Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400-419)
Miss Holly McCain, Miss Lizzie Dutton, Mr Mark Adams
and Dr Jonathan Chapman
5 FEBRUARY 2008
Q400 Lord Howie of Troon: I am still
a bit confused. Is there any regulation of the profession?
Miss Dutton: Of product designers themselves?
No.
Q401 Lord Howie of Troon: You think
there ought to be some, do you not?
Miss McCain: It works both ways. There needs
to be clearer legislation that needs to be communicated to designers
better. There is legislation that says you have to consider the
life cycle, but that is not necessarily very stringent or moderated
at the moment. We found that a lot of businesses were quite confused
about what legislation there is at the moment and what they have
to do.
Q402 Lord Howie of Troon: What you
have asked for is a more recognised regulatory body.
Miss McCain: It was specifically in terms of
implementing eco-design within businesses and looking at how to
apply eco-design strategies within businesses rather than a whole
regulatory body for the whole design industry.
Q403 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Does
that not presume there is a right or a wrong answer to that particular
question? It seems to me that with some issues we are dealing
with here you have really got to balance one set of factors off
against another. You get other factors coming in such as purely
the prejudice of whether you like the look of the thing or not.
Miss Dutton: That is the complexity of the situation,
balancing between giving designers the opportunity to look at
alternative solutions and the issues for each particular product
design case and giving them guidance and regulation that says
in this set of scenarios this is going to be the way that we all
move forward in one direction. Sometimes that is a better solution
because it forces everyone's hand together in one direction.
Q404 Lord Howie of Troon: I am a
civil engineer and I am regulated by the Institute of Civil Engineers,
the Institute of Structural Engineers, the Royal Academy of Engineers
and the Engineering Council. This is quite easy to bear by the
way because this regulation is not heavy. Are you thinking of
something along the line of these institutions with control over
the qualifications, ethical behaviour and professional behaviour
of the design industry?
Miss Dutton: There will be an opportunity for
that. I think the Design Council's research more recently has
found that the skills and training would be a more appropriate
way to move forward on that issue, but that has to be balanced
with the regulation.
Q405 Lord Methuen: How should businesses
be educated to understand how waste reduction could confer a genuine
competitive advantage?
Dr Chapman: I see it as being something that
comes from the root of education.[38]
Obviously a business is something made up of people, and the skills
and visions of the people within it, just as this group here is
made up of skills and visions of people. I think it is really
essential, therefore, that the people who are graduating from
further and higher education institutions in the UK are skilled
up and qualified so that when they are injected into companies,
regardless of size, they can start to equip that institution with
the knowledge and the expertise to enable positive change. There
is a second point there, which is something that came up in the
earlier session, about entrepreneurialism and the way in which,
at best, design is an entrepreneurial opportunist enterprise,
which is a lot of what is being paid for by the client. Sometimes
we call them clients, but as people decide to invest in design
a lot of what they are investing in is an entrepreneurial, opportunist,
unique and external perspective that can create new scenarios
and new potential for situations. I would argue that the earlier
discussion about some sort of regulatory system would need to
be very carefully managed if put in place. One thing I know about
entrepreneurs is that they do not thrive in overly-regulated environments
particularly well.
Mr Adams: I think, if I may, that is my cue
because my general tenor would be to look at the carrot side of
it rather than the stick from the point of view of the entrepreneur.
For example, in direct answer to your question about education,
a very good way of educating the businesses is to increase the
cost of waste because that then directly forces inward looking
up, what should we do about it. That is education in itself. Equally,
we should be pointing out to businesses what we have been able
to do. Vitsoe, for example, in terms of getting ourselves to a
business where we produce virtually no waste, has found that there
are cost savings everywhere. There is a lot of investment, there
is a lot of effort that has to go into it, but eventually the
cost savings come through. We have been very surprised by the
extent to which the cost savings have outweighed what we thought
they were going to be. We had to find that out for ourselves.
There was nobody "educating" us in that.
Q406 Lord Methuen: So it needs to
come from the top down.
Mr Adams: It certainly does.
Q407 Lord Methuen: Would legislation
obligating companies to design out waste be an effective strategy
and what would need to be included in such legislation?
Mr Adams: I would still urge the carrot rather
than the stick. Legislation implies a stick.
Dr Chapman: WEEE legislation keeps coming up.
One thing that it really does is it brings certain conversations
to the table, particularly at boardroom level, which I actually
do not think would have come about otherwise. Conversations to
do with selling less do not sit well in those contexts. WEEE legislation
creates leverage, but it also brings about a new paradigm that
was not there before, which gives design an opportunity to reinvent
itself and also reinvent the way we do things, and the way we
think about processes such as consumption and waste.[39]
Q408 Lord May of Oxford: I resist
the temptation to embark on a disquisition about carrots and sticks
because of course the free market is a great tool where it works,
but it demonstrably does not deliver pharmaceutical products for
tropical diseases in developing countries and so on. So a different
take on this inherent tension that is often there between producing
environmentally-friendly products, which is ultimately what we
are talking about, and selling lots of stuff, to what extent do
you think one could help resolve that in a manner that is more
carrot than stick by moving away from selling a product as such
to selling services in the sense of the manufacturer essentially
retaining ownership of the product? How do you think that would
work? Do you think it would work? What is the experience of that?
Mr Adams: It is the transition we are actively
looking at at Vitsoe with long-lived furniture. We have, arguably,
been accruing very little of the benefit of selling long-lived
furniture because a lot of people look at us and say, "Aren't
you just doing yourselves out of business because you sell furniture
to last a long time, you support it, you encourage its re-use,
its repair, et cetera, et cetera?"
Q409 Lord May of Oxford: One should
have said that to Chippendale!
Mr Adams: Yes. Ever increasingly, in order to
make something in this country and be able to sell it at an economic
price and run a business the service element has to be ever greater.
So we are looking now at how we move that precisely to selling
the use of the product. There are lots of complications around
it. Arguably, we could have a better business model by just selling
the use of the product rather than the product.
Miss McCain: I think there needs to be a competitive
advantage there for these types of service schemes to work. The
example I would use is power tools. Traditionally power tools
are not really used very often, you probably use them for a couple
of hours each year maybe and so if you wanted a sander you would
hire it rather than purchase it. Nowadays, due to the advent of
production in the Far East, consumer products are a lot cheaper
and affordable for consumers. It is often the case with power
tools that you could actually go out and buy one for more or less
the same price as it would be to hire one. There has to be a cost
advantage of using the hire schemes which I think could work as
long as it was implemented correctly.
Miss Dutton: We find that business-to-business
hire schemes are a lot more successful. The total cost of ownership
has become a bigger part of the business model's rationale. So
that service is a little bit easier to control.
Q410 Lord May of Oxford: Given that
there is merit in this in appropriate circumstances and coming
back to what we might call the stick-carrot interface, are there
things you can think of that the UK might be doing to incentivise
more activity of this kind?
Dr Chapman: Rather than a penal process or system,
I think there should be awards, or at least recognition given
when certain products, certain design teams and certain brands,
which essentially are all part of the same thing, meet new standards
and push the edges of sustainability outwards. That is the sort
of thing that should be encouraged. Legislation doubtlessly needs
to exist and does exist. In terms of designers operating within
a consultancy environment, I would question how many practising
designers know or understand the implications of the WEEE Directive,
for example. That is not to say these people are not intelligent,
conversant and knowledgeable people, it is just that legislation
often fails to penetrate to that level. So I think alternative
incentives need to be put in place for those people, who essentially
are the people who influence, through formulating the ecological
impacts of products in an extraordinary way. I mentioned entrepreneurialism
earlier on. Sometimes I think the incentive provided by the potential
of being recognised for hitting new standards is enough to bring
the sustainable agenda into the design studio. I think you should
start to ask the question, "How do you measure success in
a creative environment? Is it about the salary?" It is partly
that, but I do not think it is really about that alone. New incentives
that start to provide opportunities for people to excel and succeed
in their creative careers I think would help to bring the agenda
to the fore, and re-frame sustainability as a component of good
design.
Miss McCain: Speaking as someone with a consultancy
background, as a member of a design team you often feel undervalued
in that a lot of the strategic decisions are made by top level
directors and there is little consultation with the actual design
team about how to put eco-design strategies in place. Obviously
the designers feel undervalued and that they do not have an opinion.
I do not know whether there is a need for more training or more
engagement with design teams as opposed to the managing directors.
Mr Adams: As we heard in the previous session,
virtually the entire assumption is that design is an outsourced
bolt-on extra to the client business and yet where it works absolutely
best, whether we are looking at waste, sustainability or design,
is where that function is integrated within the business. There
has been far too much of a trend for the cleaving of the two.
I would say that would be an area the Committee should consider,
in just what way you could get that back together because the
power comes from the client, not from the designer. As Lord Foster
said many years ago when being congratulated on his latest modern
building, "Don't congratulate me, congratulate the clients
who have got the courage to commission me." So it has to
come from that side.
Q411 Lord Howie of Troon: Do you
believe he actually meant it?
Mr Adams: No comment!
Q412 Chairman: There is this sense
in which a lot of companies, particularly SMEs, are too small
to have a design function within their business. Really what we
are talking about here is, if we are talking about small businesses
that do not have the capability or the resource to invest in design,
when they use intelligent design. Too often we get the impression
that it is an after-thought, not at the pre-planning stage.
Mr Adams: We are that small business and it
is utterly endemic in our business. You cannot separate it out.
If anybody came to our business and asked how much we spend on
design, we cannot separate it out because all of the people in
the business are utterly aware of the benefit and are employing
it in their day-to-day use. It is just not seen as something we
add on late in our business.
Q413 Chairman: I do not really have
a mental picture of the chairs you produce. Your company has been
producing these items for 50 years. They last an eternity from
what you are telling us. Has the design changed much in the 50
years?
Mr Adams: Yes, it is constantly evolving technically
and it is often at a very small level and where production techniques
are evolving so that we can use much more up-to-date ways of making
things. The drawers, for example, have gone through however many
iterations over those years and yet the external appearance is
virtually identical. The critical bit is the compatibility. The
backwards-forwards compatibility is there. You can still come
back today and add the latest bit to something you have owned
for 40 years and it will still fit even though the bit you add
on today is up-to-date. It is constantly looking at that backwards
and forwards compatibility. It is a very difficult design discipline
and therefore everybody in our business understands that in every
decision we take.
Q414 Lord Lewis of Newnham: I do
not want to embarrass you, but how far would you say that was
typical? I have a rather odd feeling you are in front of us because
you are a special case.
Mr Adams: I would guess so, yes.
Q415 Lord Lewis of Newnham: If what
you were saying were applicable to the majority of industry I
do not think we would have any problems, but I think you are unique.
I completely agree with what you are saying, but I do not see
that as being the practical approach that many industries have.
Mr Adams: No. I think the point increasingly
being levelled at our business is that you should be pointing
out to more people how it can actually be done and so possibly
that is why we are here.
Q416 Lord Lewis of Newnham: Who is
"they" should be doing this?
Mr Adams: Other businesses.
Q417 Lord Lewis of Newnham: You said
they should be pointing this out. Who is going to do the pointing?
Mr Adams: Through whichever medium you can.
For example, for a long, long time now the media has been obsessed
with novelty. You can only get press coverage in magazines and
newspapers if you are generating something new. We have been working
with a number of magazines over the last four or five years to
point out the benefit of them supporting what is the best rather
than what is the newest, and we have had some success in getting
columns now in magazines where they are drawing attention to products
that have been around a long time, that have been supported, which
might look a little bit "boring" but are actually the
way many more of us should be living, rather than just being seduced
by what is the latest and the flashiest and the newest but is
probably going to be gone in 12 months' time.
Q418 Chairman: Let us move on to
the question of "smart" materials. We know that materials
can react in particular ways. It has now been suggested that if
we were able to take advantage of the smart materials we could
have them disassembling themselves and this in turn would perhaps
help with waste reduction and recycling and what have you. To
what extent do you think this approach is held back by a lack
of new materials or technology? We seem to have the knowledge
but we are not quite bringing all the bits together.
Mr Adams: At Vitsoe we use simple materials,
steel, aluminium, wood, some glass fibre, but all mechanically
assembled, not bonded or welded in any way, so that they can all
be dismantled at any point during their life cycle for repair
and then they can be easily dismantled at the end of the process.
It is not a road we have gone down because we have tended to stick
to a much simpler route.
Dr Chapman: The smart material aspect is an
interesting one. For example, when a polymer is exposed to a certain
frequency of sound or light it expands slightly, which forces
the chassis of a mobile phone to pop apart. You could argue that
that is potentially very interesting; yet in some ways a mobile
phone is a leased product in many cases. I am sure a lot of the
phones we have in this room are leased or based on certain contractual
arrangements, which lead to the exchange or return of products;
in some ways this is very similar to Mark's model of the business
relationship with customers. I think smart materials are something
that should definitely be looked at. I think there is also a flipside
to it in that the automated approach brought about by that could
essentially reduce the need for a workforce, which in terms of
economics might pose less of a cost to the manufacturer, but it
could also, in the full big picture system, miss opportunities
to generate employment through recycling and disassembling. I
think that is just something that is important to recognise.
Miss Dutton: As far as I am aware in this area,
whilst there are plenty of opportunities there, it is a systems
problem first and foremost because the recycling systems have
to be in place to use these smart materials. The system has to
be in place for these products to be recycled at the end of life
before the designers can take advantage of that system. It is
a chicken and egg problem for designers and they have to understand
how that is going to work before they can use it in their design.
Miss McCain: It is a very nice conceptual way
of dealing with a recycling issue to do with waste, but there
are so many practical stumbling blocks that we might come across
with active disassembly. There are millions of different consumer
industrial products, but the cost implications of having a system
to make sure they all disassemble themselves at the same time
and managing that system is going to make it impractical from
the outset. Also, if you are going to go down this route there
needs to be a lot more research into the practicalities of using
these materials in terms of what stimuli triggers them to disassemble
themselves. Could these products automatically disassemble themselves
at an inopportune moment? You do not want your phone to fall apart
when you are on holiday in bright sunlight, for example.
Miss Dutton: That would be a trust issue for
the designers, to understand the materials and be happy to proceed
before they have dealt with them.
Q419 Earl of Selborne: I would like
to touch on recyclable materials and whether we are making effective
use of recyclable materials. It is complicated. It is different
in many regions because of the existing contracts and the like.
Do you think that consumers need better understanding as to how
to dispose of recyclable products, how to put them back into the
recycling chain, or are we wasting a lot of potentially recyclable
materials at the moment?
Mr Adams: Unquestionably, we are wasting it.
Does anybody know where to take their batteries, for example?
I think there are enormous gaps. It is still very difficult even
for those consumers who are really trying to achieve it to know
what to do.
38 The EU-funded project on design education in sustainability
(DEEDS), consists of five partners, including Brighton University-led
by the Dean, Anne Boddington-and aims to implement new educational
models and tools for embedding sustainability within the design
curricula. Back
39
The six-point experimental framework provided within the evidence
I supplied, defines a territory of enquiry, that enables this
through design. Back
| 
