A cloud over the Beijing Olympics, comfort for harassed logo designers and a way to quantify hunches
Environment
China’s green crisis
China has a plan for climate change. By 2010, one tenth of its power will come from renewable sources. But it’s the unplanned climate change the country may be responsible for that is worrying environmentalists.
People in China wearign Face Masks (Corbis)
In a debate about sustainability on page 32 of this issue of DCM, Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI, says: “China has made it perfectly clear that its idea of parity with the US is when they match America’s CO2 emissions per head.”
The US currently produces five times as much CO2 per head as China. If Lambert is right, the world’s fastest growing major economy could generate an extra 25.7 billion tonnes of CO2 . To put that into perspective, the entire world only emitted 26.9 billion tonnes in 2004.
Ma Kai, the head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, has said that: “The international community should respect the developing countries’ right to develop”, and dismissed the EU’s target of keeping global warming within a two degree band as “lacking a scientific basis”.
John Thackara, the design expert, says China is aware that it needs to change. Sixteen of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. The leadership knows that predicted temperature rises could cause more droughts and cut production of rice, corn and wheat by 10% by 2030.
The issue has become a public embarrassment to China with the International Olympic Committee, ahead of next year’s games in Beijing, warning that some events may have to be rescheduled because of urban air pollution. The Canadians are even considering providing athletes with asthma inhalers. The Chinese have pledged to spend £6bn to clean up Beijing’s environment and are experimenting to see if car-free days can help reduce the smog by next summer.
2012 Olympics
The shock of the new
Wolff Olins, designers of the controversial London 2012 Olympics logo, should count themselves lucky. Their new logo may have been dubbed “a national embarrassment”, but at least no one threatened to kill them.
When Dr George Stanley was tasked with designing Canada’s national flag in the 1960s he expected criticism, but even he was a tad stunned when his red-white-red stripes with a central maple leaf design provoked one member of the public to threaten to shoot him.
The reaction to Wolff Olins’s London 2012 Olympics logo wasn’t quite as extreme, and the designers have history on their side. It takes a while, past precedents suggest, for humanity to adjust to the shock of the new. When the Eiffel Tower appeared on the Parisian skyline in 1887, the public didn’t like it and the writer Guy de Maupassant insisted that the only reason he ate there every day was because it was the one place in Paris where he could look out of the window and not see the tower.
Today the Eiffel Tower is visited by nearly seven million people each year. Stanley’s flag was embraced within a generation. So Wolff Olins may well have the last laugh by 2012.
In Europe, 410,000 designers generate £24bn in turnover. The race between cities to attract design is now on
Europe
Small firms, big numbers
Design firms may be small, but design is not a small industry. In Europe, 410,000 designers generate £24bn in turnover according to a recent report by European design organisations. In the UK, the industry accounts for almost 1% of GDP, while in the Netherlands it generates as much added value as the aviation industry.
The report shows that design is still clustered around capital cities. In Norway, 48% of firms are in or near Oslo while in Sweden half are based around Stockholm. In France, 60% of design firms operate in Paris (though more new firms are opening in the provinces than in the capital now). Design – and the creative sector – is such a powerful economic driver that many cities have, since the millennium, appointed creative directors, as they brand themselves, to attract investment and tourism.
Fed up with saying “Trust me, I’m a designer”?
Acting on a hunch is traditionally the preserve of poker players in movies and grumpy, maverick yet infallible detectives on TV. When you’re vice president of global product design for a £9bn company, it doesn’t tend to go down so well. Which is why Chuck Jones, design chief at Whirlpool, America’s biggest home appliance manufacturer, decided it was time to give his hunches some kind of scientific rationale.
Jones joined Whirlpool in 1995. He wanted to make a five-dollar design tweak on a fridge, but there was no reliable way to explain its return on investment. He ended up effectively saying to the company’s resource allocation team: “Trust me, I'm a designer”, which he admitted, sounded both “lame and elitist”. Explaining the business case for design is, for designers, an age-old problem. Determined to change that, Jones created a prototype that he could present to focus groups to measure their reactions to its aesthetics, craftsmanship, technical performance, ergonomics and usability, so he could compare it with existing models.
The result? Jones got the rationale to back up his design modification, and profits for the first generation of appliances designed in this way increased by 30% over their predecessors.
Law and order
The designer as crimefighter
Jacqui Smith, the new home secretary, has called on designers to help reduce anti-social behaviour as part of its new crime-fighting strategy.
The government has formed a new design and technology alliance with a board that includes David Kester, chief executive of the Design Council; Jeremy Myerson, professor of design studies at the Royal College of Art; and Lorraine Gamman, director of the design against crime research centre at Central St Martins School of Art and Design.
Broken glass (Punchstock)
Design has already helped reduce crime. Vehicle crime fell by 50% in 10 years after the introduction of immobilisers and chip and pin has cut credit card fraud by 46%, while Tesco cut thefts from its stores and car parks after it employed an environmental criminologist to design its stores. Typically, theft costs retailers 1% of their turnover.
The business case for using design to combat crime is laid out in Think Thief, a Design Council guide which outlines, for example, how harder drinking glasses and new pub design reduced the number of violent incidents in Wythenshaw in Manchester.
Find out more about the Design Out Crime programme
Banks charge a woman running a business 1% more interest on a loan than they charge a man
Mortgage news
Gender lenders?
There simply aren’t enough women entrepreneurs in the UK. In the US, women account for 40% of the self-employed workforce. In the UK, three out of four self-employed are men. That proportion has hardly changed in the last 15 years and some small business federations say there are fewer women running their own firms now than in 2004.
The rarity of women running businesses may be partly explained by a Warwick Business School study which found that banks typically charge a woman running a small business 1% more in interest for a loan than a man. The banks deny any bias but Angela Russell, who set up a food company in 2006, says: “The bank’s attitude was such that I ended up taking my husband along to meetings. Then it changed. It was simply the fact that my husband was a man.”
Annette Naudin, course director in media enterprises at Birmingham University, admits the problem is especially acute in the creative sector. Women are under-represented in the industry. In the UK, 61% of designers are men. Even more shockingly, only 6% are from ethnic minorities.
Naudin says creative women have often suffered from a double discrimination: investors were wary of the sector and of lending to them. “Business support agencies just didn’t understand the motivations of certain industry sectors and did not cater for the needs of either women or creative individuals. There is evidence to show that this is changing for the good.”
Creative cities
Vancouver
Nature has helped give Vancouver its creative edge. The city (with a population of 588,000) has water on three sides and mountains on the other. Though it is regularly voted one of the top three places to live in the world, the city isn’t content to rely on its natural advantages and is about to start a 10-year strategic plan to bolster its creative sector.
Creative industries already employ 8% of the labour force, with 0.87% working in design. Attracted by Vancouver’s mix of technology, talent and tolerance, the creative workforce grew by 23.5% between 1996 and 2001 and the cultural sector now generates around £3bn, contributing more to the economy than tourism.
The boom has been driven by movies. So many are shot in the city, it is known as Hollywood North. In 2005, more than 200 films were made locally, generating £566m in revenue.
The city has several local public design schools and the respected Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.
The most famous design studio to emerge from Vancouver is probably Molo, whose work now appears in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Molo was set up by Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, two architects who also design compact furniture. Their innovative soft-seating is created from craft paper that has been strengthened to take human weight.
| Vancouver's cultural occupations |
% |
| Performing, literary and visual arts |
 57 |
| Designers |
32 |
| Information services |
11 |
Vancouver is now investing heavily in the digital arts, encouraging more start-ups. A new centre of excellence in digital media is planned as the city strives to become a global hub for gaming, visual effects and post-production. Disney has just announced plans to expand its computer games studio in the city.
The new black is…
Words for a new century
Captcha
(acronym: Completely Animated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart)
If you’ve ever tried to decipher the smudgy grey alphanumeric code that appears on screen when you register on websites like Facebook, you’ll know what a ‘captcha’ is. They might look like clumsily photocopied ransom notes, but captchas are a way for the software to make sure you’re a real, live person, not an automated programme joining the site to bombard users with adverts for breast enlargements.
Murfing
(verb: to surf the internet on a mobile device)
Set to become very popular as mobile internet access offers more than sports results and ringtones, murfing could displace the morning paper as the commuter’s first choice for information. As a threat to situational awareness, it’s up there with crossing the road blindfolded. Expect to see a sharp increase in ‘durfing’ – death while surfing.
Zerotasking
(verb: to have no tasks; to do nothing)
The antithesis of multitasking, zerotasking is to life what the slow food movement is to cookery. The word first surfaced in a cartoon in New Yorker magazine, which showed a ‘zerotasker’ seated happily in an armchair.
Adhocracy
(noun: the opposite of a bureaucracy)
Coined in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler, an adhocracy is “Any form of organisation that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems and get results.” Often, these adhocracies are temporary structures, like the task forces which are now universally prescribed for public ills.
Nevaeh
(noun: girl’s name; origin USA)
As a wave of Kylies hit their 20s, the search for newer, more interesting children’s names continues apace, with ‘Nevaeh’ – ‘heaven’ backwards – now the fastest growing girl’s name in the US. Nevaeh first hit the headlines in 2000, when Sonny Sandoval, of Christian rock group P.O.D., and daughter Nevaeh were featured on the MTV show Cribs. Four years later there were 4,457 new Neveahs.
Aunt Mimi’s got a point
Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor on the Beatles and the knowledge economy
“The guitar’s alright, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it.” That’s how John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi tried to persuade her nephew to forget being the next Elvis and knuckle down to a real job. Just five years after Lennon ignored his aunt, the Beatles were handed MBEs for their services to the export industry. There are those who think Britain as a country can follow Lennon’s example. The knowledge economy, we are told, is how we will pay our way in the world. Sorry, but I’m with Aunt Mimi. Britain is not going to make it on creativity alone.
The creative edge
You might think, from all the hype, that the creative economy is new. It isn’t. British architecture is a big export earner. But Richard Rogers started building the Pompidou centre in the early 1970s. The Beatles made their breakthrough in the United States in early 1964 with the top five songs in the US singles charts. In 2002, an entire year passed without a single British act making it into the Billboard 100. That year-long absence, you could argue, reflects the fact that after 15 years of steady growth and falling unemployment, Britain’s creative edge has blunted. The backdrop to the 1960s musical revolution was the gradual dismantling of the social controls of the 1950s; the catalyst for cutting-edge TV in the 1970s was economic crisis. Things today are just a bit too comfortable.
Programmed to import
Despite the recent slight pick-up in manufacturing output, Britain runs a trade deficit in tangible goods of £6bn-£7bn each month. Around a third of this deficit is covered by the brainpower industries – banking, insurance, architecture, consultancy, design. The fees and royalties generated by invisible exports are big, but not big enough.
That’s particularly true of the creative sector. A report by NESTA, (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts), reported that more than 100,000 people were employed by the UK TV industry in 2004 and £2.6bn was spent on original programmes. Even so, the UK ran a small deficit on TV because so many programmes are imported, mainly from the US, to fill schedules. The long-term decline of manufacturing in the UK has left a black hole in the UK’s trade figures and it will never be filled by the knowledge economy – let alone the creative economy – and we ought to recognise that.
Separatist tendencies
British history is littered with examples of great design lying unexploited because of an absurd distinction that we, as a nation, draw between those who think and those who do.UK manufacturers employ fewer in-house designers than competitor countries, either because firms underplay the importance of good design or because they can’t afford to. Other nations do not make the cardinal error of treating design and production as entirely separate processes. Germany is a successful exporter because its manufactured goods are so well designed. They work and look good because creativity is an integral part of the manufacturing process, in a way it isn’t in the UK. Sure, we’re creative. Always have been, always will be. But we need to learn from the Germans to make the kind of money that would impress Aunt Mimi.
The Danish are coming
Denmark may be synonymous with football fans with painted faces, Hans Christian Andersen and bacon but the government is spending millions to change that, resurrecting the brand Danish Design and supporting innovation consulting, in which Denmark is a per capita world leader.
This summer, the Danish government set up a £35m fund to stimulate user-driven innovation. Finn Lauritzen, head of the Danish Enterprise and Construction Agency, said: “Most products we make, the Chinese will develop at a tenth of the price in a year. We have a head start in user-centred innovation over our low-cost competitors and we have to keep that.”
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 3, Winter 2007