Britain and Modernity

Design is certainly a component in our national culture. We don’t have the option to stand outside culture to get a clearer picture of it, because we’re all part of it, design no more or less so than dry-cleaning, dog breeding or drinking, except that they might be rather easier to define.

The point about design is that it’s just another name for creativity. To ‘design’ something is to ‘create’ something in a structured way, based on our experiences and beliefs, usually for a specific reason.

So how do we make contemporary things; globally desirable products and services that reflect the place where they were conceived, things that are recognisably British? Should we make things that are recognisably British, Scottish or European, or does it really matter?

I think it does matter.

The knowledge revolution lets us choose how and where we live and whether or not we want to live in the past, the present or the future. We can go home to a Manhattan style loft or a Tudor semi complete with Mediterranean kitchen. We can watch the History Channel while eating authentic Indian food. If we get bored we simply flick channels or rearrange the furniture.

All of this ethnic and historicist window dressing only masks our desire to deal with the difficult issues of designing to represent the cultural diversity that typifies our country. Unfortunately many designers think inclusivity is an impossible brief so they’ll make ‘neutral’ products and places instead. But it would be a disaster if laziness or political correctness stopped us expressing ourselves because many kinds of difference create an inclusive society while neutrality satisfies no one.

The more we submerge ourselves in other people’s cultures while they claim joint ownership of the English language, the more important it becomes that we define and express who we are and what makes us special. We’re all equal and different and British and entitled to celebrate that. How else will we, and the things we make and do, survive, evolve and remain visible in the global marketplace? Britain will have to express itself or die. Design or die!

While it’s important that we don’t lose sight of what we are and where we are, it’s also important that we don’t lose our sense of time; of living in the present. Designers create the props and backdrops, the objects and architecture that allow us play out the dramas of our everyday lives. If we want to live in the present we have to keep making new things in new ways. We are destined to continually improve rather than just reinvent the wheel.

The future is scary and sexy and inevitable. Britain will inhabit the future or it will simply fall by the wayside. Because creativity is becoming an increasingly professional activity it separates creators from consumers. Those who create will control more of the environments and the lives of those who don’t. Creative power will reside with those who make and distribute things, not those who have to buy them.

The synthetic world grows ever deeper and becomes less distinguishable from the natural one. Designers have more power and therefore need more understanding and control because mistakes made in machine code and genetic code will linger for longer. We invented design education and the tools and methodologies that grease the wheels of creativity and allow us to identify, understand and exploit opportunities for new products and services.

Speed and change are characteristics of our identity and because they’re so much part of us it makes it hard for us to see their value clearly. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the slippery and intangible thing that is Britain might be better expressed as a Website that a tangible lump of geography.
We have the good fortune to live in Philip Dodd’s ‘mongrel’ society; a place that encourages conflict, confrontation and diversity—the essential preconditions for creativity. And of course we have the English language that, like us, has an astonishing capacity for change, reinvention and communication. Our language is a huge asset in tomorrow’s world, in all its different dialects, because it’s also the language of science and technology and it’s spoken in some form or other by one quarter of the world’s population. We’ve also got rich and varied history, a distinguished educational system (that’s not perfect), and healthy street culture.

But how can we be modern if modernity changes with every moment? For me, modernity is a willingness to consider and try new ways of doing things. We can’t change history but we can reinterpret it and represent it and make it ours. One thing is for sure—the cycle of change is speeding up and we’ll have to stop prevaricating over Diana’s death and whether or not the Dome was a good thing and get on with the next thing.

I think the recent exercise in Cool Britannia, naff though it was, was useful. It gave us the permission to accelerate the creative process and examine, and even commodify, some of our cultural characteristics without having to waste most of our energy explaining or apologising for what were doing. It simply allowed us to get on with the job of letting our country evolve rather than actively preventing change.

Our heritage is no longer a burden of crumbling stately piles and gloomy castles or the grind and filth of heavy industries. Thanks to Sir Walter Scott, Trainspotting, Fergie, Tom Jones, Spice Power and Tim Berners Lee we’ve liquidised our ancient assets and turned them into thriving businesses. We might be ancient but we’re justified in capitalising on our heritage and at long last making the past our own and hopefully the future too.

I’m going to quickly show four projects:

The first two are designed to be inclusive. They’re for your granny or your brother. They borrow from a range of cultures and traditions but they aren’t neutral.

The second two are culturally exclusive. Red Lemon is for computer nerds talking about themselves to people who share their values.

RATT is for clubbers with want to party in a specific type of way.

The first two are broad and soft and the last two are narrow and strong tasting, none are neutral.

Favorit and Tinderbox are both mongrel environments. They’re everything: café, bar, restaurant, coffee shop, deli and sandwich bar at different times for different people—the environment is a kind of ‘loose-fit’ and doesn’t impose itself on what happens in it. It’s loose and changeable. The bric-a-brac of product gives it its personality. Hierarchy of different opportunities to use it, to sit and interact in different ways. It sells to many people that mean we have to be all things to all people without becoming bland.

Red Lemon … in contrast this company hasn’t got a history—it’s only a couple of years old. It uses its environment to express as clearly as it can what it is about in order to attract people to work for it. It’s a lure to buy and attract the best of a single group of people to work for them, not to sell. It talks to one group of people allowing us, as designers to be very much more specific in our message.

Room at the Top is also a single pitch to single group of people.