Also elsewhere, in the course of a discussion of Haworth’s new/refurbished headquarters and its re-invented business vision, I introduced John Robinson, from the University of British Columbia, whose take on redesigning design and on its connection to matters of human activity and behaviours made more sense than any other single contribution to this inexpressibly complex debate I have so far heard. Essentially, he maintains that you can’t have sustainable policies, sustainable design, sustainable buildings or sustainable anything else without sustainable human behaviour. The estimable Ben Humphries, Associate at long-established ‘green architect’ Architype, agrees, having just completed 56 Southwark Bridge Road in south London, a new Creative Media Training Centre in an old Victorian library, on a site none more urban. It includes just about every eco-architectural move you can make in this day and age, but the architects politely hint at some, shall we say, frustration in the process of ‘user education’. You can build a super sustainable building, in other words, but it ain’t sustainable at all unless the users use it sustainably.

What’s my point? Three actually, upon all of which the foregoing has bearing. I respectfully draw your attention to 1) the work of Professor Jeremy Myerson and his team at the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Centre (with research partners in Japan and Australia) on the Welcoming Workplace, generously assisted by Kinnarps; to 2) the publication by Unwired Ventures, one of the arms of Philip Ross’s Cordless Group, of The Unwired ‘Byte-Sized’ Guide to Sustainability in the Workplace; and to 3) a comparison of Herman Miller’s new all-singing, all-dancing Embody chair, claimed to give health to parts of the body you never knew existed, and Niels Diffrient’s prototype Diffrient Work chair for Humanscale, both of which were on view at Orgatec 08.

First, the Welcoming Workplace. The Helen Hamlyn Centre was set up to explore and promote the idea of ‘inclusive’ design at the time when it was first becoming abundantly obvious that design by and large ignored the increasingly dominant over-50 age group. Everyone knows by now – or should if they don’t – that by 2020 nearly half of the adults in the EU will be over 50. This trend is visible in nearly every country in the world except for some African nations. The Helen Hamlyn approach is not to design for older people, but to design environments and products that can be used by everyone, including older people. And they are currently promoting and exhibiting the results of their year-long Welcoming Workplace project (the Kinnarps showroom had an exhibition on Designers’ Saturday). You can find out all about it on their website, but suffice it to say here that, thank God, someone has at last come out with a piece of wisdom on office design that I think we all knew in our hearts but never got round to admitting, we were so eager to keep up with the newest and latest thinking on collaborative, flexible, knowledge-driven new ways of working.

The research, amongst older office workers (not decrepit, just not young), on three continents has led to the conclusion that everyone – including the young – needs at least three types of interior; spaces to concentrate, spaces to collaborate, and spaces to contemplate. Office design should therefore include all three; the office should be a place of variety, not one in which a single open plan (or cellular) model dominates; and thus the older generation of office workers – whose value, in a knowledge economy, is self evidently greater because if their experience – are not only accommodated but made to feel accommodated, which psychological benefit is more than half the battle.

Recommendations for spaces to concentrate include a noise masking system, motorised height adjustable desks, task lights and available windows

Recommendations for spaces to contemplate include an ‘office garden; a variety of furniture; a curtain of falling water to soothe the mind and purify the air; semi-transparent dividers which separate but do not isolate

Recommendations for spaces to collaborate – the team ‘owns’ the space: an abundance of display space, digital and traditional; moveable and bench-style furniture; dynamic lighting

The WW project does not focus on sustainability in the environmental sense. But, crucially, it is entirely focused on behaviour and the environments that support those whose needs have not been so far met, and in no way does it alienate the younger workers. Its recommendations thus lead us to humane and therefore sustainable design.

The Unwired ‘Byte-Sized’ Guide to Sustainability in the Workplace, which also benefits from Kinnarps’ support, is something entirely different. It is a well written and well researched comprehensive guide to the overall environmental issues, to the ones that deal specifically with office buildings, to the legislative landscape in more than one country, to standards and regulations, and to the routes that occupying companies can take to reduce energy consumption, reduce costs, fulfil a corporate social responsibility agenda and otherwise compile a meaningful carbon reduction strategy. Crucially, it concentrates on existing buildings rather than new build, accounting for the issues in 98 – 99 per cent of buildings rather than dealing with construction techniques and materials for the one per cent in the design and build process. A useful reference for facility managers, architects and interior designers and indeed members of the board, not least because it also deals with the building management technologies that support and enable carbon reduction and energy efficiency measures. Further still – and this is the point – it comes round to individual environmental control and accountability, where it begins to overlap with the ideas behind Welcoming Workplace, and the ‘sustainable behaviour’ mentioned above. ‘With developments in information technology enabling greater integration between… building systems and more energy efficient use of the workplace,’ it says, ‘there is also the potential to provide individual staff members with the ability to control their own environment. As a result, staff are likely to benefit from greater comfort and higher productivity, and become more aware of their individual responsibility to reduce energy use.’ Sustainable and humane go together again.

Last but not least, a quick note about the two major chair launches at Orgatec; Herman Miller’s Embody, the result of six years’ research and work, which is intended to reflect and support body movement to a far, far more detailed and responsive level than ever before. Miller apparently thinks that the impact on the market will be similar or greater than that of Aeron. Naturally, being from Herman Miller, the design includes a huge percentage of recycled and recyclable components, and as far as it goes all the possible environmental credentials are there.

Herman Miller's Embody – very nice, but is it sustainable design?

But when you compare it with Diffrient’s ‘Diffrient’ work chair for Humanscale, only visible in prototype form at Orgatec, it rapidly becomes painfully clear which way office seating design should go. Little or no engineered adjustments – they are pretty much all automatic, which to be fair is true of Embody as well – eight major components (of course the components are made up of components, but nonetheless the simplicity of design and manufacture is astonishing) – and a list price point not far off a third of the Miller product. Both are humane design, but ask yourself which one is more truly sustainable. Great try Mr Miller, but I believe you’re looking in the wrong direction. Sorry!

www.welcomingworkplace.com

www.unwired.eu.com

www.architype.co.uk/southwark.html

www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Product/0,,a10-c440-p271,00.html

www.humanscale.com (no info on the Diffrient chair as of Dec 08)

•  concentrate include a noise masking system, motorised height adjustable desks, task lights and available windows

• Recommendations for spaces to concentrate include an ‘office garden; a variety of furniture; a curtain of falling water to soothe the mind and purify the air; semi-transparent dividers which separate but do not isolate

All these companies do – or did – bench systems. Nothing so notable in that, you say – most companies do bench systems now. But with the arguable exception of Beyon, they were also operating at the, how shall we put it, more budget conscious end of the market. Sorry if this seems inexcusably vague, but the truth is no manufacturer, dealer, specifier or client will give someone with connections to an industry publication more than a very general budget guide to the price paid per workstation in a given job. All someone like me has to go by is price lists and the knowledge that heavy, not to say apparently suicidal, discounting is a not unknown practice in the office furniture industry.

So companies with small margins, who aren’t able to charge large amounts for their product, for whatever reason, come under pressure when times are hard. But times aren’t that hard – yet. So what’s happening? John Sacks, of JSA Consultants, who has run a few office furniture companies in his time, explains that in many cases such companies are under capitalised, and although bench systems are by and large cheaper to make than the equivalent single workstations, the related costs such as delivery and installation are the same. ‘But the most serious problem for office furniture companies,’ says Sacks – manufacturers and dealers alike – ‘is that lower product specifications and simpler products have led to lower selling prices and that although the percentage margins for manufacturers and dealers might well still look satisfactory, the cash margins are hopeless. For example, assume a margin of 25 per cent; when a 250 workstation order was worth £1/4m, the cash that generated was £62,500. Today, say five years’ later, the order may be worth as little as £125,000 and the margin is perhaps only £31,250. That amount of cash - worth even less after inflation compared to the £62,500 - has to cover the same costs as before in winning the order as well as delivering and installing it. It just doesn’t work.’

So it’s not only margins that are under pressure; the whole business model needs an overhaul. Further than that, the all-singing, all–dancing bench – hailed a few short years ago as the new and glorious solution to the demands of flexible and mobile working – is in fact much harder to reconfigure for ever-changing project teams, in both accommodation and IT terms, than the standard workstation. Kind of stands to reason. Creative companies, you know, the advertising, web and design organisations that always seem to be featured in magazines not a million miles removed from this one, love all that bench thing – possibly because, as their workers are knowledge workers, they are anyway mobile and work with laptops, and also (less demonstrably) their mentality is less wedded to territory and ownership than those in more traditional organisations. Also because the bench demonstrates a democratic organisational culture that you are more likely to find in a creative company.

So. If not the death of office furniture as such, or even the death of the bench as such, then at least the incipient death of the cheap bench. Which suggests, as implied above, that bigger margin companies, and that almost always means companies with greater brand value, will survive and prosper. And this is because such companies are selling not just a product but an idea that goes with it, a feeling, an emotional proposition to which people can attach their own individual aspirations, a whole array of non-tangible elements. A brand, in other words. Vitra is the perfect example of this phenomenon, and so too is Herman Miller. The products, by and large, are of course excellent, the result of profound and intelligent design thinking, a commitment to such process by the management of the company, and the result of a corporate culture that enshrines such values, and many other enduring intangibles, in the company’s activity. It also helps if the products are higher priced. (I thought Beyon was a very interesting phenomenon when it entered the UK office furniture market a few years ago, because from the word go, the word was ‘brand’. But as it turns out, maybe the company’s financial structures weren’t strong enough. You can’t live by ‘brand’ alone.)

In the office furniture market, ‘brand’ must now carry a whole lot more meaning. It is no longer enough for a company’s brand just to mean quality, longevity and design excellence. It must also represent not only sustainability (I don’t want to be boring about it, but you can’t ignore it) and service. And in the context of the new, IT-driven, knowledge-worker inhabited, flexible, mobile and (hopefully) very sustainable world of work, that service must somehow be represented to clients as helping them figure out how to operate. An office furniture manufacturer becomes a workplace design consultant. Haworth (see FX July, p?????) has worked this out, and because it is coming from behind its major competitor Herman Miller in the design value stakes, it has been able to more or less reinvent itself as such, with the help of a brand spanking new eco-HQ, some sleek new products, and a carefully developed and very effectively written set of new marketing messages. It remains to be seen how successful such a brave change in direction will be – but it was as obvious to Dick Haworth and his board as it is to you and me that the old way won’t work any more.

There’s a little sting in this tale, a reassuring one perhaps, especially to designers, manufacturers, salespeople and all the other members of the office furniture community who wake up screaming at the ghastly prospect of the imminent death of their industry. Expensive desks become cheap tables, highly engineered chairs become simple to use and to look at – so where is the money going? The insight is from Adrian Campbell, senior associate at BDG Workfutures and the man in charge of specifying furniture, and it has a resonance that I promise we will return to in these pages, because it touches on where design itself has to go. ‘I don’t know’, he said, wrapping up a conversation about the death of the cheap bench and the possible disappearance of office furniture as we know it: ‘I like furniture. I just like it, I like a piece of furniture in a room. It’s an emotional connection – people have an emotional link with furniture.’ I knew exactly what he meant, and so do you. It’s emotional. And that’s why a) the clever companies who see the necessity of developing their brands to mean more than just ‘stuff’ will not only survive but thrive, and b) we’ll be using desks, chairs and storage designed for working at, on or in, for generations to come. Phew.

Here is what I said about the iPhone in April, for your June issue of FX: ‘Here is an object of desire that looks beautiful and works not just well but beautifully, inside and out. It’s so… right. It’s also got icons. And as for whether that does or doesn’t make it a piece of iconic design, frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.’ How deeply, bitterly embarrassing. Shoot me, do away with me painfully, I deserve it.

I wrote those words without having owned and used an iPhone. I had given several of them a bit of a run round the block, enough (I supposed) to come to some conclusions, but not the same at all as living and working with one. I have now had one for about six weeks, and I can tell you without fear or favour – it sucks. It just doesn’t work.

The humiliation of having been caught out by my own lack of rigour in delivering critical opinion is made worse, far worse, by the fact that I had heralded the iPhone as the ‘smart phone’ to end smart phones, the one I had been waiting for, long before it was even announced. After endless frustrations with Treos and Blackberries, the back of my hand to them, full of Macintosh-unfriendly functionality as they are, I saw the iPhone as the answer to my prayers, a further proof of one of my basic tenets of design philosophy, which is that Apple computing is best in every way and never shall I tread the vale of tears named ‘PC’, inhabited by illogical and ‘inhuman’ product and systems design. Apple’s computers say: ‘I am a computer but I will look nice and try and talk your language, O human’, while PCs say: ‘I am a PC. Get used to it. Learn my language, human, or suffer. Or both.’ But this time Apple’s fabled arrogance – we put up with it because their products are so good - is intricately commingled with straightforward bad design.

Time and time again, it just doesn’t come up to scratch. It doesn’t deliver. Which strikes directly at the heart of my basically enthusiastic and occasionally forgiving attitude to Apple’s products. It has damaged our relationship.

I won’t bore you with the endless detail of what and how doesn’t work on the iPhone, but I will give you a ‘sample’ list. First and foremost (apart from the woeful battery life), its ability to pick up the network signal is worse, far worse, than the crap phones of years ago. On the M1, the M25, in central London, Gatwick airport, you name it. ‘No service’, when you know and I know that there is plenty of service. Look at all those people around me using their phones, while I stare in frustration and anger at ‘no service’. Pretty much the only way out of this is switch it off and back on again – you might get it to cotton on to what every other phone in the vicinity already knows - but ‘shutting down’ takes about 15 seconds, and ‘booting’ more than 30. I timed it yesterday and it took 36 seconds to come back to life. Not likely to improve one’s mood in a hurry. And if and when you do finally get it to admit to the existence of a cellular network, it sometimes looks and feels as if it is ringing but doesn’t connect. Why? No idea. The answer? Switch it off and on again.

Much of the other crap stems from this basic inability to connect to the network. But not all. You’d imagine a smart phone that does emails and all sorts of other functions based on text input would have a copy, cut and paste function wouldn’t you? A pretty basic requirement, one would say. Apple seems to disagree. Can you copy, cut and paste? No, you cannot.

Let’s have a quick look at some of the other ‘functions’. Email. Why does the little ‘connecting’ wheel go round and round with no result? Don’t know. Switch it off and on again and see if it works. Ah yes, at last. And cool, here is that pdf Fred was sending me. Aha, can read it, yep good. Here comes the train, will look at it in a minute. Get a seat. Now, the pdf. Er… where is it? Crap. Gone. Suppose I’ll have to download the email again then save it. Er, no, can’t download the email. ‘This message has not been downloaded from the server.’ Yes, I know that. Why? Because your server is told to delete messages immediately after downloading. So re-set it (you’ll need to be at your computer to do that), then you can read the damn pdf, as if you wanted to by this time. Best to save it, eh. Er… where? How? Nowhere. No way of saving files for future use that I can find. Maybe I can just Bluetooth that pdf across from my own computer? Nope. iPhone is not configured to receive files via Bluetooth. Really? Confidence in your mobile communications device beginning to wane?

And here’s another totally maddening email thing, related to that inability (or downright bloody-minded refusal) to make a place where ordinary files can sit to be read whenever is convenient. You’re in the middle of writing an email. The train comes or the phone rings or whatever. You put it in your pocket or go to a different ‘function’, expecting to go back to the email when you’re done. Not likely. Gone for ever. Where? Search me. I had to re-write the same email three times yesterday. Same with texts. They just disappear. (By the way, you can’t forward texts. No, really, you can’t.) There is an ‘outbox’ for emails, but they only sit there when you’ve pressed ‘send’ and they haven’t gone yet. If they go and end up in the ‘sent’ folder, you can see them but not edit them to re-send. My God!

Oh yes, Notes. Nice little Notepad app that, just do a few words while I’m waiting, start the article maybe, and carry on when I sync it to the computer. Er… no. Can’t sync ‘Notes’ to the computer. Why not? Why the hell not? (Voice rises in a strangled shriek…).

This is only a sample. Almost wherever you turn with the damn thing it frustrates and disappoints, refusing to deliver the basic functionality I have every right to expect. Search contacts? Fine, as long as you can remember both the name and the company – because if the company you’re after is in the wrong box on the contact field, ‘search’ won’t pick it up. You know it’s there, but the phone doesn’t. What extra effort is need to make software do this simple thing?

Delight it has, in its yummy little touch-screen way – which, incidentally, can be infuriating in itself, being slower than a keyboard and when you need to input text you have to wait for the keyboard to ‘arrive’ – but functionality it does not. Obiwan 69, one of those nameless individuals on one of those numerous forum type things with which the web overflows, puts it in a nutshell at http://joeygadget.com/2008/06/10/contact-search-finally-added-to-iphone-in-iphone-20-update:

‘The iPhone 3G is a toy. It’s not for work.
 It’s not possible to search into contacts, notes or calendar
- It takes ages to add a task into calendar
- There is no “week” view for the calendar
- cut, copy, paste are not available
- it does not synchronise ‘To Do’ lists and Notes with Outlook. If you want a PDA for work, find an old Palm Pilot from the previous century, it’s much more useful. But for listening to music, playing games or drink a beer with iPint, it’s great.’ (It’s not even that great for listening to music, Obiwan. It was playing what it wanted to play last night, not what I set it to play and not in that order.)

There you have it. Of course, there are many and many developers out there writing little programme-ettes for it, which I suppose Apple can feel smug about, given that so many people are so disposed in the iPhone’s favour they are prepared to write their own software to remedy its shortcomings. I’m not one of those people. By what definition of good design does the user constituency muck in and add its own modifications and enhancements? I demand that good design not only looks good and makes you feel good, but that it works. And the iPhone damn well doesn’t. Don’t buy one. Or if you must, wait another year or two for all the things that it should have had in the first place. By which time ‘early adopters’ will be on their third or fourth, Apple’s stock will still be rising, and most of us will forget just how underdeveloped and under-delivering a device it was. But not me. Me and Apple used to be like that. Now we’re estranged. It is nothing short of cynical, an outrage on the poor smart phone user. Apple, the back of my hand to you.

(Final word to Apple – if I’ve failed to find these functions through my own stupidity, please tell me and I’ll eat another slice of humble pie. Publicly.)

CAPTIONS

3437: Notes – all very well if you don’t want or need to transfer them to your computer. Third party ‘apps’ will allow. Why not Apple?

3438: Contacts – lucky I knew Caroline was in there as editor of Grafik. Because searching for ‘Grafik’ brought no result. Yes, that’s right. Nothing.

3439: Forward this text to your missus to remind her to remind you to do your insurance? Nope. Copy and paste it into an email? Nope. Throw the phone out the window? Yep.

3440: Aha, an attachment. Good, I’ll be able to read that….

3441: … even if it is way too small, because I can ‘swipe’ and magnify the tiny text. But what else can I do with it? Save it? Nope. Edit it? Nope. Maybe third parties can help here…or it’s the window solution again.

John and his team are building a building – they’ve got $20m of public and private money to do it – which they claim will be the world’s most advanced exemplar of sustainable building. It is called the , it will be built they reckon some time in 2010, and part of its ‘key goals’ is ‘to live within the building footprint as much as possible: most of the building’s electricity and lighting, and all of the water supply, liquid waste treatment, ventilation, and heating and cooling will come from the sun, wind and ground that shines on, blows through, or lies underneath the site.’

So far so not very amazing, you say. It’s true, it doesn’t sound all that unusual, given the current amount, worldwide, of research, discussion and general cerebral activity on sustainability. But a few of the things he said really made me sit up and take notice. One is that he and his colleagues are creating ‘future modelling’ software – essentially computer games – to explore the ordinary person’s attitude towards changes in behaviour – the ‘behavioural advances necessary in any transition to sustainable patterns of living.’ This is related to the aim of treating the building process as a living laboratory over its whole life, studying system integration and the interaction of the building with its inhabitants.

The second is that the whole project is based on a collaboration between disciplines – psychology, sociology, geography, information technology – as well as the building and design specialisms, ‘to create new forms of private, public, NGO and research sector partnership to commercialize sustainability… as a springboard to the trillion-dollar global market in urban infrastructure.’ Mark that word, commercialize.

The third – and this is the bit where I sat back and said ‘Enough already!’ - is that he is setting out to measure happiness, along with health and productivity, of the building’s inhabitants over time. The fourth – and this is the bit where I sat forward and went ‘ Yesss!’ - is that be believes the time of An Inconvenient Truth is over. He doesn’t even like the film. Why? ‘Because we’ve had enough analysis of the problem. No one seriously doubts that any more [although you can still find climate change deniers almost anywhere you look]. It’s our job now to present solutions.’

So it’s getting practical. For whatever reason – perhaps just because the expression of the problem has reached a critical level of acceptance and now we’re moving on – our engagement with the idea of sustainability now seems to be turning this very corner. We’re beginning to realize just what has to be done, and frankly it’s scary.

Two of the documents I’ve recently been digging deep into, though they come at the issues from quite different standpoints, are pointing in a similar direction. One is celebrated workplace theorist Frank Duffy of DEGW’s new book ‘Work and the City’, published by Black Dog Publishing as part of a series called ‘The Edge Futures’. The Edge is a ‘ginger group and think tank’ of influential people in the building and related industries that gathers regularly to discuss issues of the day. This series – five smallish books, including Jonathon Porritt on Globalism and Regionalism – has sustainability as its central theme.

The other document, not yet published, is from the principals of something that pleases to call itself the SEED Foundation, Clare Brass and Flora Bowden. Clare was head of sustainability at the Design Council until last autumn, and as a designer has been working in this area since the late 1980s. It is called ‘Design for Social and Environmental Purpose’ and essentially is proposing a redesign of design itself. The document ‘investigates how the still emerging discipline of service design, in dealing more with relationships and experiences than material objects, offers inherent social and environmental benefits and is naturally transferable to sectors broader than private business – where designers traditionally work’.

Frank Duffy, meanwhile, concerning himself with that part of the industry which he himself helped define and develop, is essentially saying that the ‘knowledge economy’ of which we are all more or less a part (not quite but almost the ‘service economy’) demands buildings of a completely different type than those that have been built in the last century and a half of commercial office development – and more importantly, that the delivery mechanism for those buildings must be radically redesigned. The ‘supply chain’ – finance, development, design, construction, real estate, facilities management, IT, end users – must be turned on its head and become a ‘demand chain’ where end users decide what space they want, where they want it and for how long, and what they are going to pay for it. The payoff is sustainability at both a micro and a macro (urban) level. (What he doesn’t say is what he thinks developers are going to do for a crust in this bright and sustainable future.)

No surprise, then, it’s what we knew all along but were reluctant to admit. The change in our business culture must be as deep and penetrating as at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when capitalism and manufacturing got together and severed ordinary people’s connection with the natural world. Both these sets of distinguished thinkers, in their own way – Brass and Bowden more for design, Duffy more for architecture – are saying that design cannot and must not serve the capitalist project any longer. Unless an ‘enlightened capitalism’ can be fashioned that ‘commercializes sustainability’. See above, CIRS. The language used is almost shocking – ‘the harmful practice of material production’ means ‘making things is bad’. One of Brass and Bowden’s sources, Mike Betts of green communication group Better Thinking, describes how in consumption terms, competitive advantage has historically been with the manufacturer of better goods, then with the owners of better brands. ‘The next step,’ says Betts, ‘is that businesses will be valued on their behaviour and will have to provide transparency in order to maintain customer loyalty.’ In other words, business must rewrite its whole sense of itself. It must look elsewhere for profit than just making and selling things to people who don’t need them. It must look to sustainability and it must look to service – and design, the erstwhile, servile flunky of the ‘make and sell’ regime – must use its research and analytical skills to grapple with human problems defined not by material enrichment, but by the way we live our lives. Of course the corporates are already making eco-moves (eg GE’s ‘Eco-magination’), and increasing profits thereby. The sad way of looking at it is to say design has to concern itself with survival. The happy way is to say it must concern itself with… happiness. Either way, design must redesign itself just as business must, and in some major cases is already doing.

Next month: And where does government come in all this? And brands? And is design really the tool with which to re-write western civilisation as we know it? And don’t even get me started on China. Don’t miss this exciting sequel!

• Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, www.cirs.ubc.ca
• Work and The City, Frank Duffy, Black Dog Publishing, www.blackdogonline.com
• SEED Foundation, www.seedfoundation.org.uk

The seminar programme at 100% Design was full of chewy bits and threw a few curve balls. Aidan Walker mulls over a biased selection of points to ponder

Not for you, of course, because London Design Week or Design Festival is well over and done with. You’re reading this in November or thereabouts and already on to new stuff – Orgatec has been and gone, for instance. For me, however, sitting here writing in late September, slowly recovering from an intense week at the 100% Design Seminar Theatre, it’s time to recoup and reconsider, and pick out some of the highlights and defining moments of one small, argumentative corner of all that intense and overlapping activity. (Someone said: ‘Why does nothing happen for months and then everything happen in one week?’ Good question.)

This is just a personal selection, you understand. An exhibition seminar programme has to perform many functions, and often from the point of view of the exhibition itself the main one is little more than to make sure folks come flocking in through the door. In the world of ideas, however, we were trying to move the sustainability debate on and explore a few other challenges facing design in this day and age. We even had Clare Brass of the SEED Foundation, with Nick Gant and Jonathan Chapman of the IF: Lab in Brighton, discussing how to redesign design. More to come on that, it needs its own few pages.

We also had the ‘design as art’ or ‘Design edition’ phenomenon, a session ably chaired by Suzanne Trocmé of Wallpaper*, and equally ably panelled (?) by Ian Stallard and Patrik Fredrikson of Fredrikson Stallard, artist / designer / videographer Arik Levy, Craig Allen, now MD of Linley, and Francis Sultana, director of David Gill Galleries which handles Fredrikson Stallard’s work. It was an enjoyable session because there was plenty of thought provoking contribution from the thought provoking panel, but ultimately we ended up deciding that design is what it is, art is what it is, and if designers can sell their work through the lucrative gallery route, so much the better for them.

The vexed question about whether design should or should not ‘say something’ has been aired in these pages before, and the conclusion really depends on your own understanding of the term. It would be a shame if design restricted itself to problem solving and functional issues alone, but of course this will rarely be the case because aesthetic considerations come into play. I still remain unconvinced about design delivering meaning in any other way than the messages directly related to its immediate context; a table knife should say ‘efficient and elegant at the same time’, a funky bar interior should say ‘cool, sexy, elite, discreet’ (or whatever), a corporate HQ should say ‘stylish but sensible’, etc etc. If a designer asks his or her work to comment on, for instance, the ramifications of the relationship between romantic and physical love, then hand it over to the artist. Or become one.

Obviously we were not going to get away without talking about sustainability – and talk about it we did. First up was Arthur Potts Dawson, chef and entrepreneur, and green restaurateur par excellence, with his amiable and profoundly thoughtful architect Andrew Waugh of Waugh Thistleton, who have been collaborating on the recently opened Water House, billed as ‘London’s greenest restaurant.’ This team also did Acorn House, which opened to a great media fanfare a couple of years ago. Amongst all the kerfuffle and mullarkey about sustainability –  cradle to grave becomes cradle to cradle (what next? Grave to grave?) – and what we might call the ‘Ultimate Sustainable Solution’, which is essentially ‘don’t do anything, not a damn thing’ – Arthur and Andrew have dug deep. The fridges are hydrocarbon, the kitchen is hydro-electric, energy is via solar panels and photovoltaics, there is hot composting and a wormery… no menus, and no toilet paper. This last because the toilets are expensive imported Japanese auto-flush models, with built-in, how shall we put it, posterior-cleansing technology. The panellists were both fully aware of the fact that it would take one hell of a lot of toilet paper to create the same carbon footprint as flying a toilet in from Japan. Which is the kind of dilemma sustainability is always struggling with: at times it’s best just to lose a bit of eco-cred for the sake of making a point.

The interesting thing about the background to the Water House is that it was Arthur’s initiative because he is young enough to have grown up in a home where green behaviour, green politics and an acute awareness of the issues was the norm. For him, it’s natural.

Pausing only to pay homage to the painstaking, carefully thought out and highly articulate arguments of Christoph Behling and Luke Pearson (luxury goods are indeed sustainable), the provocative journey through the valley of the meanings of modern craft with Gareth Williams of the V&A, Rod Wales of Wales and Wales and Tom Lloyd, partner with Luke Pearson in Pearson Lloyd – and not forgetting the dynamism, richness, imaginative impact and artistic vitality of architect / technologist Jason Bruges and textile artist / colour consultant Ptolemy Mann - we arrive at the door of an unassuming, quietly spoken and altogether surprising ceramicist / pewterist (?) by the name of Ian McIntyre.

Ian was one of our ‘Eco Young Guns’, a session we put together with Nicola Giuggioli from Eco Age, the ‘eco with style’ shop and consulting business that recently opened on Chiswick High Road. Nicola stocks a great many products from a great many practitioners, but the idea here was to see how recently graduated designers were taking sustainability on in their practice. How mature was the thinking among the yoof? Along with Jason Heap and Max McMurdo of Reestore (he of the supermarket trolleys turned into armchairs), Ian delivered a short presentation on his work in pewter, which he manufactures with the support and resources of traditional Sheffield-based company Wentworths.

I really really liked this one because Ian is thinking about recycling, waste, energy efficiency and beauty all at the same time. His processes are devised to use waste material (recycled offcuts) and to make a virtue of the age-old pewter casting techniques that are still being used, and are still as wasteful as ever. In one instance of redesigning such process, he takes a mould, swirls the molten pewter around in it and pours the remainder out. This is a new version of the old ‘slush casting’, which makes complex shapes like traditional tankard handles by pouring the metal into a mould then pouring it back out again so there is only a thin skin left to create a hollow, and therefore light and economical, handle. Ian’s version of the process produces bowls of astonishing, ethereal beauty, with a silky smooth shiny exterior and a stippled, irregularly surfaced interior. Plus every one is different. His vases too use a similar process, but incorporate the waste that is dumped from the mould as part of the form of the object – again surprising, beautiful – and sustainable. When the designer researches process closely enough and discovers a new and compelling aesthetic, driven by that process, in a bid to make both product and process waste-free and energy-efficient, then the result gives a clear and coherent picture of what sustainable design should be. Another way of saying that in less than a generation, design won’t be design at all if it ain’t sustainable. And it won’t be called ‘sustainable design’.

The shortlists are no secret (anyone can see them at http://www.fxdesignawards.co.uk/pages/shortlist.html), so I’m not breaking any confidentiality agreements discussing them. This new transparency is quite a luxury in itself, and makes the Awards a matter for more general consumption over a longer period than previously, which can only be a good thing. This particular scheme has to be one of, if not the most, reliable and accurate means of taking the temperature of the professional design industry in this country and worldwide, figuring out what is important to clients and their designers, getting an idea about which way the big ideas are going and how they are changing.

Let’s have a look at British designers working abroad, or in this particular case Project Orange working in India. It is by no means stretching a point to identify the I-Bar in Bangalore and the Park Hotel in Mumbai, both of them rich in imagination and cultural reference, as the leisure destinations of a newly sophisticated and westernised professional middle class in that restless and turbulent country. Its long imperial history renders India more English than England in some old-fashioned ways (the railway system is still genuinely Victorian, not heritage-retro fake Victorian) but it is now flexing its fast-growing economic muscle so confidently as to be downright threatening. Westernisation, or at least Britishness of some sort, has been part of India’s social, administrative and political fabric for nearly three centuries, and although the received idea of the place is usually one of abject poverty, there has always been wealth a-plenty. So what new factors are driving the demand for the sort of intelligent, multi-faceted leisure design which the Orange people do so well? Information technology must be part of the answer, but one can hardly believe the BT Broadband ‘cyber-coolies’ in the call centres of Bangalore slope off down to the I-Bar for their after-work sherbets. Call centre wages are higher than the Indian average, but there is a cultural, not just a financial, phenomenon at work here.

Retail, leisure and hospitality – traditionally the market sectors where the ideas flow almost as thick and fast as the money – don’t seem to be wowing me nearly as much this year as the public sector, public space work. Perhaps it’s just a good year for one and not for the other, or perhaps it signifies a genuine shift in the public sector client body’s appreciation of good design. Not to say that there isn’t any good work in retail and leisure – of course there is, but I am tempted to mark it down either as rather less than original, or so absurdly, ridiculously extravagant that it boggles the mind. ‘Indulgent’, even ‘decadent’, are words that pop up in the entries’ accompanying text to a worrying degree. Do we really want to flock to ‘decadent’ places of entertainment? Perhaps we do. Check out Australian consultancy Woods Bagot’s work for the Silk Road club in Melbourne if you want a real eye popper; Rome burning springs to mind. As a contrast, pop across to Sacramento California for a lesson in restrained Modernism at the hands of Uxus, whose Ella Dining Room and Bar has the clarity and calm one used to associate with the very best of British.

I’d far rather have the intellectual rigour and clear headed engagement with such pressing issues as health or education, represented here by Rogers Stirk Harbour’s Maggie’s Centre for cancer sufferers, and Allford Hall Monaghan Morris’s Westminster Academy, a school to live for if ever there was one. Such work surely indicates not only a measurable rise in the public sector client body’s commitment to good design, but also the payoff of a great deal of serious thinking about how well designed environments are inextricably entwined with better health and better schooling. More of that please.

For me, FX 2008 is an unusual year mostly because of the products. Reading, digesting and pondering the work, then letting it simmer as I go about my business, the mind keeps coming back to lighting and furniture. It also seems to be coming across Pearson Lloyd more than somewhat – my, how those two gentlemen are at the top of their game. Their characteristic blend of technical virtuosity, elegant aesthetic and deep rooted craftsmanship is coming to fruition in a powerful and persuasive body of work. Their Lox barstool for Walter Knoll and Edge table for Danish company Danerka positively gleam with the results of ‘total design’ – sophisticated technology, seductive simplicity, logical and ultra-clear thinking, a pinsharp-accurate eye for sheer beauty, and what we might call, at the risk of being thought hippies, soul. Pearson Lloyd’s products have untrammelled delight, a quality most products strive for and almost all miss by a mile.

Then have a look at the lighting. Whatever is this? An OMG moment at the hands of Lee Prince of Light and Design Associates, who with German developer and manufacturer Kalmar Gmbh has designed a monumental piece of extravagant illuminated engineering for the Qatar Education City Convention Centre, a room measuring a mere 10,000sq m (the biggest football field you can have in the UK is 8,250). Oh, and the ceiling? Only 16m high. So if your name is Lee Prince you design a light fitting that changes a 4500-seat convention centre into an ‘intimate’ dining space for a much more modest 2000 people – at least, it does when there are 28 of them hanging from that 16m ceiling. Each one weighs 380kg and is 3.8m high when closed, but it is made up of ‘leaves’ which open to a span of more than 5m, rising and falling to effectively bring the ceiling way, way down. They change colour, they operate individually or in sequence, they practically dance with you. Together, the 28 fixtures use 383,600 pieces of Swarovski Strass crystals… enough, you say. This is ‘Islamic style’ gone bonkers. What about energy efficiency? Aha, says Mr Prince. His 28 fittings use 23,688 RGB LED sources, and each fixture uses 280 watts fully lit, making a total of 7840 watts for the room, or only about 3 times more than the biggest dining room I ever had – it was a really large one… about 50 sq m. Say what you like about the aesthetic, this is wildly ambitious but nonetheless very clever design. And that is what the FX Awards, when all is said and done, are about. See you there.

Naturally, one would assume that the ‘S’ word is top of the agenda, and everything else follows on down the list of priorities. Design isn’t design any more, after all, unless it is sustainable, unless it deals with sustainability, or unless it is making some sort of comment about sustainability (although there is plenty of blood on the carpet when it comes to a debate about whether it’s design’s rightful place to comment on anything at all). Forgive me, that was the impression I had gained from every recent conversation I have had with practising designers, architects and others connected to the industry – exhibition organisers, retailers, a host of others. If it ain’t sustainable, or engaged in the sustainability arena, it ain’t design. Yes, there are huge obstacles to the practice of sustainable design, not least the inconvenient truth that definitions change daily as new facts, new methods and new ways of looking at the problem come to the surface. There’s no single, reliable, defining source, so we flap around from idea to idea and argument to counter argument. Notwithstanding all this, overall you can’t be a designer these days without grappling with the key issue.

I say ‘forgive me’, because with one or two notable exceptions, this imperative seems to have escaped the design education community. I had obviously got it badly wrong. Sustainable design - and thinking about sustainable design - was so lacking in evidence at New Designers that I began to suffer from ‘vision panic’ – was there something out there really important that I was missing? If so, what was it? And where was it?

A similar chill ran down my spine at Central St Martin’s, when I was looking at the results of a materials and textiles project proposing new ideas for luggage, sponsored by Samsonite. The quote taken as a guiding principle for the scheme, displayed prominently on the stand in the entrance hall where the work was on show, talked about the attractions of global travel, its ease and cheapness, and how all this means we need to rethink luggage. I had to blink and read it again. What about neutralising your carbon? What about tonnes and tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere? Did the project encourage such a line of enquiry? It didn’t. Smart materials there were, and some nice ideas too, but none of them making a connection to what is surely now the abiding concern for all forms of design.

No surprises if the sponsor hasn’t yet quite got around to asking the question: ‘What happens when people decide not to travel (at least by air) and therefore don’t need luggage any more?’ – because that would require a complete reinvention of its business model. But if design colleges are where the blue sky thinking is being done, why wasn’t that question or a similar one being asked as the project progressed? Any amount of self-folding suitcases and Bluetooth locking handles are not the point.

And so, with a sinking heart, to New Designers. Not that there was no sustainable thinking, of course there was. But it was by no means dominant, and in most colleges’ cases, it seemed that when individuals were working on sustainable principles, they were following a self-charted route. Without being able to interrogate every course leader, it is easy to conclude that sustainability is not yet at the top of the majority of the course agendas. I hope to God I’m wrong.

And so, with a rising heart, to the BA Hons in 3D Design for Sustainability at University College Falmouth. Here we have Dave Capewell’s wood burning stove that is no ordinary wood burning stove: ‘”FireFly” is a wood-burning stove designed specifically for thermally efficient eco homes’ he says. ‘Pre-heated air from the outside is mixed with flue gases for more efficient use of the fuel, and a system for creating carbon neutral castings is realized by using waste vegetable oil to melt the metal.’ Here we have kitchen accessories, clothing, furniture, sportswear, proposals for public space, for children with learning disabilities and for busy X-ray departments. Here we have an ‘inbuilt’ ethic of sustainability and communality, an underlying sense of social and environmental context that drives the thinking that drives the work. Not all of it is impeccably worthy and super-sustainable, of course; I liked Chris Bowsher and Iain Jones’ TeaFix, the instant cup of British tea complete with doily, saucer, teabag and teaspoon – even at Falmouth you can get away with design as comment, it seems.

What overall I found very impressive was the quality of the thinking, the acceptance and absorption of the idea that sustainable design demands that we think about community, behaviour, the nature of the manufacture – market – consume – waste cycle, the consequences of design, the nature of user-centred design. All the ‘soft’ bits, in other words, that don’t really look or feel like design as we have known it, but that might lead to the designer, in the words of course leader Su Vernon, asking the dread question: ‘Why do we need another blah? We’ve got too much stuff already.’ These people are working at design where ‘the outcome might not be another object,’ says Vernon. ‘It might be a system, even a way of thinking.’

Refreshing indeed. And the sting in the tail? – You know there had to be one. Jeremy Whitaker, the college’s Head of Marketing and Recruitment, has argued successfully for ‘Sustainable’ to be dropped from the course name, so it becomes just plain old ‘3D Design’. A backward step? All is not as it seems. The ethics and philosophy of the course will stay, says Vernon, while Whitaker’s own rationale, once he explains it, makes perfect sense. ‘It’s partly whether we see sustainability in the context of the college as a whole, or just one course. Because of what, and particularly because of where we are – four hours from anywhere – environmental sustainability is very important to Falmouth. We don’t want to put a ‘tag’ on it that could be accused of greenwash. It’s a more fundamental – and a longer – communications task to make people understand that everything at Falmouth is sustainable, so we develop the course in that overall context. If we didn’t do something that is intrinsically sustainable, we’d be selling the students short.’

This point is tellingly close to the idea that ‘sustainable design’ is a misnomer, or soon will be as the idea becomes increasingly stitched in to design culture, because all design should be intrinsically sustainable without having to say so in its title. Has he, I say, jumped the gun a bit, got Falmouth a little too far ahead of the game? Has sustainability yet been so far absorbed into design culture that it doesn’t need to speak its name? No, it hasn’t, if you go by the offerings of the other colleges. Whitaker, whose job is to attract students to Falmouth – to make them, in his words, drive past Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth to get there – has to play to its strengths and aim for the position of market leader. ‘We are small and specialist. We can’t be small and mediocre and stuck right out on the end of England. We’re already out on a limb.’ To which we say, risky but brave. All power to them.

Aidan Walker’s new monthly column gets off the line in search of that mythical beast the design icon

Last month Harrods was running a marketing promotion called ‘Design Icons’. The store was hung with signs in suitably iconic News Gothic bold condensed, advertising the fact that Harrods, despite (or perhaps because of) its iconic status as the world’s most traditionally patrician department store, is very much alive to the value of iconic design – and by the way, you can buy it here. The supporting lecture series, organised in conjunction with the Design Museum, set out to explore the nature and meaning of a design icon, or iconic design, which is not perhaps the same thing. The programme includes Arup’s Alastair Lansley, the chief architect of St Pancras International, Vivienne Westwood (iconic individual if ever there was one), Ross Lovegrove, Richard Sapper, and Concorde pilot and chronicler Christopher Orlebar. Kicking the whole thing off was a debate between fashion designer Roland Mouret, Alessi UK MD Matteo Alessi, Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic, and humble self. The subject: What Makes a Design Iconic?.

The initial reaction to the idea is that it isn’t an especially groundbreaking subject for debate, since almost every designer’s conversation is littered with the word ‘iconic’. (‘Classic’ too, but that’s another story.) But then it gets gnarly. When uttered in conjunction with the word design, what is usually meant is a) good design, b) mass recognition of same and c) outstanding longevity and endurance of both the work and the recognition. But do they know what they’re talking about? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts it thus: ‘… From the Greek, e???? likeness, image, similitude. 1. An image, figure, or representation; a portrait; an illustration in a book (1727). B. An image in the solid; a statue. 2. Eastern Ch. A representation of some sacred personage, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship.’ Not much help there then, to express this idea of some enduring and deeply truthful value. Collins’ Concise adds: ‘a person regarded as a sex symbol or as a symbol of a belief or cultural movement,’ which is fine when we’re talking about Marilyn Monroe, Che Gevara or even perhaps Philippe Starck, but doesn’t throw light on the nature of the designed object.

To my mind, if we really want to understand what makes a design iconic and how such a piece of work is different from other designs that do the same job, the path we should follow is the one signposted ‘meaning’. This is the only point where the dictionary definition and how people use the term in everyday design life come anywhere near together. An iconic design means something, almost always to a mass of people. It has resonances, it is recognised, respected. It is a benchmark; it is enduring, timeless, with as much relevance today as it had when it first came out. Much more relevance, in fact, as we shall see.

But that demon ‘meaning’ brings with it a whole host of other gremlins. Apart from straightforward function, it’s safe to say that most designs of any value carry with them a set of significances which act as primary attractors. They tell the world something about the person owning / using them; this person is cool, this one is funky, this one is ahead of the game, this one is a traditionalist. But those signals are by and large false messengers, superficial and transient, in the realm of fashion. If the designer intends to give his or her work meaning, then he/she had better be prepared to be called an artist, for art can exist with no practical function other than to mean something, while design must have practical function and does not have to have meaning. A design that speaks its function through its form? That’s a different matter under the headings of visual language and product semantics.

Keep our noses on this trail, and we discover that what defines a design icon is almost certainly not the designer’s intention. It is the mysterious and magical process by which the work acquires or is invested with its mysterious and magical iconic quality (see above, relevance). It means something – loads of things – to loads of people, things which the designer almost certainly never intended. This explains why iconic design is often not very good design. Or, in the case of the Harley

Davidson motorcycle, not design at all. A partnership of two highly respected product designers, both of them motorcycle fanatics and with a couple of convincing (though not iconic) motorcycle designs under their own belts, contributed to a BBC tv series a few years ago entitled, not Design Icons but Design Classics. The Harley Davidson ElectraGlide, the big touring bike with loads of extra bodywork bits, came in for an awful thrashing. To avoid libel, let’s just say the verdict was that this is inherently a design that evolved rather than was conceived. The sublimely ridiculous version, the bike ridden by Peter

Fonda’s Captain America character in the (iconic) 1967 movie Easy Rider, seems to have paid no attention whatsoever to practicality, rideability or comfort. The tiny teardrop tank holds about a US gallon, enough to take a bike like this about 30 miles (long straight roads leading to the horizons of the mythical west anyone? Not unless there’s a gas station every few miles or a tanker trailing you not far behind), there is no rear suspension and only a rudimentary front spring, no front brake and forks so long that turning a more than barely perceptible corner requires superhuman skill and courage. But hell, it’s an icon all right - the look, the myth. And the myth here is one of America’s most powerful – freedom.

From the designs included in the Harrods’ list – some of which I must say I have serious issue with as an icon in any of the terms of definition – and spreading the net wider to include icons that no one would argue with but are not necessarily design icons (Routemaster bus = London, Eiffel Tower = Paris, Marilyn Monroe = sexual revolution, Che Guevara = youthful, idealistic revolution), one concludes that the concept has limited value, certainly when you are trying to nail down good design. It’s one of those tricks that language occasionally plays; everyone knows what is meant but no one knows what it means. Currently my best icon money is on the latest offering from Apple under the redoubtable Jonathan Ives, the iPhone, which I strongly believe will revolutionise our use of the mobile world wide web. This is a product I wanted long before I knew it existed. Here is an object of desire that looks beautiful and works not just well but beautifully, inside and out. It’s so… right. It’s also got icons. And as for whether that does or doesn’t make it a piece of iconic design, frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.

http://designicons.harrods.com

www.designmuseum.org

Aidan welcomes responses and comments, positive or otherwise, as long as they are reasonably polite: aidan@aidanwalker.co.uk

CAPTIONS

• iPhone: perhaps too early to be sure it will be an icon, but it certainly ticks all the boxes, and it is great design as well. Not just easy to use, but a downright delight to use. Bravo.

• Harley Electra Glide: Iconic for some. For others, it’s heavy, hard to handle, and turns corners only marginally better than a shopping trolley with a stuck wheel.

• Captain America’s Easy Rider bike: Worse yet, but more iconic. No suspension to speak of, no front brake, range of about 30 miles, turning corners positively dangerous; but as an icon, it’s hard to beat.

• Juicy Salif lemon squeezer by Philippe Starck. Iconic of… what? The triumph of style over substance? Once used as murder weapon in a movie, we hear. May or may not carry many messages, but none of them have to do with squeezing lemons. • Dyson vacuum. Again it’s love or hate. User reviews (eg http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews1017.html) give it 3.6 out of 10 overall and the highest mark (just over 5) is for style. But that visible rubbish churning about behind the window makes it all worthwhile, in an iconic sort of way. • Curve Coke bottle. What is there to say? Count the messages, many of them to do with quintessential Americana. Also can be a refreshing drink. • Chanel No.5. I quote Marilyn Monroe: ‘What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel No.5 of course.’ Nuff said. • Ipod. Did we ever think we could carry our entire record collection wherever we went? Did we want to? And answer me this; there are many MP3 players out there, many with the same capacity, almost all cheaper. Why does the iPod rule? • Tizio lamp: a million movie art directors can’t be wrong. • Arco lamp: likewise. A glorious, extravagant statement about light and comfort – and it works.