At the recent DMI conference in London, Geoff Mulgan, once Tony Blair’s ex-strategy advisor and now a leading social entrepreneur, politely explained how ‘social designers’ had ‘entered his space’… and failed. The reasons he gave were their naivete, their lack of knowledge about the public sector and their inability to effect change. While this caused some squirming in seats, it was a refreshing moment of critical, but constructive, feedback from a real power broker.
Social design is one of the new problem areas that designers have started to explore over the past decade, as the scope of design has expanded and the old disciplinary boundaries have blurred. Other new fields include service design, systems design, organizational design and design strategy. These interventions into new and more complex problem areas are sometimes called design thinking.
Whatever we call them, they present both opportunities and risks for design’s trailblazers. The opportunities include a chance to expand the design industry into new, higher value disciplines. A risk, as Mulgan suggests, is that designers over-stretch themselves and damage their long-term prospects in these emergent domains. A risk is that designers over-stretch themselves and damange their long-term prospects in these emergent domains.
T-shaped designers
The opportunities and the risks around design thinking got me pondering, in turn, about the whole idea of the T-shaped designer. First devised by the management consultants, this model of an individual’s, team’s or company’s know-how was adapted to design and popularised by IDEO in the noughties.
In design, the T’s vertical element consists of a vertical stack of deep design expertise, which is typically acquired at college and honed through years of professional practice. Some of these capabilities are general design skills such as creativity, sketching and visual sophistication. Others are specific to a particular design discipline: for example, deft handling of surface geometry (product designers), the finer points of typography (graphic designers) and mastery of the interplay between light and space (interior designers).
The emphasis of the T-shaped model however is usually placed on the generalist horizontal beam. Capabilities here include a big-picture perspective; knowledge of other related disciplines such as marketing, production and distribution; and the ability to facilitate work across organisational silos. These tend to be developed by some more senior designers ‘on the job.’ These lateral competencies are the ones that have enabled some pioneering designers to edge into new problem areas.
Pioneers of the design profession have hit a major stumbling block: a weak vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their new discipline or problem area.
Diminished vertical stack
Mulgan explained that in ‘social’ design, designers are one of many rival providers claiming to have the right approach. NGOs, management consultants and service user groups all compete with social designers. Here the latter group, like many other pioneers of the design profession, have hit a major stumbling block: a weak vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their new discipline or problem area.
The consequence of this weakness is that social designers are left to compete primarily on their generalist ‘horizontal’ competencies – strategic perspective, cross-silo facilitation and the ability to synthesize. But there are plenty of other clever people out there who, in these areas, are just as strong, if not stronger than most designers. After all, designers are not the only ones who can run a workshop.
Designers should also be worldly enough to recognize that they do not hold a monopoly on creativity. Let’s not confuse visual creativity with more general creative problem solving that is often required in these new domains. Anyone who has worked with a successful entrepreneur, for example, will know at how many different levels they are able to solve problems.
New problems areas require new knowledge, craft skills and methods:
Knowledge
Knowledge of traditional design disciplines and industry sectors was never designers’ strong suit. Ignorance of production techniques and of wider industry dynamics has long been tolerated. However, this slack approach to mastering the subject matter of a new domain can quickly lose designers credibility. As Geoff Mulgan noted, social designers, blissfully unaware of their new domain’s historical background, have often proposed ideas that were tried and failed decades ago.
Craft skills
Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up for in craft skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing or rendering, designers take an inordinate amount of pride in honing key techniques over many years. Unfortunately many of these very skills have limited use in the new design domains.
Instead, new ones are required. At Plan, we have identified some of those required for design strategy that designers are mot taught at college: they include analytical thinking, the formulation of strategic frameworks and knowing when and how to use narrative structures. These new skills are not always as tangible as the traditional ones, but still take coaching, time and practice to master.
Methods
While designers are not particularly ‘process driven’, there is a tendency of the design pioneers to place a little too much confidence in the design (thinking) process as an all conquering magic-method to crack every problem – from a new detergent pack to climate change. I’ve covered this issue of designers believing their own hype before. Nevertheless, they still need to put more effort into innovating how they design when they operate in today’s new contexts. Not every problem can be cracked in a brainstorm.
Without a strong vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their chosen problem domain, designers stop being designers – and join the legions of free-floating generalists.
So I would submit that without a strong vertical stack of capabilities that are relevant to their chosen problem domain, designers stop being designers – and join the legions of free-floating generalists.
Building the new verticals
Some exciting new opportunities have opened up for designers. But to take advantage of them, we need to do some deeper thinking on the new problems, our transferable know-how and what new capabilities we need to work on. Even the most cocksure designer would admit that there are some problems that are best left to others more able to tackle – pension reform, for example. So what are the characteristics of problems that present fair game for designers? What is it about a design background that gives designers an edge over other providers in these new fields? What new competencies does the problem area require that designers will need to build?
I don’t have the answers, but these strike me as some of the right questions to be asking.
The T-shaped designer is still an illuminating model. Yet as the example of social design and design thinking shows, serious designers should think twice about playing up their horizontal skills, and instead get down to the tougher but ultimately more rewarding work of consciously defining and building the new verticals for emergent design disciplines.
Kevin McCullagh sees bling taking a back seat as the Chinese capital becomes more comfortable with its growing wealth. But in the back streets, bandit phonemakers are forging ahead with design
‘Beijing is so tidy and organised,’ gasps my Shanghainese interpreter, as we are whisked from the immense Capital Airport to our hotel, a block away from OMA’s forlorn-looking CCTV tower. As well as the adjacent Television Cultural Centre burning down during a firework display, the building has become the butt of much derision from the locals. In addition to being accident-prone, its expense and easiness on the eye have been called into question – by more than the local cab drivers.
As I would glean over the coming days, Beijingers have moved on from bathing in the reflected glory of Western starchitects. The success of the 2008 Olympics delivered national pride – in spades – and the ‘made in the West’ financial meltdown only further underlined the need for China to rethink what remains of its inferiority complex.
There’s a new cultural assuredness in the air. Beijing has always tended to shun the go-go flamboyance of southern cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong in the name of higher cultural and social concerns. As the seat of power, it tends to frown upon bravado, especially now that ‘bling’ is associated with
What particularly irks big brand manufacturers is that the Shanzhai versions often beats them to the market
Yanling Duan, a design magazine editor and TV show presenter, confirms that Chinese tastes are maturing and shifting towards a simpler aesthetic. However, she emphasises that, historically, they have tended towards softer French designs, rather than harder German modernism.
While the CCTV tower was commissioned in a more attention seeking era, the elite now looks to impress with understatement such as the recently completed ‘The Opposite House’. Kengo Kuma’s hotel sets a new benchmark in minimalux space and finishing, in a country that one jaded architect claims never finishes its buildings: ‘They never get much more than 90 per cent complete’.
That Kuma was commissioned at all reflects not just an assured shift to minimalism, but also a more subtle dynamic. Despite the resurgence of cultural nationalism and an architectural debate around the development of a contemporary Chinese vernacular, when push comes to shove the real aspiration is to have the best the world has to offer whether that be a Japanese architect, a German car or a Finnish phone.
German cars however can hold unexpected meanings. Audi, the epitome of restrained good taste, in the West, exudes power and status in China. The black Audi A6L is the politicians’ car. The ‘L’ stands for extended leg room, as big cheeses sit in back seats in this part of the world. This brand legacy dates back to the early nineties, when government officials were obliged to buy cars made in China; at the time, Audis were the best of the bunch.
While I fail to find an emergent Chinese aesthetic being forged by the design elite, I do find one in the back streets. At the bottom end of the market. Shanzhai (bandit) mobile phones are a distinctly Chinese phenomenon. These pirate phones began as simple knock-offs of popular handsets, with brand names such as Nckia, Sumsung and HiPhone, often selling for as little as $20 a piece. While features and interfaces are Inferior to mainstream models, in visual terms they are doppelgängers of the real thing. What particularly irks the big brand manufacturers is that the Shanzhai versions often beat them to market.
These makers of small phones, often run by just a handful of well connected staff in or around Shenzhen, have now started to add innovations. As well as reducing their size to fit local hands, new features like dual SIM-card slots that allow the phone to respond to two phone numbers are added. A personal favourite was the phone cum electric razor (pictured), a true Bodie and Doyle phone if ever The Professionals were to be resurrected as a 21st-century crime series.
This might prove to be a short lived burst of local design innovation, since recent reports suggest that sales have started to dip. Among Chinese consumers, who will research a purchase for weeks, word has got around that the fakes are hard to use and break too easily.
I notice a less welcome innovation on the way across town for dinner. Our cab driver has strapped a video player over his rear view mirror and is taking in a movie, while ducking and weaving through rush hour traffic. As we pass the outsized portrait of Mao at the top of Tiananmen Square, my interpreter laughs: ‘This is the only place in China that reminds me that I live in a communist country.’
There’s a storm brewing in designland. A backlash is gathering momentum and what’s more some of its chief dissidents are design’s leading lights.
Philippe Starck sheepishly peered out of the cover of December’s Icon magazine, under the ‘I killed design’[1] banner. In an article a few months earlier Stephen Bailey, the fiery British design critic exclaimed ‘When I hear the word “designer”, I reach for my chainsaw’[2].
This rising tide of disaffection tends to share two themes: a distaste for the superficiality of design’s media-celebrity nexus; and a growing discomfort with design’s role in generating ‘useless stuff’. These two complementary critiques could be abbreviated as Anti-fluff and Anti-stuff.
Anti-fluff
As ever the ad agencies were among the first to sample the anti-designer zeitgeist. In 2004 the British agency Karmarama created the ‘Elite Designers Against IKEA’ campaign[3], for the ubiquitous purveyor of $20 chairs. It featured the fictional Van den Puup, a kind of histrionic lovechild of Starck and Marcel Wanders, railing against cheap IKEA furniture.
Soon after Ford ran a campaign for the Focus in which Oglivy updated the caricature to a shaven headed and stubble-chinned pseud[4]. The implicit message of both campaigns was clear – Design with a capital ‘D’ has disappeared up its own behind, and IKEA/Ford deliver democratic design at non-pompous prices.
Virginia Postrell eloquently explained how design became a mass-market preoccupation, in her seminal ‘The Substance of Style’[5]. In parallel it mainstreamed in business, to the extent that ethnography and innovation are the new black[6]. Even Government got in on the act, it is now 10 years since Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ took the reigns of power in the UK and turned to the ‘creatives’ to help recreate everything from Britain’s national identity to its national health service.
At one level the backlash is not much more than elitist resentment of design’s success. Witness Starck’s outburst: ‘Nowadays you fart and are a designer… When design was nothing there was a lot of good designer because they was obliged to fight’[7]. This school of thought holds that design has lost its magic now that everyone has an opinion on it. Wasn’t it just more special when only we cognoscenti swooned over the latest Apple product?
Stephen Bayley, a design critic and the first director of London’s Design Museum, lodges an altogether more substantial critique. He bemoans design’s fall from grace, which he paints as ‘a rapid descent from saint to sinner, from ennobling industrial art to the silly designer chair’. He pines for a bygone era when design stood for ‘intelligence made visible’, instead of today’s ‘attention-seeking frivolity’[8].
Paola Antonelli, Curator of MOMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, recently lamented that ‘Design is treated as fluff and pushed to the lifestyle sections of newspapers’[9].
To underline that this is not just the concern of the chattering design classes or buffoons like Starck, two of the profession’s most respected figures – Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa – have launched a riposte. Their SuperNormal exhibition[10], which showed in Tokyo and London in 2006, is a design response to the ‘fluff’ issue. In his introduction to the exhibition booklet Morrison reflects that ‘design, which used to be unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines, and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise.’ Taking a leaf out of Dieter Rams’ book he goes on to expound an ‘approach to design, of leaving out the design, [seems] more and more of the way forward’[11].
This is not the first time that Morrison has played his part in saving design from its excesses. He helped rehabilitate design in the early nineties, at the heights of the backlash against the previousd ‘designer decade’ when it had become bracketed with yuppies and facile post-modernism. His thoughtful approach will undoubtedly provide a key point of reference when the mud starts to fly this time around.
Anti-stuff
There is nothing new in accusing designers of being superficial, what is more novel is designers re-conceiving of themselves as the creators of landfill. A growing number of designers share environmentalists’ concern that design is part of the problem.
Let’s begin with Starck, the contrite clown: ‘I design useless Christmas gift… That’s why don’t ask me to be proud or to be interested in what I do. I am so ashamed of what I do…’[12].
Bayley too situates design’s malaise within the context of the paradox of choice[13]: ‘No longer is the designer helping to edit dross from the boggling universe of choice, he is contributing to excess.[14]’
Criticising designers’ role in consumerism is not new, Vance Packard[15] castigated planned obsolescence in ‘The Waste Makers’ in 1960, Victor Papanek[16] made the case for socially responsible design in the seventies, a baton Nigel Whiteley picked back up in the nineties[17]. What is new is that an anti-consumerist agenda is being welcomed in from the critical margins by designers.
The central concern here is that designers are contributing to over-production of stuff that we don’t need. Styling is suspected as a form of aesthetic manipulation that stimulates the urge to buy. While innovation is criticised as often amounting to little more than meaningless feature tweaks. Too much stuff, too much choice.
If Anti-fluff argument is a reaction to the mainstreaming of design, Anti-stuff is reflection of the mainstreaming of environmentalism into design.
So just as critics from outside design are sharpening their knives, designers are becoming racked with self-doubt and -loathing. We have surfed the wave of adoring interest, but the shifts that have taken place have left designland in intellectual disarray and in bad shape to defend itself. First, the frontiers of design have expanded well beyond its traditional heartland. From championing design thinking in the boardroom to the re-engineering of public sector services, ‘design’ – often practised by people without a design training – now encompasses a far wider spectrum of activity. Second, the old certainties of disciplinary boundaries appear increasingly blurred and irrelevant. For example, when designing an experience that includes product, service, communication and retail elements, the coherence of the experience matters much more than breaking it down into individual disciplines. And how useful is it really to ask whether Thomas Heatherwick an artist, designer or architect?
Some accuse designers of ‘mission creep’, others of over promising and under delivering. ‘What is design?’ is no longer a question for first year student seminars, but for design magazine editors[18]. When design is used so widely and loosely, it is striped of much of it’s meaning. If we are to navigate ourselves out of this morass, we will have to answer some big hairy questions like: what is the constructive alternative face of design to the fluffy emotionalism promoted by the media? Is there a positive case for consumerism and designers role within it? Is there a more useful way of discriminating between different areas of design activity than the old disciplinary boundaries?
If designers intend to sidestep the backlash they need to develop a point-of-view on whether they are going to defend design in all of its guises or just particular areas. It’s time to draw some distinctions between which we want to defend and which deserve the lash.
[1] http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/042/starck.htm
[2] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1866747,00.html
[3] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Elite+Designers+Against+IKEA&search=Search
[4] http://www.productionsparadise.com/showcase/barcelona/27/goodgate.html
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Substance-Style-Aesthetic-Remaking-Consciousness/dp/0060933852/sr=1-1/qid=1166386506/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8255020-5671931?ie=UTF8&s=books
[6] http://www.designobserver.com/archives/008049.html
[7] http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/042/starck.htm
[8] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1866747,00.html
[9] http://www.designzerosix.com/design06_en.htm
[10] http://2021supernormal.wordpress.com/
[11] http://2021supernormal.wordpress.com/about/
[12] http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/042/starck.htm
[13] http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/0060005688
[14] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,1866747,00.html
[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Papanek
[17] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Society-Nigel-Whiteley/dp/0948462655
[18] http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/018/whatisdesign.htm