Over the past 50 years Britain has moved to not only embrace but also to export and celebrate contemporary design. There have been many standard bearers and champions: curators, journalists, shop-owners, the Design Council, and not least the designers themselves. There is, however, one particularly significant advocate, a man who rails against poorly designed consumer goods, who has acted as a catalyst between industry and designers, and who has a rare perspective on half a century of British culture, promoting engineering and industrial design as much as graphics, and automotive and product styling: the Duke of Edinburgh.
You might assume, considering that we are talking design, that I’ve got the wrong prince. No, I’m sure on this one because last month I sat down with Prince Philip to talk about design in what turned out to be a passionate and revealing conversation. At 88, the Duke is sprightly and as acutely observant as a design critic half his age. He is also as famously blunt as ever, with a knack for voicing the everyday frustrations we all encounter, especially on the subject of technology: “To work out how to operate a television set, you practically have to make love to the thing. And why can’t you have a handset that people who are not ten years old can actually read?” Quite.
Web design gets short shrift, too. “The websites I’ve seen are so awful it’s untrue. They’re so unfit for purpose I’m surprised anyone tolerates them.” Right. But hang on reader, these aren’t the green-ink outbursts of yours, Irate of Buckingham Palace. Here, HRH has a point. We are all, in the main, so enamoured of owning the latest computer, having the fastest modem connection and priding ourselves on our internet shopping prowess that we rarely take time to assess the websites we use, let alone analyse their useability. The Duke does.
The phrase “fitness for purpose” has an old-fashioned, pre-brand age quality, suggesting robustness, appropriateness, usefulness and ergonomics. It sums up, in fact, the qualities most desirable in good design. Since 1959 the Duke has awarded his own annual design prize in a personal crusade to win recognition for what designers contribute to daily life and business success. Organised by the Design Council, it is Britain’s longest-running design award. No wonder the Duke feels comfortable with the language of design.
The prize was his idea, although he does not feel the need to impose his views on the selection committee that chooses the winner each year. The Duke chairs the judges and — as I can testify, having been a judge this year — steers them discreetly to consensus. “We never need a vote to decide who wins. It just works itself out,” he says.
Winners have included grandees of the profession, such as the Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran and the architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank, as well as the imaginations behind design classics such as the Kenwood Chef and the Austin Metro, icons of the everyday that functioned well and managed to delight us along the way. Next month, winner No 50 will get their turn in the royal spotlight.
When the prize began in 1959 things were very different. For a start there were few, if any, grandees in a profession fighting to be called a profession and be taken seriously as anything more than industrial art. While there was design to be had in lateFifties Britain, it was a niche commodity. Manufacturing had yet to emerge fully from the drabness of postwar austerity and rationing was still fresh in the memory. That’s partly why the Duke decided that it was time to do something to recognise what designers did, encourage them to do more of it, and, just as important, get businesses to take advantage.
He had already found out for himself just how little there was — and what a difference design made. The Royal Yacht Britannia had been launched in 1954 and the Duke helped to oversee her fit-out. “I suddenly became involved in questions like, ‘What do you put in the bathroom, what do you put in a bedroom, what sort of door handles, what sort of cups and saucers?’ That brought home to me that there were people designing all these things.”
He also saw that the US was streets ahead in the way businesses used design to improve the desirability of everything from Cadillacs and electric razors to Lucky Strikes and Coke. Designers were stars. Raymond Loewy made the cover of Time for his verve and style and the contribution he made to his clients’ bottom line — “streamlining the sales curve”, as the magazine put it. “He had an extraordinary influence on the design of practically everything he touched,” says the Duke.
By contrast, Britain was hiding its light under a bushel, he says. He wanted to change that by putting the under-appreciated designer front and centre. “If you pick out an individual, you give them a tremendous sense of confidence ... The recognition brings confidence, and with confidence people get better.” Of course, it can now be argued that design, if anything, has become such an overused word and overexposed activity in Britain that we celebrate a designer the moment he or she has a new teaspoon out. The Loewy culture of styling and publicising has taken root and overshadowed the more workmanlike and engineering sides of the design process.
So how do we move away from the culture of celebrity designers who do little more than endorse products or, at best, simply style the aesthetics of products? The Duke thinks that it’s as much about educating the client as appreciating the designer. “It’s the interaction between the patron and the designer or the architect that produces the great things.”
The collaborative nature of the process, it seems, is the key to conserving its integrity. That interaction was clearly missing when he visited Austin one day in the 1950s. The management proudly showed off the factory and their new manufacturing process, but left the designers, Cinderella-like and unseen, downstairs.
“It never occurred to them to suggest I see the design studio, wherever it was. All they wanted to show me was how the cars were made.” At the time, he says, “the cars looked ghastly — they were sort of bulbous things”. Sensing the in-house designers were too meek to push for change, the Duke suggested that Austin bring in external design help. “They said, ‘Who do you think?’ and the only one I could think of on the spur of the moment was Pininfarina [the stylistic genius behind Ferrari]. I discovered that Austin employed them practically the next afternoon and they designed the A40 Farina, which was the biggest success that they’d ever had.”
After the Duke’s work on Britannia, it’s not surprising that for its first decade the Duke of Edinburgh’s Prize for Elegant Design, as it then was, went to designers of household products. And there is, in that title, another clue to his seriousness on the subject. At the launch of the prize there was some concern about the meaning of the word “elegant”, as though the Duke intended rewarding Baroque picture framers or ballgown dressmakers. Far from it. As with “fitness for purpose”, he was using the language of the design profession, meaning elegance as in “elegant solution”: the neatest, most efficient and ingenious resolution to a problem; the desire of every and any designer when faced with a challenge.
Not surprisingly, the first winner was Charles Longman’s ultra-sleek, ultra- modern Prestcold Packaway refrigerator, a masterpiece of sharp-lined, less-is-more design for cramped living spaces. In really tight spots, it could even hang on the wall. “It’s easy to forget now that it was competing against other refrigerators which were hideous beyond words — round, bulging and offensive,” the Duke says. “The Packaway was an elegant solution to a problem, but also something just a bit better than the ordinary.”
The prize adopts a wide-ranging definition of design, taking in architecture and another of the Duke’s passions, engineering — in 1976, he helped to start the Royal Academy of Engineering, one of the group of professional and educational bodies that now puts up nominees and judges for the prize. Given the Duke’s enthusiasms, it’s no accident that engineers are frequent winners. In the Eighties — the Me Decade of design for the masses — the award rowed against the tide and went mostly to solidly practical and unglamorous non-consumer items, such as Westland’s 30 Series helicopter and a flight simulator by Rediffusion. Elegant solutions in their own field, no doubt.
Out of, perhaps, a re-examination of the Duke’s original intentions to celebrate designers rather than their products, the prize was reorientated in 1990 and renamed the Prince Philip Designers Prize. This recognised an initial awakening of Britain’s importance as a home of design. We were realising that the country now had a fully fledged, world-renowned design industry powered by people with a record of success. This was seven years before new Labour’s notion of “Cool Britannia”.
So how, almost 20 years later, as he approaches his ninth decade, does the Duke keep the spirit of the prize keen-edged? For a start he emphasises education: successful designers ought to be teaching, employing, training and encouraging young talent. That is one of the judging criteria for the prize. Oh, and he looks at the work of young designers, checking out the Royal College of Art’s degree shows. “They’re using computer-aided design and materials that never existed before. It’s astonishing how imaginative they are and how many opportunities there are — techniques and materials are appearing from nowhere, and these kids are making use of them.”
Prince Philip is clearly pleased with the progress made by the design industry. He sees great successes as well as the continuing failure of some disciplines. I’m thinking of his television buttons here. So, not surprisingly, he is biting on the bridle to see more change. “Design has become much more of an issue than it ever was. An awful lot used to be left to manufacturers, who are good at producing things but don’t necessarily have very good taste. If you go back to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Prince Consort [Prince Albert] was saying that you’ve got to have a marriage of art, manufacturing and engineering to produce good stuff. I think they split after that, but now they’re gradually coming together again.”
Gradually. There is still a war to be fought against the vagaries of fashion, branding and celebrity endorsement. Design is still an undervalued and underpaid profession, and we punters still need more help in understanding how to appreciate the value of well-designed, well-made and enduring things. There is still much to do. There is still much to celebrate. The Duke is as busy as ever.
The winner of the Prince Philip Designers Prize will be announced on Thursday Oct 15 at Buckingham Palace, designcouncil.org.uk. Watch the HRH Duke of Edinburgh talk to Kevin McCloud at timesonline.co.uk/architecture
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