‘We’re going to hear a lot about the designer as researcher, as entrepreneur and as initiator,’ predicted director Richard van der Laken before the start of What Design Can Do 2014. Naturally, having handpicked the speakers himself, his guess was pretty accurate.
Minister for Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker then added a fourth design persona: the ‘competent rebel’ who can change the way we look at things. She wants to ensure the education of ‘competent rebels and specialists side by side. Our technical capabilities combined with our hopes and dreams.’
These two sides of learning — technical capability and dreams — intertwine in the work of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. She is bringing creativity into synthetic biology — ‘design at the DNA scale’ — and her investigative design research explores how new technologies might influence everything from food additives and patents to terrorism and even the weather.
Too much of that hoping and dreaming championed by Bussemaker has a downside, warned Lucas Verweij. ‘Design often generates hope, but no solution,’ he said. ‘It’s turned into a hope industry.’ Designers raise hopes that turn out to be phantom solutions. A fifth design persona has appeared: the designer as illusionist.
Inspiration is everywhere
One designer with no illusions is Paul Smith. He told of his steady rise from modest beginnings, in a shop measured 12 by 12 feet, to head of a fashion emporium with over 350 shops around the world.
How did the man become a global brand? ‘Do things which are right, not which are easy,’ he advised. ‘You can find inspiration in everything. If you can’t, you’re not looking properly.’ Lateral thinking is the motto. The yellow, green, grey and black stripes on a shirt find their inspiration in a church interior in Lithuania.
His job is to produce work with enough commercial appeal to satisfy the buying agents on one side of the catwalk, and the critical appeal to convince the fashion editors on the other side. ‘Get the balance right,’ as he put it, is why his dreams sell well.
Fiction as laboratory
Imagination grounded in the real world also informs the work of Richard The and Willy Wong. The’s interactive projects shape the output of Google Creative Lab, most notably in the Google Glass. While product designers were considering the shape and functionality of the device, The jumped ahead and made a video to show how Google Glass might be used in daily life, presenting a fiction as though it already existed.
In a similar manner, Willy Wong took a commission to redesign New York City’s tourism campaign and reframed it to encompass a wider agenda that encouraged citizens to plant trees, reduce energy consumption and much more besides. From a straightforward brief to boost tourism figures by streamlining information, Wong articulated a bigger vision to unify and enhance the city.
Tomorrow depends on now
Improving city life is also the aim of Carlo Ratti. ‘Design is about inventing tomorrow’s city,’ he said. He does it with the digital data we generate. ‘Big Data is about understanding our environment, analysing it, and drawing conclusions that are not about architecture or design but about lives. The society we inhabit tomorrow depends on the society we are creating today.’
The design focus on change, innovation and renewal is subjected to scrutiny by Professor Timo de Rijk. Design is a future-oriented profession and denies history. ‘This future-oriented approach with a perpetual motion of change has penetrated deep into design practice, into design education and the practice of design history,’ said de Rijk. He argued for ‘a critical examination of the role of design and the designer in the world’ so that we can ‘form a much more accurate picture of the practice, discussions and ambitions in today’s world of design’.
Nelly Ben Hayoun finished the day with a French flourish by offering us a glimpse into her weird and wonderful world that looks neither to the future nor the past. With an orchestra composed of space scientists and the design of emergency procedures in the space programme, she takes us to a playground on another planet where the only aim, to use the words of Paul Smith, ‘is to have a lovely day’.