Thank you very much. I want to repeat the welcome that Celeste gave. Thank you all for coming. And especially thank you to Tim for coming all this way to the end of the world to talk to us about design. As Celeste says, Tim is the director of the Design Museum in London and has been for six years. In his capacity as director, I think Tim has really used the opportunity to test the dimensions of design, not only in the way we conventionally see it as objects and things, but also in terms of film, fashion, technology, and innovation. So clearly this is an interesting subject, and I want to talk to Tim about it. Tim is a very good broadcaster and interviewer, and he has interviewed me many times. So it's a nice opportunity to turn the tables, and tonight he will be the subject. But I do want to introduce very briefly some of the themes. Clearly, the issues we want to deal with in this exhibition or have tried to touch on is, what is design? Now, all of us in the design profession have had to reconsider our focus given our current anxieties about the environment, how we make things, why we make them, the effect of consumerism, and in terms of community and purpose. I just want to give a brief overview from my perspective about design in the Galician context. This is a rather beautiful tool. Can we maybe turn the lights down a tiny bit? Those of us who are a bit romantic about design continuously return to the sort of honest objects that had great functional requirements. We always somehow see something extremely honest and beautiful at the same time in these objects. This is clearly a sort of romantic projection as well, no doubt. And you could argue that these objects are much more innocent, but in a way, every time we make something, we design, and there's something very interesting about how making protects designing. If you make something well, there are inevitably design decisions. I have many weaknesses, but one is to collect ceramic bowls. I started many years ago in Japan, Korea, and China when such objects were affordable. The reason I collect bowls is because they contain this utilitarian component. On one hand, they are the universal object; every culture has a bowl defined by its use. But every bowl also has a beauty in the way it is made. Within one object, you have a universal understanding. This appeals to me enormously as a design object. Within the history of design in the UK, there was a strong movement in the late 19th century, the Arts and Crafts movement, which was a revolt against industrialization. We understood that industrialization would isolate making. Romantics like William Morris and Pugin tried to stop time, romanticizing the importance of craftsmanship. That became the Arts and Crafts movement, and it is still philosophically stuck in our minds. Counter to that, at the beginning of the 20th century, we had the Bauhaus, which instead of refusing industrialization, embraced it as a way of bringing beauty to many. This is Wagenfeld making beautiful glass containers. He was a student at the Bauhaus and became an extremely important designer. This was the romantic idea of modernism: industry engaged with design can produce beauty for the most people at the lowest price. We know that tendency became consumed into consumerism, and design became part of selling things. We are producing too much, consuming too much, and producing waste. All of us as designers and makers are guilty of this. Design has become embedded in consumerism and the commodification of our world. Instead of a cheap pair of glasses, the same glasses are much more expensive because they are design glasses. Design has gone from something about honesty to something not about honesty. Bringing this back to Galicia, this is Sargadelos, an interesting moment in Galician manufacture and culture. A company that thought about how to make things with beauty, addressing a cultural context with a strong design aesthetic. In my opinion, it was a great moment of these forces coming together. On the same note, there was a moment in Italy after the war in the 1950s and 1960s. This is Gio Ponti, my hero, where post-war Italy used design in a genuine way to put back the pieces after the war, recreating beauty, meaning, and skills. Finally, this is a eulogy. I edited Domus for a while, and Jasper Morrison, a good friend, wrote an article each month for me. This was about the Thonet 14, one of the most extraordinary objects ever designed, in continuous production for 160 years. It became the closest thing to a universal object, about how to make something by bending wood, originated in Vienna in the 1840s. You could buy them in Argentina, Moscow, and it was an extraordinary example of good design applied to industrial scale. That's where I want to leave it. This is an introduction to talk about the relationship between making things and designing things. In the context of Galicia, thinking about where design sits, I'm concerned that the word design has become meaningless. If we talk about designer jeans or designer glasses, what does it mean? It just means desirable or thought about. It's clearly a time when the design community is looking beyond the design of sofas and furniture. But Tim, in the last six years where you've been hunting around and looking at what's going on, what are the positive things you've seen? Where do you see design? Is my romantic idea of the Thonet chair a dead idea because we don't want universal objects anymore? Is design more about technology? Where are we in terms of the design focus?
I'm going to stand up because this is beautifully designed but no one at the back can see. Hello. I think design has always been involved with technology. Design is the application of certain principles of formation with the technology that's possible, so there's a symbiotic relationship. I gave up after about a year and a half trying to define what design was in any meaningful way, realizing that having been in the art world trying to define what art was was interesting for certain creative people but in a museum context virtually pointless. I was interested in where design met other areas. I came up with the idea that design was fundamentally about problem-solving, but it can be other things too. Even in fashion, someone raised the issue: what problems are being solved? How we adorn our bodies, how we present ourselves is still a problem resolved through design. What was interesting to me was that the art world preached inclusivity and boundary blurring, but it turns out the art world is quite territorial. It doesn't like designers becoming artists or architects becoming artists, though it doesn't mind artists co-opting across boundaries. That's just an observation. You talk about the design community, David. For the purposes of this talk and humanity, there has to be some sense of community among creative people, but fundamentally individual creative people respond in their own way. Design is a much more collective activity than art; it is collaborative. Most people don't design airports in their bedrooms. It has to be commissioned, funded, a collective activity. That was interesting. Design is also a great way of looking at the world to draw attention to how things are put together and made. At the museum, we do pure design exhibitions, but we also use design as a framework to look at film. We did a history of football over 150 years through the lens of design, from technology to balls to pitches to mediation to graphic design to the notion of play. It was a great way of looking at something. Design affords all those different ways. The thing that gives me cause for optimism is also the problem: the best designers acknowledge their complicity in mass production and fueling mass consumption. There's a realization that good design is our way out of the screwed-up relationship with our planet. It's a big picture idea. What also interests me is using design to look at things from a different perspective. This looks like a tapestry of beautiful flowers, decorative, but it's produced from an algorithm that takes a particular place. We did it in a garden in Kensington and a park in London. The algorithms are fed with soil conditions and climate, and the algorithm comes up with the best plantation for pollinators. This is a pollinator's view of the best planting for bees. Then if you go to the next slide, have I got the control? This is the beginnings of the garden. We did it with children. These children in a local school and Daisy Ginsberg, the designer who produces the algorithms and the tapestry on show at the Design Museum, gives a different perspective that is enacted by a school group or landscape gardener to plant the best thing. It's that shift in perspective from human-centric design that excites me most, trying to see things from the perspective of other species. That gives us the best opportunity to shift how we design with and for the planet rather than just for human need. That is a romantic idea because humans are survivalists, selfish gene constructions, but this shift is interesting. Where it all began for me was this. These are tiny sculptural creations that look like post-surrealist humanoid figures, but they are by a design practice called Dunne & Raby, speculative design pioneers. Each construction is based on biological analysis of how different species see human beings. Some see us as a pheromone trail, others as a ball of energy, others smell us. This was a manifesto piece in thinking about seeing from a different perspective. We started to work with designers who were working from that standpoint. That's the exciting part. The interesting thing is you've talked about good design. We have a big wall at the Design Museum that is crowdsourced, the most popular design. The designer label is very low on that. There are plastic buckets, bikes, shoes, the Philippe Starck lemon squeezer. I thought we could do a wall of bad design, and everyone got excited, but I chickened out because I don't think it's fair to have a wall of shame based on public taste. But it's not a bad idea to go public on that. Finally, I had a brilliant letter about three years ago. Sadly, the signature was scrawled, no phone number, no email, no address. I couldn't read who it was. Stereotypically, it was in green ink and wavery, so I reckon a woman in her 80s. She wrote to me calmly: 'Dear Mr. Marler, I am writing to complain about the design of tin openers. I have had three in the last three years and been hospitalized once. One cannot function, and the other is whatever. And while you're at it, parking wardens.' Then she went off about the British obsession with parking. I thought it was brilliant that the director of the Design Museum was the only place she felt she could write to complain about bad design. Sadly, she didn't give me the opportunity to write back and ask for more details. I thought we could have a competition among young designers to come up with the best tin opener for this woman. I couldn't do that. I like that idea. Where do we go with our complaints about bad design? The market says products fail. Where do we go with our approval for good design? It's how we use it, invariably market driven. It would be wonderful to have some sense of collaboration in evolving and making better designs, which brings us to your area of practice, placemaking, an area now more publicly demanded that we collaborate and consult. We don't tend to consult on the stuff we make; people just buy it or don't, or they hospitalize themselves.
Because it's the market that delivers that.
And the only way we can influence the market is by not buying, and that's our feedback.
The only other feedback is to write to you.
Although by the same token, if I am responsible for all bad design, which I'm happy to do, I'm also responsible for all good design. So you can take a huge amount of credit.
On that. If we see design as innovation and if we take me as a typical romantic designer of a certain period, like Jasper, I love these objects, the timeless object, the Thonet chair. But the timeless object hardly exists anymore. For two reasons: the world produces a different type of object, we buy a new one every few years, built-in redundancy. Secondly, the market needs to keep supplying. So the idea of creating a chair you'll have for life is counter-market because they want you to buy another chair next year. How do we reconcile these different ideas of design? Even the tools I showed at the beginning are objects that have perfected themselves within their own terms of reference, carrying skills and intelligence. If we've surrendered that process to a consumerist or commodified market, how do we regain control of the tin opener? Because you're saying it might be possible in placemaking, where people come together and express that.
Well, I think the post-modern condition about taking from the past what is most useful affords a kind of liberalism, a freedom, but also confusion. More people are looking to relearn lessons of the past. We did a workshop about fixing stuff and it was inundated. The repair shop mentality is an area where control can be regained. The luxury market can be hijacked to counter mass consumption. For example, Patek Philippe: you own it for your lifetime and pass it on. Producing things built to last and handed down is something we should push. I heard a fashion house, maybe Hermes, say they're not a luxury brand but for everyone. That's nonsense. They should say they produce things that live through decades and generations, sustainable in that sense. We did an exhibition called More than Human, looking at non-human-centric design. You and I were at the Museu del Pobo de Barcelona this afternoon and saw many things similar to objects in that exhibition. For example, mass fishing with huge plastic nets decimating oceans. Some solutions from research units look like the wicker baskets and netting that small communities use sustainably. So there is much we can learn from the past.
Yeah, but let me interrupt you there. The fishermen who are actually fishing don't want to use those things anymore because they're inefficient. The people who like them are students of architecture at Harvard University who are regaining this idea of a tangible and repairable society. So how do we realign this? You use the word repair. When I grew up, everything new was exciting and better. Now we have lost that commitment to innovation for its own sake. We're suspicious of it, and I think we should be. In architecture, we're looking more at repairing than exploiting. We can't extract without consideration anymore. Every time we build, we have to rethink. This is changing our mind enormously. Everyone got excited about the rocket going to Mars, but we're not going. People said, 'Haven't we got enough to work out here? Isn't there enough to fix on our own planet?' It feels like we aren't taking the simple things more seriously. That's why I still like the idea of the physical. I don't believe only nostalgic romantics like me still like a beautiful old chair. We all still like objects and would like to treasure things more. Your story of repairing...
But it's how do we change it? Education. I think generations a lot younger than us now feel fundamentally that the climate emergency is the most important thing. We could take the cynical view that eventually when they have to earn a living and support families, they become cynical again. I'm not so sure. I think there's a change through education. There's a generation emerging that will assume power in the next two decades who understand the mess we are in. That's to do with education and taste. Modernism put forward the idea that newness and originality and endless recycling of the avant-garde was the way. Now there's a more nuanced approach. The other thing is money. You rightly point out the fisherman is an economic thing. There was a scheme with a marine charity in the UK, a natural harbor off the coast of Dorset where oyster beds had been wrecked from dredging. The fishermen were paid a subsidy through the charity, and over two years oyster beds were replanted. Within five years, the ocean bed and fish recovered. One problem with the ocean is you can't see the damage, out of sight out of mind. They started to see that with some subsidy, it became a much more fertile area to fish once things were renewed.
But someone has to intervene.
And it's not a commercial intervention. It may have commercial long-term benefits and make commercial sense. But who is the agency that is going to do that? That seems to be the problem. Take another example, housing. We all know we should be producing affordable housing. We should be producing everything that people can afford. We are now getting to a general affordability crisis. Why? Because everything is leveraged, our whole economy is about making more money from something. You don't make something without making money from it. There has to be reward. Take the Bauhaus example: they believed you can apply design to industry to make the most beautiful objects for the lowest price for the most people. That's the beautiful dream, because industry and technology allow you to do it. But they forgot that the commercial motivation behind that is not going to allow you to do that. In the same way, if you wanted to build low-cost housing and finance it through investors, it's very difficult to say to investors, 'I want to build the best possible housing for the lowest price for the most people' because the investors, where do you get the money? Who makes the money? Unless we intervene in this commercial mechanism, all we're going to do is keep putting prices up. Every time we sell something, we have to make more money from it. You make a cup of coffee, you've got to make a huge profit. We are in the land here where you're not allowed to do that, which I like a lot. If you go to London, a coffee can be...
Seven quid in the designer.
Try to do that in Galicia. So I think there's something in my opinion, and this is a silly anecdote in a way, but unless you can put a break, a sort of social break on what's acceptable, and unless we can find other methods by which we can produce high quality without it only being for a luxury market, because that's where quality is migrating. And the other danger is if we're not...
We will keep products affordable but only by reducing quality. And so, that's my sort of anxiety about it. It's one thing to observe and be more cognizant of these issues and articulate them better, but unless we really grapple with the machinery, the agencies, and the market which delivers these things, it's quite difficult for us to make a significant change.
Well, it is and you and I can't fix late free market capitalism. We can do something through education, which shifts perceptions and taste, but it's funny you should say that. If you just move next slide. The one of the things that design can do to help resolve, and it's small scale, but this is the whole issue around environmentalism, isn't it? I mean, which is why recycling our stuff when, you know, Trump's America is reneging on all contractual obligations in that. It's we still got to keep doing it. You know, we still have to keep small incrementalism. And design can actually move the next one. I'll do that later. This, yeah. But, so design research is the key area, and the best design companies and the best companies spend a huge amount of money on design research, but at times of economic downturn, at times of hardship, research and development is always the thing that goes out the window. So, actually, there can be some public-spirited design opportunities that could be for everyone. So, this is something that the Design Museum has done. We have this unit called Future Observatory. We are now the national center for design research for the green transition. We get funding from research councils in the UK, which we don't have ourselves. We distribute it to different postgraduate departments as a network around the United Kingdom with certain projects that they have pitched ideas to us, and then we fund these. And a lot of it's big thinking. So, how do we get rid of all single-use plastic in the Scottish National Health Service? That's something that Strathclyde University postgraduate design department are now working on. Now, the problem with that is it might take them 5 years. They may actually crack it, or they may come up with a brilliant academic solution of three options, which you could choose, but it becomes more speculative. So, that's important that we think big, and we think, you know, there's another whole funded project about Rathlin Island off the coast of Northern Ireland. So, there's a kind of whole cultural infrastructure there. So, it's how we can the most sustainable way of getting rid of effluents and human waste and recycle waste within a community. So, this could become a blueprint for the future. But, much more concretely, excuse the pun because no concrete's involved, we've just produced this stone well, we, but the Future Observatory commissioned Groupwork. You probably know Amin Taha is an architect whose practice in London works in stone. And Amin Taha and Arup and the research department at University College have come up with this is called a stone demonstrator. And it's the three-stories one-to-one scaled model which is used entirely of it's stone. It's with the there are steel tendons. It's pre-tensiled compressed stone that makes the structure. And actually the self-supporting stone bricks on the outside, there's a laminated timber roof. There are kind of wooden joists as well as stone structure there. And the point about this is as a basic technological model, it reduces the carbon footprint of a steel frame by 70%. And if you use traditional London bricks and concrete combinations, it reduces it by 90%. Now, the point about this is it's been constructed and it's there for industry to take. We don't want ownership of it. We don't mind some IP down the line for future projects. But, we're trying to get the government housing ministry to look at this and say I mean, it's also economically, it's as economic as any other form of construction, cheaper than some, no more expensive than others. But, the carbon footprint is so much lower. And we're saying, but no one's taking a moment you have to get through various government levels of bureaucracy and saying, there's a housing crisis in the UK. You want to build much more housing. Use this as the basis. You can architects can use this structure and design a whole range of different kind of housing solutions. So, just this is a small idea. If design research is commissioned and put into the public domain for broader use. I mean, developers are actually quite interested in this. But, we also we also showcased an all-wooden building about 3 years ago. We the construction components of that. And the problem with that is, although it's incredibly sustainable and fire-treated laminated timber is unburnable, because of the tragedies of Grenfell Tower, if you know about that. But, anyway, a major public housing complex that burned down and hundreds of people lost their lives, the algorithms of insurance companies won't insure a wooden building over 10 stories, even though it's perfectly safe. So, that now can't go into the public domain. It can only be private developers, because it can't go into the public domain. This can. The key is, how do you sell it? How do you say to people, look, just take it. Here's the technology. We'll show you, you can download the whole issue. You can speak to the architects. You can speak to the engineers. Build it. And in fact, if you build it, it's great for us. We'll keep promoting it and more and more people can do it. Now, hasn't taken off yet. It's only been up about 3 months and English winter doesn't necessarily encourage people to come and look at a model of this scale. But, this kind of initiative, I think it's one of the few ways that museums can set agendas. Museums always talk about setting agendas. Museums don't. They tend to reflect the agenda in various areas, showcase it, take it to broader audiences. And it's much better if they're honest about that. But, if you're working in design research, you can. And obviously our role as museum is to leverage funding, is to commission design practices and design research departments to look into these problems and then make it publicly available. That's one model, that's one way of doing it.
But the challenge is to get that accepted by industry.
Yeah, and government. I mean, if government when the housing minister was showed interest and got sacked or stepped down, so we now have to wait for the next one. But if somebody at that level said, 'Right, there's going to be a national building initiative which we need to do and we're going to use this model for sustainable building.' That would be a major breakthrough.
Isn't that the reality that without political direction, these things can't they can be ideas, they can be researched, companies can be interested, but unless they are encouraged financially and administrations and governments take responsibility for pushing that, without that, it's very difficult to join these things up.
It is, but individuals are increasingly conscious of their carbon footprint and are demanding products, buildings, public spaces that can show environmental consideration.
