Designs on Tomorrow’s New World

How we shape our lives today will impact on future generations, says designer Janice Kirkpatrick.

Design is a much bandied about word, misused, abused and almost entirely linked to clothes in some people’s minds. The reality is that design is a strong influence on the way we live, now and in the future. This is the argument behind a new series I’ve written for BBC2.

The six programmes each focus on a different subject, such as the chair or the body, to illustrate how design shapes our world. The series was shot on an extremely tight schedule between May and October last year in Britain, Japan, Iceland and America.

Filming and writing on the hoof for weeks on end is not glamorous. In America we did 20 interviews in 19 locations in 10 states over 28 days. It was exhausting, but the up side was meeting some great people, seeing some strange sights and hearing even stranger stories.

In Phoenix, Arizona, in a shopping centre so hot we were continually sprayed with a fine mist of water, I met Patti Moore, a gerontologist. In her twenties, Patti became frustrated with lack of information on the effects of ageing, so she decided to experience it first-hand and transformed herself into a woman 50 years older.

She wore glasses to impair her vision, clothes that restricted her movements and applied make-up to create the lines and wrinkles of old age. For two years Moore lived a double life in various American cities. Outside she was an old lady, her frailty largely ignored by others. Inside she was a young woman playing the role of observer.

She stopped when youths beat her up for no other reason other than she was old and dispensable. The attack left her injured but with a mission to make the world a better place for the elderly. She has since designed new products specifically for the older generation.

For the programme which explores the chair, I visited the Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Ohio where we filmed inmates manufacturing office chairs as part of a rehabilitation programme. I interviewed Tumbleson, an inmate specially selected by the prison to answer my list of approved questions. Unfortunately I couldn’t allude to his past history or current environment, including the daily grind of being baked in an institutional oven that stank of male sweat and playground manners. Stripping him of his personality was the ultimate punishment, it seems.

Guards and police departments use Tumbleson’s chairs, but he can’t. Inmates are denied chairs, because they are viewed by the authorities as a privilege, something which would express the owner’s individuality and taste.

My most poignant moment came the evening before I was due to interview Kari Stefansson, a biotechnologist and entrepreneur aiming to unlock the genetic causes of the world’s worst diseases by putting the medical records of Iceland’s population under the microscope. I met a woman with multiple sclerosis, who was profoundly opposed to the gene project. She feared if her illness was found to be inherited, her children would not get medical insurance. She, more than anyone else, summed up our addiction to improving the world without always being able to live with the consequences of our creativity.

This series has been a long time coming to fruition. In 1996, May Miller, executive producer from BBC Scotland, called to ask if I’d like to write it. May’s request came out of the blue; I’d done bits and pieces for BBC over the years but nothing as big as this.

I co-manage the design business Graven Images and do some writing, so being asked to commit my thoughts to paper in a structured way was okay, but it felt good to be doing something new with my well-worn skills. I borrowed old programme proposals to learn the shape and style and set to work drafting my proposal. In 1998, when I’d assumed the project was dead, the BBC called to say that they wanted to make my series the following year for transmission in 2000.

Early on I realised I didn’t want to write about “design” in the ordinary sense. I wanted to use the chance to tell stories about the explosion in creativity.

This process is common to all of us. It’s the thing that separates us from other animals. Our most common natural resource, creativity allows us to make civilisation from a wilderness of dust and rituals.

Designers are among a long list of alchemists, scientists, assorted royalty, witches, architects and industrialists: People who use their power to change the world. They manipulate others by creating a kind of huge stage set on which their subjects unconsciously play out the drama of their lives.

It’s hard to tell a complicated story in six half-hour bursts, so I decided to explain why the world is the shape it is by focusing on the chair, the word, the wheel, the home, the body and the patent.

Chairs are a good place to start because we don’t need chairs to sit down, but chairs reveal our particular place in the scheme of things. The chairman controls and the Queen rules from her throne. There’s a chair for everyone and every occasion.

James Dyson, inventor of the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner, tells us how patents allow ideas to be owned in another programme.

The wheel study explores our addiction to speed and how reinvention accelerates us into the future. A Tibetan monk and Neil Mackenzie, the superbike champion, talk about the technical and spiritual dimensions of these seemingly simple objects. In Virginia scientists are building a smart road where intelligent wheels will drive cars for us.

Our homes show how we’ve so many lifestyles to choose from that we’ve lost our sense of place. In our rush to consume products from other cultures we’ve almost forgotten what its like to be here and now.

I couldn’t ignore our bodies as they’re the starting point for almost everything we’ve ever made. Throughout history we’ve idealised and standardised our bodies then applied the resulting proportions and measurements to our city plans, buildings, tools and clothes. In our determination to find one size that fits everyone we’ve created a world that fits none of us perfectly.

Today we are struggling to reconcile our biological need for faster progress with the cataclysmic potential of our new inventions. The result is that we may have lost control of our most basic human birthrights: Our bodies and our creativity.

What will tomorrow’s world look like when we are all wholly owned subsidiaries of private companies and public institutions, when we’ve changed our bodies, the very things that gave it scale and proportion in the first place?