After “gangsta rapper”, perhaps, the last word to pop into your head if you
spotted Sir Michael Bichard in a crowd is “designer”. He has no complicated
spectacles, no fancy hairstyle, no Day-Glo threads. He is, he says, a
“boring bureaucrat”, though one, I suspect, with a cheeky side. There’s no
tie garnishing his monotone suit, for a start. And is that a John Rocha
belt? And why is there a zip inexplicably sewn into the hem of his trousers,
form trouncing any notion of function? A designer detail – a dead giveaway.
This bureaucrat has aspirations. This paper-pusher has dreams. The man may
be grey, but it’s designer grey. The perfect choice for the new chairman of
the Design Council.
“I’d always had a bit of an interest in design,” Bichard confesses. “I’d have
loved to have been an architect, but I couldn’t draw. My art teacher said I
was the most boring pupil he’d ever had. So I didn’t regard it as a serious
option. Law was a safe bet. I was from a work-ing-class family – though I
don’t want to play that card – who’d never had anyone go to university. The
possibility of becoming a lawyer was unbelievable.”
Several decades later, though, after a highflying career in local and central
government – as the chief executive of Brent and Gloucestershire councils,
chief executive of the benefits agency, permanent secretary in what was then
the Department for Education and Employment – he had his Reggie Per-rin
moment: “I thought, do I want to spend more years in an office, waiting,
waiting for the next job? No.”
As rector for the past seven years of the London Institute, the largest
collection of art and design colleges in Europe, he gave up the tie, used
his knowledge of education and skills to restructure it as the University of
the Arts London, and went on a steep learning curve about the career he
might have pursued, had art teachers and cackhandedness not intervened.
So will it be tattoos and skinny jeans next? “God, no. But you should look for
jobs that develop you, shouldn’t you? I think I’m a lot more relaxed and
informal than I was. I have to remind myself to put a tie on sometimes.”
If he doesn’t seem the most obvious choice for the Design Council, you haven’t
visited in a while. The shop and gallery on Haymarket in London, where my
Mum once lusted over design classics that she couldn’t afford, closed aeons
ago. These days the council’s headquarters in Covent Garden resembles a
management consultancy, albeit of an edgier sort, with bright colours,
workstations and lashings of “cultural citizenship”, envelope-pushing and
“empowerment”. Its mission statement – “helping businesses become more
successful, public services more efficient and designers more effective” –
might equally suit an office-equipment supplier in Kidderminster, but at
least it shows the precise order of its priorities. Whatever happened to
posh lemon squeezers and designer vacuum cleaners?
It’s a long way from the Council for Industrial Design, founded in 1944 “to
promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products
of British industry”. That’s because there is no British industry left. Or
rather, the nature of its products has irrevocably changed. After a few
moribund years sinking alongside British manufacturing, the council was
refashioned under government instruction by John Sorrel, the designer and
brand consultant, as a think tank and lobby organisation for design in
Britain’s new service economy, with a small staff, a lean £6 million annual
budget and that funky new HQ.
We may be nostalgic for Rolls-Royce, the Mini and Concorde, but the reality
today is that the creative industries are more about web design, adverts and
computer games – the intangible – than elbow grease and engines – the
tangible. The Design Council simply recognised this, and began rallying,
professionalising, rebranding what had been a disparate, disorganised ragtag
of creative companies into a vibrant “sector of the economy”, the better to
be taken seriously by, and to reskill, business and government.
It’s had mixed success. On the one hand a report by the National Endowment for
Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in 2006 showed only 21 per cent of
British companies had introduced new or improved services or goods over the
previous three years, and that overseas earnings from design had halved
since 2001, leading some to accuse advocates of the creative industries of
overegging the pudding. On the other, after a decade of lobbying, at least
the Government is listening. In 2005 the Cox Report, by Bichard’s
predecessor, Sir George Cox, showed the importance of creativity and
innovation in the competi-tiveness of British industry. Suddenly Gordon
Brown wouldn’t shut up about design – “not inciden-tal to modern economies,”
said the then Chancellor, “but integral. Not a sideshow, but the
centrepiece.”
“We’re convinced,” Bichard says, “but we’ve still got to convince an awful lot
of British businesses.”
Bichard’s arrival, then, comes at a critical moment. There is still a huge
clash. On side are economists who see the creative industries as vital to
Britain’s economy – such as Will Hutton, whose Work Foundation, last summer,
published a report for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the
creative economy, and who wrote in The Observer: “Britain’s creative
industries are now as important in terms of wealth generation as the
financial services industry . . . There is a golden thread that links the
creative energy on, say, Glastonbury’s stages to the creative energy that
animates new design.” On the other side are those such as Larry Elliott and
Dan Atkinson, who argue in their book Fantasy Island that the
creative industries are all hype, part of “Bull-shit Britain”, that making
money from creative expression is an inadequate replacement for
manufacturing industry, and that it will soon shrivel when the credit crunch
cools the economy.
But Bichard is not deterred. Indeed, his arrival sees the Design Council
moving into still more controversial areas – the reform of public services.
Bichard has long been an advocate of “service design”, reshaping the
structure of services. Is that really design, or just a fancy name for
management con-sultancy? “A lot of money has been poured into public
services in the past ten years that are ill-designed. You will get some
improvement when you’re pouring the money in, but you don’t get a
transformation. And when you take the money away, which is about to happen,
then the quality of services will fall back.
“The best design is about simplifying something that’s complex, isn’t it?
Isn’t that what you need in a service industry? Simplifying the process,
focusing it on the client, the user. That’s what product design’s about,
that’s what service design’s about. Most of this country is about service
industry now. Are we saying design has no part to play in this?
“I understand the worries. But the Design Council is never going to walk away
from graphic design, industrial design, product design. All I’m saying is
that the fundamentals of good design have got a part to play in another
setting. And why should we not want design to play that part towards an
improved society?” He cites sustainability, crime and the ageing population
as three areas where design must take a role.
He’ll face an uphill struggle. To some – me for instance – this is pushing the
definition of design beyond its limits. It was controversial enough when, in
2005, Hillary Cottam, then at the Design Council, won the Design Museum’s
Designer of the Year for her work transforming – redesigning, as some put it
– the processes by which schools, prisons and other public institutions were
created. I could swallow that: at least at the end of it there was a
reshaped product – a school, for instance, though she and the Design Museum
fell foul of many in the design world: “If Hilary Cottam is a designer,”
said one influential museum trustee, Sebastian Conran, “then I am going to
nominate a major publisher like Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins for next
year’s Booker Prize.”
This, and the simultaneous controversy surrounding the resignations of James
Dyson as chair, and then Alice Rawsthorn as director, of the Design Museum,
revealed the major split in the creative industries between, broadly, the
new world and the one – one that, like Rawsthorn, embraced branding,
fashion, advertising as valid constituents of design, and the other that,
like Dyson, hankered after less trivial fare. “Redesigning” government
pension provision, though, might turn Dyson apoplectic. “I had a long
conversation with Terence Conran about this a couple of years ago,” Bichard
says. “I think I moved him on in the course of an evening.”
For many designers, though, the Design Council has become a distant thing. In
reshaping itself to influence business and government, it’s gone native,
detached itself from much of the source of creativity – designers
themselves.
“The Design Council is not there merely to make designers feel good,” Bichard
says.
“But I recognise that the design community perhaps doesn’t feel as positive
about it as I would like it to. I’d like to feel we can get some
reengagement with the community.”
Perhaps it could start by reordering that mission statement. How about
“helping designers to become more effective, businesses more successful and
public services more efficient”?
Oh, and a nice shop might help too.
Ancient and modern: landmarks in design
THE CLASSICS
The Mini This 1957 British icon was a new kind of small car – smaller
outside but bigger inside.
Penguin Books Allen Lane’s affordable, quality paperbacks
revolutionised publishing.
The Dyson The world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner used centrifugal
forces.
THE YOUNG PRETENDERS
Computer games Despite objections about violence, sales of computer
games in the UK have continued to rocket.
Fashion It might seem vacuous and occasionally absurd but British
fashion is considered one of our greatest exports.
Systems Bichard bangs the drum for “service design”, which translates
roughly as “better ways to do things”.
Sir Michael Bichard's Five Rules of Design
1.Great design can change the world and move people
2.If you think good design is expensive you should look at the real cost of
bad design
3.Design, creativity and innovation are essential if we are to meet the global
challenges of sustainable development
4.Design is not just about products and communications, it's also increasingly
in the services we receive or buy
5.To consume design is a creative act – and everyone can be creative!
Victor Papernek's "Design for the real world" needs to be at the top of designers reading list again. The death of the old political idealologies coupled with the rise of the service based economy has left Britain still confused over what industrial design is. The "new" idealology of sustainability is good old fashioned common sense. Can the new designers rebrand common sense to re engage Richard Dyson? I hope so and I hope that design colleges have their bubble burst to include business studies on the same level as life drawing. We need the renaissance men to populate the Design council. We need designers to be better informed, better educated about business and more willing to challenge society rather be led by it.
james paget, bournemouth, dorset