Ladies and gentlemen and Secretary of State can I just say first of all, on behalf of the Design Council, thank you all very, very much for coming to this Competitiveness Summit and thank you particularly minister for coming in and attending and for addressing us so inspirationally just now on the importance of design in our economy.
My job today is a quick canter through how much have we achieved over this last year since the Review took place, but also a look forward. Now obviously there are some areas that we’ve been very particularly involved in but across the board we’ve been involved in chasing and hopefully connecting up the system. So I hope that this will be a useful overview particularly in the context of the conversation that then will take place.
I’m going to talk very briefly, I want to make sure that we are all on side and we’re talking about the same thing. Over lunch actually somebody was saying to me “gosh you know this design thing, you know, it seems to have a lot of different definitions, do you know what you’re talking about when you’re talking about design?” So I thought let’s make sure that we’re all talking about the same thing when we’re talking about design. Let’s just quickly revisit those issues of our strengths and weaknesses and see whether that we’ve got some agreement on this.
What are our competitors up to? I mean we’ve heard about this fear factor but what are the other countries around the world actually doing? So let’s have a little look at that. The Cox Review is it a plan? Is it a framework? Do we have a plan? Collectively somebody asked about a vision earlier. In fact I thought interestingly when that question about the vision and is there a vision here. I thought it was quite interesting because everybody said no and then everybody actually said almost the same thing, which was it seems to be about designing around the needs of people. I thought how appropriate that what was the museum of mankind. Is it enough? Again we’ve got this question, George’s question of the race. Is the race on? Is this a race? And finally then particularly pertinent as we have been asked to come and report in, in February, to the Secretary of State what next, where does this take us?
So this question of the definition of design, it’s a tricky one. Of course it’s quite good to turn to designers because they’re rather good at this and they’re very good at coming up with 50 sentences so it’s always good to open the design books and I think there are, designers have lectured and talked and of course this is very much their own pitch if they are working in consultancies to business. So lots of very, very good ideas and the boiling down of what design is all about. But I have to say to ‘big it up’ for my own chairman, I think the definitions that were presented in the Cox Review themselves are very helpful for us in this regard and it is important that we’re consistent when we’re talking about design and creativity and innovation and indeed I thought it was great that Jeremy Myerson also mentioned that earlier. And I just want to remind everybody of what those definitions are.
The point that’s made in the Cox Report is creativity, yes, is the generation of ideas, innovation the successful exploitation of ideas but design is what links creativity and innovation. It is about shaping ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Sounds like some sort of musical beep behind us now. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.
Now I think that’s very helpful but again I suppose it’s sort of words isn’t it and I was thinking about this and I think there is an easier way for us more viscerally to think about what design is. Because in the end, of course, design is all the things that are all around us. Anything, of course, that’s manmade where there is a man, where there is human intervention, it will be design. Indeed the acoustics of this room minister have been designed or not designed and of course if it is good design it should surpass our expectations. It should delight, it should certainly meet the need and if it’s bad design it probably will frustrate us and design is in the interfaces, it’s in the interaction, it’s in the products, it’s in the services.
And I took, now this is actually the view from my window in my office at home and, I hope that if I push this button you are going to see 15 seconds of my office at home. So I’m going to let you into my home now, just so that we can have a look at some of those things that really are design. Pan around, here we are a little bit of the filing cabinet, fax machine, it’s actually not normally that neat I have to say, coffee, the computer and so forth. Well there you are. A little snapshot, could be anywhere couldn’t it, in anyone’s home a little bit.
In there and I’ve just taken these little stills because the point that I want to make, design, we can get terribly caught up with the idea that design is only about the whizzes and the bangs. Design is about our every day experience all around us for everybody in the nation. Now in here, just in these little stills and I won’t go into all of them, each one is not just a design story, it’s a business story.
This shelving unit designed by Dieter Rams, Vitsoe Shelving, one of the finest examples, designed in the 50s, still enduring today, interestingly enough was a German manufacturing company now a great British manufacturing success story. The MD, Mark Adams, will say “design is in our DNA”. That’s his quote. Because they’ve continued that design tradition and it’s not just in the product which, actually interestingly, is one of the highest load bearing shelving systems that you can buy because it’s actually a piece of engineering genius and I won’t go into the details we haven’t got the time now but here you’ve got bottom line benefit by design.
But look to the next one, Yellow Pages, something we all use every day. Well here the designers were actually brought in to look, not just at the brand, but they actually were looking, the brief was, how can we save money. Now that’s not a brief that designers are often brought in for, it’s not what we think they’re brought in to. But here they were and this was Johnson Banks and they were brought in and they looked at the typography, they looked at how they could reduce the type size, which they did to an amazing 5.5 point size which is much more, we’re all used to sort of 8 point, 9 point, 10 point maybe but they looked at how they could create a typeface that could reproduce on that sort of paper without infilling. They did it but the end result isn’t just an attractive Yellow Pages, it’s in the first edition £1.5 million of saving and of course over the life cycle of one Yellow Pages edition after another, we’re talking about several forests being saved so not a bad result.
Now I won’t go through all of these, the 40/4 Chair which forty chairs stack in four feet, one of the best stacking chairs in the world, gives that manufacturing business great competitive advantage worldwide. We heard earlier the minister mentioning Apple, of course the brilliant thing there with Apple isn’t of course that it’s just beautiful products that we can all look and say “well isn’t that iconic and I love it and I want to own one” or whatever, it’s actually that things are translated there into interactions and services. Services built around the real need of today’s users and again back to those people and people’s real needs and there a music system iTunes and of course their many other systems all brought together and integrated by a business which has put design on the front foot, held at the top of the business by the Chief Executive who understands it in Steve Jobs working incredibly closely with his Head of Design who works integrally with all of the other disciplines and we’ve heard a lot about those partnerships and of course iTunes when it launched within one month of launch they had overtaken the entire European CD singles market. Another business success.
So that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about design. I’m talking about brands, I’m talking about products, I’m talking about interactions and I’m talking about all the various disciplines of design that come together.
So our strengths and weaknesses, well here are some famous names in design, they’re all British designers and of course I’m referring to what is, undoubtedly, a great UK strength. We’ve got a design sector that contributes £11 billion to GDP annually. Now that’s actually a very healthy rivalry to our manufacturing sector and that calculated on the 5.5 billion from consultancy, 2 million from freelancers, as well as the rest of those which are the in-house design facilities within businesses.
So we’ve got a very healthy sector. We’ve heard about our education sector. Now many educationalists are here today, we know that it’s a sector under pressure. But there can be no doubt that our education sector is regarded around the world, particularly in design and in the creative areas is absolutely world leading. No question about it. And actually these statistics 56,000 students some people would say we heard from Bill Sermon there are too many. Sometimes one questions whether it’s too many or are the right people matched up with the right course and that’s something I know that we’re looking at as we are doing the work on sector skills at the moment with Creative and Cultural Skills and leading on this with the industry. But in the year that that was taken 2003/4 saw an uplift in the number of post-graduate students from abroad of over 30 per cent and as somebody who sits on the council of a university which is, itself, one of the leading design courses, design colleges, I know that of course many of those students are of course coming from China and the Far East, they want to understand how we do it over here and indeed, of course, our knowledge is something which is much sought after.
Well another great British strength is at the top of the business pyramid and there’s no question about it that our best businesses really do know how to exploit design to great advantage. Now we tracked 63 firms that we identified as design led firms. These were companies that really had integrated design deep into their companies. We passed the information over to the FTSE and they tracked those firms year on year retrospectively over a ten year period. Those firms out-performed the market by 200 per cent over a ten year period. Now if that’s not proof alone, what is?
But here’s the sting in the tail, 60 per cent of UK firms haven’t designed a new product or service in the last three years and these statistics and many more are all brought together in the evidence base that we actually put forward to the Treasury as part of the Cox Review process and indeed they’re all online and I’d urge you to, if you’re interested, to have a look at them, they’re under this thing called the Design Factfinder. What you’ll see is economic analysis, each year we do an economic survey over 1,500 firms, we break it down by sector, we break it down by region. It does show there’s some movement and I think that that is quite interesting and it does show, for instance, that the manufacturing sector has been putting more effort into using design. So it’s not all doom and gloom but I have to say it’s unfortunate for what we do see as the general picture is that whereas it’s okay at the top end business in general lacks the skills and the capabilities and the confidence to utilise design effectively.
We asked the question, “what are the competitors up to?” Now it is a tricky one this and I totally applaud what Bill was saying, in saying “well what is a competitor in this regard and what’s a national boundary?” But we do need to know what’s going on around the world. Design education, isn’t that phenomenal. In 20 years China has opened 400 specialist design schools to train up and develop and build the capabilities because yes they do want to build on the expertise that they’ve got in manufacturing and technology and turn those ideas and abilities into new ideas and IP that they can exploit so that they can build brands in China, and why not, and quite right to.
Prime Minister Singh announced that India will be a global design hub. Already as we know most of the major IT and technology companies are basing R&D centres in India so they’ve got every chance of actually achieving their goal of being a global design hub and of course they’re already rolling out these design led business and academic centres. Interesting isn’t it, it chimes with things we’re talking about over here.
New Zealand and, actually I could say the same of, Australia, Helen Clarke the Premier has launched a design strategy from New Zealand. We were involved members of our team, you’ll hear Andrea talking later was actually involved in that and consulted. They’re looking to breed a cohort of design led firms, brand builders based around ideas grown in New Zealand. Everybody’s at it.
Talk about creative business centres Singapore has decided to make an entry to this exclusive club of nations worldwide that have decided to create centres bringing business and design and creativity together, now that’s a big ticket item, but they follow along with Korea, Denmark, many others and we know them well.
So have we a plan? Well I have the Cox Review here, I think it would be a mistake to view this as a UK plan because I think that would be just the same as if we actually said that a business plan is something that you write down, you type up and then you issue it and everybody works to it. That’s not how business planning works. What you have is a direction that you’re going in, a framework to which you work and then of course it is about the best way to get there. But what we do have now is a framework and I think it’s a very strong framework, we’ve heard earlier, I’m not going to go through all of these one by one in terms of what’s going on and indeed the minister has himself taken us through some of these and George has also very eloquently too. But in terms of tackling awareness and understanding certainly the business programme is already delivering Designing Demand and I myself have been visiting some of the firms. I know if you have a look on these little red shelves over there, you can pick up a bottle of Buster which is a company, Challs, a UK firm making a very honest product to unblock your sinks and your drains. They were underutilising design but they were an ambitious firm and that’s the key thing. This was a company that wanted to change, that recognised that there was something that they didn’t have and they were ready to acknowledge that and they went on the programme and what came out of it? A new brand, product lines, design skills built in the business, trained and developed people within the company.
That all sounds very good but the bottom line was within one year 35 per cent uplift in sales and new markets in Aldi and Lidl and others. And running down, well we’ve heard about the tax incentives of Nissan, the broadening skills through higher education, of course, the university centres are definitely on the move, public procurement, a piece being led by the OGC and, of course, the centre piece as well that we heard Graham Hitchen talking about. So I think our view from the Design Council as an organisation that’s been chasing and involved in this right from the beginning and we will continue to do so very vigorously. We heard about the word creative tissue, that’s very much how we see ourselves helping to connect up the system. I think our view is that there’s definitely progress right across the board. The big question though is, is this enough?
This is my attempt at a window of opportunity, I’m afraid in fact when I look at it now I think maybe it’s the wrong type of window, maybe it should be a smaller, sort of, closing window of opportunity but you’re recall for those that read the Cox Report that George identified that there was a window of 10 to 15 years. So that takes us from 2007 now to 2020. Well is it enough what we’re doing? That window of opportunity wasn’t pulled out of thin air, it was based on international research available from business and from academia such as the Goldman Sachs research that had identified that the BRIC economies will overtake the G6 by 2040. It was based on independently commissioned research such as the John Heskett research, Profession John Heskett who is a specialist in the creative capabilities of China and the Far East. I think it’s very difficult to know whether it’s enough.
But we heard earlier and I thought it was a very, very salient point, focus, focus, focus. I think it was Jeremy Myerson and I couldn’t agree more. Something has started in the UK. As I’ve been going up and down the country it’s been very exciting and I just came back from Aberdeen but just recently I was down in Torquay. From north to south in the UK talking to business, talking to our universities, everybody is on to this and they are very, very much following one strong idea. Everybody is doing it in different ways, approaching in different ways, the important thing is to stick to the idea and follow it through.
We also heard about the issue of sustainability earlier. I would say this cannot be one issue that is more important that cuts right across all of this than global climate change and sustainability and let’s not forget, as speaking as somebody who’s worked in the design industry for over 15 years now, that design I’m afraid is part of the problem. Packaging, creating the need for stuff that gets thrown away but it can be as we know part of the solution and it all depends on what you are trying to achieve. So in working with business and bringing business and academia together we must begin to recognise this and today someone also talked about networks and collaborations. I would like to think that this today is only one of many opportunities to create some of those networks and collaborations because it’s going to be increasingly important for all of us if we’re going to make sure that as these centres are born, as the business centres come to fruition, as the business programmes that we’re running up and down the country really have traction which they are doing, that we’re all connected up with each other and learning from each other’s experience, that the fantastic work that John Thackara talked about earlier in the North East. A really interesting enterprise where design is being put at the heart of economic regeneration, but actually we learn the lessons around the system and transfer those around.
So in terms of what next, I hope that we can be here or somewhere similar maybe with a better acoustic so that we can look next year at not only what have we done and the progress but what impact we’ve had and, if you don’t mind, I’m going to be writing to you all asking for your views as the minister has asked me to report into him in February on how we’re doing and I’m sure you all have many ideas but also I need to know what you’re up to. So I’ll be writing to you but we will also put a blog up on our website so that we can all communicate about that.
Thank you very much.