Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-394)
Mrs Lesley Morris, Dr Frank O'Connor, Dr Tracy Bhamra
and Ms Clare Brass
5 FEBRUARY 2008
Q380 Lord Methuen: What role does
the Design Council, along with the Chartered Society of Designers,
the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufactures and
Commerce and the Institute of Engineering Designers, play in overseeing
and regulating the work of designers?
Mrs Morris: It is an interesting question because,
as I am sure most of you know, the Design Council has been around
for about 60 years now but until, obviously, the recent shift
in departments we were funded by the DTI, now by DIUS, and our
role has been principally to work with businesses. So it has been
principally about driving up the demand for design; raising awareness,
understanding and really helping businesses to understand where
design fits into their success and their growth. There has been
a sort of education aspect to that, obviously, but I think there
is a ramping-up, if you like, of the need to work with the supply
side of design as well as demand. Otherwise we will have a mismatch.
Interestingly, I think, sustainable design is one of those areas
where, in some cases, businesses are demanding more than designers
can supply, because they have not got that knowledge. I think
the Design Council has started to step into that area a little
bit more and say that we do need to work with the profession—with
designers and with design education. We have teamed up with the
Sector Skills Council to look at what the skills development needs
are, and we have produced a plan for that. Interestingly, probably,
at the moment, that role is not fully recognised or supported
by government, in fact, because, as I say, we are mainly driving
up the demand side. So I do think there is an increasing role
for the Design Council to play in this to promote certain areas
of skills development, promote professional development, to make
sure that we have a supply side that stays in a world-leading
position, which it has had in the past, and make sure that it
can provide enough designers to work with businesses in the most
effective way.
Q381 Chairman: In the course of design
education we do not hear very much about designers as entrepreneurs.
If one could take the analogy of, let us say, an advertising agency
where a business goes and gets a particular service from a particular
body or company, you talk about design consultants but they seem
to be shrinking violets. There may be people who work in well-lit
studios at the back of beyond, but nobody seems to know very much
about them as businesses. There is not an equivalent of, let us
say, Saatchi, in the design business that is a household name,
yet in many respects they fulfil a business function which is
just as important. Do you people just want to train designers
or do you want the trained designers who are actually business
people as well?
Mrs Morris: Absolutely. One of the skills gaps
that has very clearly been identified is designers' ability to
really understand businesses, really speak their clients' languages,
really work at that level of effective professional practice,
where, as I say, business skills are part of it. I think that
is being addressed; it is something that has been recognised,
but there are still issues around the entrepreneurial side; if
you grow a business how do you maintain that growth? How do you
really make sure that you have leadership skills within the profession?
How do you do succession planning? Those sorts of areas are things
that small design businesses are not very good at, at the moment.
The other side of this, I think, is that it is a huge culture
change, going right back to school, in terms of it is still the
case, in some areas, that you do Art & Design if you are not
academic enough to do other subjects. There is still a bit of
a preconception that (I think our engineers and architects are
different to that) if you go into design consultancy then you
are seen to be a little bit arty and a little bit "fluffy".
This is something we have to address at school level, right the
way through. We have to make a real effort, I think, to shift
that understanding and perception and to acknowledge the role
that designers have right across the board; to make sure that
the profession, if you like, is supported as a career profession,
right the way through, so that there is information available.
We have to address this skills development issue.
Q382 Lord May of Oxford: You can
draw some comfort in the fact that there is a fascinating study
out of York University of what are the subjects, carefully controlled
by the body of exams, at A Levels that are easiest to get good
marks in and hardest. Quite significantly, the ones that are hardest
are sciences and languages, and the ones that are easiest are
anything like design and art. They are real subjects, all of them,
but with the distinction of whether there are right answers and
wrong answers, and that provides a powerful incentive for kids
to move to the softer options, so that they get better grades
for university. You can derive some comfort from that, for the
wrong reason.
Mrs Morris: Absolutely.
Q383 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Perhaps
I would not use the term "softer option" but that is
another discussion. Could I just say, one significant difference
between the two choices you make for comparison—engineering
and architecture—is that both of these have a very strong
outside organisation—in engineering you have the institutes;
in architecture you have the RIBA—who can actually tell
a university what it will and will not teach. You do not have
that position.
Mrs Morris: No, and interestingly this is a
debate we have been having very recently with the Sector Skills
Council about should there be a licence to practise for designers?
Should there be regulations and those sorts of similar situations,
as you say, to some of the other professions? The truth, at the
moment, when we have done all the research and consultation that
we have just gone through, is that the industry (as you know,
the Sector Skills Council are very much listening to industry
in order to think about what development there should be) and
designers are very clearly saying they do not want that; they
do not want to be over-regulated and they certainly do not want
a licence to practise. You may well argue that there comes a point
at which things may shift; they may need to shift, but right at
the moment, now, what we are doing is working with the sector
itself to actually develop some of the issues, to think about
the skills, to think about professional practice and definitely
support, if you like, the ramping-up of that. It may well lead,
in future, towards something that is more regulated.
Q384 Lord Bhattacharyya: Following
on from Lord May, it comes to a definition of what you mean by
"designers". The majority of designs that you see today
are done by engineers, scientists and architects, or whatever
you may call them. So the design that you are talking about is,
basically, industrial design. The whole aspect of design is a
sub-subject of engineering or any of the other professions, which
are highly regulated because of liability, whereas in your case
you are talking about design in a very loose sense. I think, therefore,
it is very difficult to do any regulation when it comes to design
in your area, because you are very loose.
Mrs Morris: It is, you are absolutely right,
but it is a huge sector and it is growing. It does cover, obviously,
as you said, product and industrial, but right the way through
to digital, media, games, communications in all its aspects, interface,
design, and now, increasingly, things like service design. You
may well be right that because of that huge diversity alone it
may be that it is impossible to regulate, and at the moment nobody
is attempting to do that; what we are trying to do is say: "This
is a very important business resource, it is underused, it is
a profession that is world-renowned in this country", and
what we have to do is make sure that we have professional designers
who are operating at the best of that ability. Sustainability,
along with some of these other issues around business understanding,
knowledge, entrepreneurship and so on, just need to be paid attention
to, to make sure that we have those designers who are doing that.
Q385 Lord Howie of Troon: I am under
the impression that the RSA have some kind of award for industrial
design. I seem to remember that Ted Happold won it a few years
ago. What is it called?
Mrs Morris: They have an award called the Royal
Designer for Industry—RDIs.
Q386 Lord Howie of Troon: That is
it. That must be quite helpful.
Mrs Morris: Yes, it is, absolutely. That is
a group of very well-respected, very experienced designers.
Q387 Lord Howie of Troon: They are
quite widespread.
Mrs Morris: Absolutely, yes.
Ms Brass: May I go back, for one moment, to
the question of entrepreneurial skills of designers? We believe
that it is very important that designers are trained more deliberately
in entrepreneurial skills. Design is a subject which is about
solving problems, and it is about people. We believe that part
of the problem that we have today is just because designers are
locked into a system with their clients where they have very little
power. We think that training designers to have more entrepreneurial
skills would enable them to break out of the private sector and
work with the third sector and the public sector, and apply their
problem-solving skills to solving social and environmental problems.
That is dependent on them being more versed in business skills
and entrepreneurial skills.
Q388 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Could
I ask a question which really touches on your article, Ms Brass,
about the position over providing services rather than selling
products. I think you are suggesting, for instance, that now it
is becoming a feature that you can lease out, instead of selling,
the actual product. I think you used two examples that immediately
come to mind: one was the Electrolux situation, and the other
one the position of a motorcar. I think these are two factors
you discuss in your actual text. How successful are these? In
a sense, this is like an IPR being actually brought directly on
to the scene, is it not? How far are these actually being successful?
The motorcar situation, of course, is rather complex; there have
always been hire cars but this is a slightly different variant
on this, if I understand it correctly.
Ms Brass: It is a variant, and I believe that
the Ford project is still in the early stages of development.
The Electrolux project was a pilot programme which has now finished,
and we spoke to Electrolux yesterday to find out where they are
intending to take this project. Currently, they were not able
to tell us whether this was going to become a marketable opportunity.
There are other cases of service design which have been very successful.
I would like to mention, for example, Streetcar. There are two
things that design does, and one is identifying what is the real
problem. So the problem, in terms of transport, is getting people
from one place to another in a convenient and comfortable way.
Streetcar is a service which allows people in cities to find a
car close by which they can get into, drive to where they are
going and leave it in the street. It is a fast-growing, very successful
business. It has been helped by the creation of a very successful
service; through making it very pleasant and easy to use it has
got a fantastic interface, which has been designed by a group
of service designers. That interface issue, and how you make that
service available, how you make your customers aware of that service
and you make it a great service to use, is what will make the
difference between it being a success and a failure. There are
examples of this beginning to work. There are very few still,
but there are starting to be examples of where you do not necessarily
need a product.
Q389 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Are there
any fiscal instruments that you would suggest, or would act to
encourage, to businesses at this particular time?
Ms Brass: I am afraid, having been trained as
a designer, I am not very well versed in the fiscal aspects, so
I would not know. Is there anyone that does know?
Dr O'Connor: There are examples of lots of companies
who have been looking at leasehold products for a number of years—Xerox
is an example, in photocopiers. That has been a very successful
business model. In fact, a lot of companies in that sector have
then managed to bring the products back, refurbish them and resell
them at the same sale price as the original product price. That
is an excellent business model. You have companies like Interface,
floor tiles, exploring this route as a business model. At the
moment we are looking at one small company in Wales trying to
understand how they can do it with office furniture—the
company is called "Orangebox"—and trying to understand
how they can take office furniture back again. There are a lot
of complicated issues. One of the key things, again—and
this goes back to the business model—if you bring the product
back, eg you lease 500 products, you need to do something with
the resource. There needs to be a recycling and recovery infrastructure.
There are quite a lot of issues that need to be addressed to make
this a successful business model.
Q390 Lord Lewis of Newnham: We had
before us, last week, people who were concerned with the recycling
of commodities of this particular sort, and they pointed out to
us that some of these things they cannot recycle because it is
against the law. In fact, they have been classified as waste and
once they have been classified as waste they are no longer eligible
to go through the recycling process. This seems to me to be counter
to what we were suggesting here, but there must be other examples.
Dr O'Connor: There are lots of examples. It
goes back to design: if you can a design a product in such a way,
from the initial design stage, to be suitable for taking back
and for recycling, refurbishing, et cetera,—chose the right
materials and the right process, etc.—then it is very, very
feasible. What I am saying is the design side is not the challenge,
in many ways; it is the overall infrastructure stuff which is
the challenge—making sure that the public/private sector/social
sector all work in partnership to ensure it happens. If you have
individual customers buying one product each, and if they are
spread all over the UK, it is quite complicated, but if you have
a business-to-business model, where you are selling 500,000 products
at a time, it is a bit more feasible. It does require a change
of culture within the organisation. You can build up a relationship
with your clients and you can, obviously, increase your resource
efficiency. There are massive benefits for doing it, but you have
to demonstrate examples of where it can happen. We have an example,
at the moment, where we are trying to understand a very small
business—can it operate with the social sector, with the
private sector and with the public sector?
Lord May of Oxford: A quick comment: one of
the other things we heard the other day, in that context, was
from the IT people, that they cannot offer a service whereby you
bring back the cartridge because that would be anti-competitive,
but from what you are saying and what I hear, it would be possible
for them to offer a service whereby you leased the service of
cartridge supply with your Hewlett Packard things, and maybe we
should return to that. It would not work very well for the home
market but for businesses it may be a way of getting round this
EU regulation (which if I were Hewlett Packard I would ignore
anyhow).
Q391 Lord Lewis of Newnham: If I
can just point out, there is now, in the WEEE regulation situation,
a new phenomena arising, as far as I am concerned, and that simply
is that there is a recycling process which is opening, I believe,
in Gloucestershire, in which they actually differentiate between
what they consider to be commercial and what they consider to
be domestic. They are rather interested more in the commercial
side because in the commercial side they can guarantee quantity
and they can guarantee a unique type of quality, whereas on the
domestic side it is a mixed bag of things. So the whole concept
of recycling between the two is a very different approach.
Dr O'Connor: It is.
Mrs Morris: I think this whole area of service
is quite interesting as well. There was a project that was part
of the DOTT[28]
scheme that we ran in the North-East where designers were working
with a local community, and in this particular project with one
street, very low cost houses which needed insulating. They worked
with the local energy provider and they devised a scheme whereby
the energy provider put in insulation and then the reduction in
the bills basically paid for it. That is a scheme that is just
a service that that particular business decided as an energy provider
to provide, and it was a win-win situation. Customers did not
pay any more, but they got their houses insulated, their energy
consumption was less and over a period of time they would then
pay less.
Lord Bhattacharyya: It also depends on how long
a product lasts. You get reconditioned engines and reconditioned
starters. There are many aircraft that have reconditioned engines,
et cetera. It also depends on the cost of buying the new one and
at the same time the sustainability of that particular design,
how long it lasts. Consumer products do not last very long, they
change very quickly.
Q392 Lord Crickhowell: The Ecodesign
Centre Wales has told us that the "Government needs to build
on international co-operation to drive resource efficiency through
global supply chains. Aspects of this issue in particular should
be addressed through the Marrakech Process." However, the
Environment Agency did not seem to be very familiar with this
process and said that it certainly was not top of their agenda.
What should the Government do to exert pressure on global supply
chains and encourage sustainable design internationally?
Dr O'Connor: If they are serious about tackling
climate change and sustainable consumption reduction we have to
do something on a national perspective. We should also look at
how we can raise capacity and the recycling infrastructure in
countries where we are exporting electronic waste to. Defra is
the leading task force on sustainable products so obviously there
is activity within the UK on that in terms of the international
stage. We do not live in isolation in the UK. The key thing is
it is an international global market and we have to understand
more and more how we can work in partnership. There are a lot
of good things happening in the UK through organisations such
as Defra, but we have a long way to go. We are keen to understand
how we can do that, and provide any necessary support.
Dr Bhamra: As the UK is leading the Marrakech
Process Sustainable Products Task Force it should use that opportunity
to really show and demonstrate how sustainable products can change
the market, how by using design you can make things differently.
They can push that through encouraging the other countries who
are involved in this to look at improving sustainable consumption
and production internationally, but obviously it needs some investment
in research, development and the training of designers in order
to do that. It is not going to happen without that.
Q393 Chairman: There was one small
point that we did not cover and that was the question of labelling,
the creation of a standardised "waste label" or an "environmental
label". We know that the Forestry Stewardship Council puts
its symbol on certain furniture products and the like. How significant
do you think labelling could be in raising awareness and perhaps
even banging the drum for intelligent design?
Dr O'Connor: It needs to be international labelling
because at the moment there are lots and lots of labels out there
to do with eco products, sustainable products, packaging, et cetera,
all over the world and it is quite confusing from the consumer
perspective. Even though I have got a passion for and knowledge
of the subject I still would be quite confused between all the
labels. So I think labelling could have a role but somehow it
needs to be internationalised.
Q394 Chairman: Should the best be
the enemy of the good? We do live in the United Kingdom, we are
part of the EU, but it could kick off in Britain, surely. If we
keep saying we will wait until we get some intergalactic standard
it could take a long time.
Mrs Morris: We were talking earlier about a
public awareness aspect to this, some sort of campaign. I think
the opportunity is to link it to good design.
Ms Brass: Labelling is about giving consumers
information, but I think there are other ways of giving consumers
information. It is about companies having to be transparent about
the products and the origin of their products and how their products
are made and where they are going to be going. We could go well
beyond a simple labeling scheme. I think we live in a world of
labels and information and it can be very, very confusing. So
I think we need to look at other ways of providing transparent
information to consumers about products and companies. I think
that is also a very important potentially legislative issue.
Dr Bhamra: Labels are a good way forward but
they can be confusing for consumers, so before we add another
one let us sort out what we think we mean by good design.
Chairman: I am not the oldest member of this
Committee, but I can just about remember utility design in the
post-War period. We could perhaps Google it and find out. In the
context of this morning's discussion I kept thinking about that
sort of thing. I am too young to really remember it. I have a
vague recollection! Some of these grey beards around here will
probably be able to provide me with graphic information. You have
been very fulsome in your responses this morning. You have taken
longer than we had anticipated, but we are very grateful. If there
is anything else you feel that you would like to add afterwards,
please feel free to send it to us. Equally, we may be in touch
with you when we look at the evidence if there is something that
we would like to take up with you again. Thank you very much for
your time this morning.
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