%).

The survey found that design-aware businesses were also consistently more likely to have added value, launched a new product or service, increased market share and boosted profits, and are less likely to end up slugging it out with rivals purely on price.

Does it matter if British firms don’t add value? Yes, in all kinds of ways. The seismic shift in the global economy means that, in 10 years, firms that don’t add value will be undercut by rivals from China, India, Thailand and Vietnam. In a world where few markets are protected, every company is looking for an edge. Adding value can be a strong, enduring competitive advantage – and cutting prices, unless you’ve invented a fantastic cost-transforming technology, just can’t.

Visit  www.designcouncil.org.uk/factfinder for more.

The new black is…

Words for a new century

Blamestorming

(verb: to meet to discuss a failed project and apportion blame)

This may sound like a phrase from a Dilbert cartoon but these postmortems are common enough for IT firm First American to launch software designed to tell financial services firms so much about their operations that it would, the maker said, “end blamestorming”. If only it were that easy…

Negawatt

(noun: unit of energy saved by efficiency)

Proof that you really can make something out of nothing, if you look hard enough. While thumbing a Colorado Public Utilities Commission report in the late 1980s, Amory Lovins come across the term ‘megawatt’ misspelt: ‘negawatt’. It was no quantum leap of this physicist’s imagination to envisage a definition of this term as a unit of energy saved through efficiency.

Crowdsourcing

(verb: to use the wisdom of the masses)

The buzzword sparked by James Suriowiecki’s 2004 bestseller The Wisdom Of Crowds, which suggested that the opinion of the many can be more useful than the judgement of the expert few. Some companies – notably LEGO – have taken on this principle, inviting fanatical users to create new designs.

Jaded in our pursuit of the perfect lifestyle, seduced to the tipping point by the you-can-have-it-all school of marketeers, opinion formers predict conspicuous abstention may replace conspicuous consumption. In Germany, this trend is epitomised by the bestselling culinary offering The Hartz Cookbook For Hard Times. This chef-on-a-breadline chic tome used such ingredients as stale bread, roadside dandelions and rocket (often found in car parks, so they say) in its recipes.

Innovation

The Grateful Dead philosophy

Nobody knows everything, do they? Or at least that is what more and more big-name companies are admitting as they throw their design department’s doors open to all manner of outside influence.

The recent Nike+iPod Sports Kit is an entirely logical corporate acknowledgement of something the rest of us have known for years – people go running while wearing Nike shoes and plugged into an Apple MP3 player. By connecting one to the other via Bluetooth-type technology, your listening pleasure can now be interrupted with information regarding your speed, pace, distance covered or time elapsed. It can even chivvy you to speed up.

The Nike/iPod tie-up marks a new, more visible, phase in open-source innovation. This – not particularly new – idea of sharing ideas for the greater good is slightly more altruistic than multinationals getting in bed together to boost their combined market share. It’s actually one of the US software industry’s last remaining links to its Northern California hippy roots – The Grateful Dead were huge open-source advocates.

Richard Stallman’s Linux computer operating system is the definitive open-source product. Starting in 1983, it was free software that anybody could develop and pass on into the community. It was embryonic shareware, giving rise to the first GPL (General Public Licence) and such humanity-friendly enterprises as the Open Source Green Vehicle Project – where designers worldwide work together to develop an inexpensive eco-friendly car.

Given the necessary importance attached to copyrights and patents, it’s unsurprising open-source design (OSD) has been entrenched in charitable works. Then eccentric footwear designer John Fluevog invited the public to submit ideas for shoe designs. Swamped with appropriately bonkers drawings – see the Flue-seum at www.fluevog.com – 10 were deemed good enough to go into production.

Arguably the most effective marriage of OSD and commercial enterprise is the InnoCentive network, a web-based community that allows a forum of 90,000 scientists and designers around the world to input into any of the registered companies’ product development challenges. Procter & Gamble’s R&D departments have joined InnoCentive’s because the consumer giant’s chief technology officer G. Gilbert Cloyd believes the forum will act “as an R&D multiplier, enabling us to enhance our research initiatives and innovate faster and more cost efficiently.” As for InnoCentive’s innovators, the ‘Centive’ bit is that anybody who solves R&D problems will receive at least £50,000.

Sustainable technology

Do adjust your set

The UK wastes more energy through its TV sets than any other nation in Europe. By 2010, £11bn of energy could be wasted by British TV sets. The advent of home entertainment systems that are essentially scaled-down multiplexes won’t help.

The new breed of LCD and plasma screens eats up to five times more electricity than your average cathode-ray tube. Trend predictors suggest the number of TVs in the UK could reach 74 million by 2020 – which, bafflingly, is more than one set each. Something must be done.

Luckily Sanyo has developed eco-friendly sets – which could consume 20% less energy than standard TVs – in its Bangalore workshop and, if trials in India prove successful, may sell them internationally next year.

Samsung has prototyped a 32in wide-screen high-definition LED TV which consumes half as much energy as most LCD sets. It’s not just about energy consumption, the first state of the art LCD and plasma sets were far more intensive to manufacture (old CRT machines were full of air). For the planet’s sake, the battle of the green TV sets can’t come soon enough.

Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 2, Summer 2007