'Design a new design industry' is the challenge presented by the Design Council in its KeepBritishDesignAlive.com project, which is responding to the possibility that 'British design could get left out in the cold'. This initiative by the Design Skills Advisory Panel (a partnership between the Design Council and Creative & Cultural Skills) is "part of a government-backed drive to improve all skills across the UK". The panel "has come up with a set of ideas for building a better design industry. Now we need you to work on them too" says the invite.
Some of these issues were addressed at an RSA/University of the Arts Lecture 'The world's design studio?' event in February this year, chaired by Chaired by Luqman Arnold, Chair of the Design Museum with Professor Martin Darbyshire, President and CEO of Tangerine; Clive Grinyer, Director of Design & Usability Innovation at Orange Group; Lauren Moriarty, textile and product designer; and Mark Adams, Managing Director, Vitsoe.
Grinyer's talk was particularly insightful, and I suggested to the RSA Journal they commission him to write a piece based on it. The piece was published as 'Production values' Clive Grinyer (RSA Journal, August 2006), and asks: is there a viable long-term future for the UK as a nation with little or no manufacturing but, instead, a reliance on creative industries? Grinyer's key point is that "The reason UK designers are so successful, and are likely to remain successful, is their intimate knowledge of customers in the local markets of Europe" and "what is important is not how close we are to the source of manufacturing, but how close we are to our customers". Having identified problems and possible solutions, he concludes by asking "Is this the basis for Britain's long-term future? Absolutely. Better to be a contributor to global success than the keeper of our own failures" and contends that "Free from the constraints of manufacturing, innovative in understanding customers and globally perceived as creative, [British design] is better able to help companies both from afar and on our doorstep, if only they would wake up and realise it".
In another piece, directly responding to KeepBritishDesignAlive.com, product design strategist Kevin McCullagh asks whether there is actually any such thing as 'British design', and what role should Britain adopt in the 21st century's creative economy ('Island mentality', Kevin McCullagh, Blueprint, August 2006 [PDF, 0.6MB]). "The reality that Britain doesn't make much any more or that its designers predominantly work for foreign companies is old news – but is it a problem?" McCullagh asks, and notes that "The scene in Britain has never been so vibrant". "The whole concept of British design sounds positively quaint, and delusional talk of being 'best in the world' smacks of a bygone Little Englander era" he writes, but argues that "designers here can still compete. However, the emphasis must be on permanent innovation in what kind of work we do and how it is done, as well as in the work itself". Discussing the keepbritishdesignalive.com consultation he notes that it "focuses on better benchmarking and teaching of existing and increasingly commoditised knowledge" but "despite its grand call to 'design a new design industry' it meekly recommends more of the same".
Although I believe this is an interesting debate, I have many reservations about the presentation of the KeepBritishDesignAlive.com forum. After 15 years of Web-based discussion I would hope we had learned enough to do these things better. Among the many flaws in the conception of this resource are:
- Who are the people contributing? If I don't know who they are (beyond their names), why would I contribute? Possible solutions: ask contributors to include a URL for their home page/Weblog and a photo, or ask them to include a link to their profile on LinkedIn/Soflow/etc.
- What is new or important? How can I see what is new in the forum when I visit, or how can I be notified of new content? Possible solutions: flag/excerpt the newest posts, or allow (using cookies) the reader to see new posts since they last visited. Or allow people to be emailed when there is a new post.
- Where's the content? And where's the editorial? The actual posts are hidden two levels from the home page, and there is no presence of the site owner/editor shaping or prioritising the discussion. Possible solutions: bring comments up the hierarchy. If the Design Council really wants people to read things, excerpt key posts on the home page with a call to respond.
- Where is the link with the rest of the Web? Most intelligent design discussion goes on in two-way mailing lists and in Weblogs. Possible solutions: promote the debate in two-way lists and excerpt key replies on the Web site. Allow trackback pings so points made in the 'blogosphere' can be excerpted on the site. There are already a fair amount of Weblog links back to the site to be found on Technorati.
If the design sector is going to try to encourage debate around design, it needs to apply some design thinking to how to make that happen. Best practice is all around us, even if the principles aren't immediately obvious.
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