Stephanie Flanders
...But we have just time for the round table discussion on this with three extremely eminent speakers. I am going to introduce them very briefly and then we’ll do the same as this morning.
Sir Terence Conran genuinely does need no introduction, probably has done more to transform over the last 40 odd years, British people’s feeling, relationship, awareness and experience of design than anybody has ever, also obviously founded the Design Museum. David Godber is Director of Nissan Design Europe which is another company that’s based in, he’s based anyway in the Rotunda Studio facility right in the heart of London and Bill Moggridge is co-founder of IDEO Consulting and is Associate Professor at Stanford University, designed the first laptop. So some great voices to hear but we’ll start off with just a few minutes from Sir Terence. Thank you.
Sir Terence Conran
I started my design career working at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Nobody knew the word design then and cared even less for it. Curiously I think that exhibition did a huge amount to shift people’s opinion because they saw in three dimensions what architects and the designers could do and in those dreary post-war years it cheered them up enormously and when you’ll see the re-furbished Festival Hall next year you’ll see what an extraordinary spirited time it was then.
At that time Britain was certainly perceived by the rest of the world as being visually illiterate, producing horrible products and if you happened to be unlucky enough to go and eat in a hotel and restaurant you had the most filthy food.
That’s changed. And the reason I think why it’s changed is because of art schools and design schools that we have invested as a nation throughout the lean times continuously in terrific art schools and art colleges and design colleges. Where would the music industry be without them, let alone the design industry?
So it is terribly important that the Cox Report does everything, or the government pursues the Cox Report to see that it does everything that it offers. We must not lose our position as the number one creative nation in the world and it is bizarre that we have that reputation and the change that has occurred in the last 50 years is so extraordinary.
But we need at this particular moment in time to make it visible to the rest of the world. If you go to Tate Modern for instance you become totally convinced that we care deeply about art in this country but where can you go to be deeply convinced that we care deeply about design, the little tiddly Design Museum. We do our bit and receive a very small amount of government’s support financially and yet we have plans to enlarge this considerably and build a really superlative new museum run by Deyan Sudjic our new Director who, interestingly enough, was responsible for the Lighthouse in Glasgow.
If we can make this happen and, you know, obviously it’s a very major financial commitment if we can make it happen I hope this might be some sort of hub for all those things that the Cox Report has talked about. It really is very important the fact that Gordon Brown asked for this report to be commissioned by the Treasury is very, very important indeed and he, Gordon Brown, is I think passionately and intellectually concerned about the importance of design in this country.
I mean, for instance, I suggested that he went round the Modernist Exhibition at the V&A earlier this year and he said “oh come round with me” and he was so fascinated by both the political and social importance of modernist design throughout the world and what it’s achieved. I also suggested to him that he might like to go and see the student show at the Royal College and he did and he went round with Christopher Frayling and he was heard to murmur as he left “well this is the future for British industry”. I think it is and when you have the Chancellor of the Exchequer and maybe our future Prime Minister being that convinced things really may happen.
Many politicians over my lifetime have talked about the importance of design, very few have done anything about it. I mean I always remember when Margaret Thatcher came to open the Design Museum she got terribly cross, really very banging cross about the fact that we had foreign exhibits in it. I said “but surely Prime Minister what we need to be doing is showing industry and designers what’s happening in the rest of the world”. You don’t want to bury your head in an old Jaguar do you forever? However she did again a bit with my involvement put design into the curriculum, CDT, in schools and her reason for doing this was quite interesting. It wasn’t because she had any sort of aesthetic passions herself. It was because she thought that a better educated consumer would actually do the job of seeing that manufacturers produced better products, I mean that was her rationale and there’s certainly quite a lot to be said for it.
Unfortunately we don’t have many manufacturers left in this country and this is one of the problems I think for designers today, because, as far as I’m concerned, a successful designer has to work incredibly closely with the manufacturer and even the distributor and until he or she understands the manufacturing capabilities and the opportunities for their design that the manufacturer can produce then they’re never going to be really excellent designers.
For instance, if you happen to be a furniture designer, which I am amongst other things, there isn’t a factory left in this country of any scale making furniture, a few small workshops around the place but if you are going to want to produce furniture that is mass produced or even produced in quantity, you have to go to Poland or Lithuania or something like that to find such a factory.
I mean, I go on about this because, you know, I’m also concerned with design and education. You see, we see so many designers going out into the world and worrying about where they are going to work and the tradition was that you worked for a manufacturer. A product designer worked for a manufacturer and so this is why so many of our designers go off and work in the rest of the world and why speaking Chinese should be part of the curriculum of every design school.