By design
• CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
Two years ago, the annual report by the Council of Industrial Design opened with a restrained display of national flag flapping. There was a good chance, it claimed, that the 1970s would become the decade of British ascendancy in design, just as the 1950s were years of Scandinavian and Italian supremacy and the 1960s (perhaps) of German and Japanese pre-eminence. This optimism was based on our possession of several swinging assets, of which a .high and advancing level of education—in its very broadest sense— seemed the most significant.
What the corn had to say about the educa- tion of the designer was particularly re- assuring: the pattern of design education, 'with a dynamic Royal College of Art at its apex,' was well calculated to equip him to take his Place in the industrial team. What it had to say about the education of the consumer was somewhat less precise: a mass market, awakened by a vigorous consumer movement and a critical and design-conscious press, was thought to be demanding better standards in the shops. But what it had to say about the education of managers was tinged with anxiety: the Coro had not yet broken through indus- try's 'crust of suspicion and indifference,' the recognition that design problems demand pro-
fessional solution could not be ,described as more than 'incipient' and the key to the future lay in maintaining pressure on this point.
A year later, in conditions of deepening economic gloom, the references to manage- ment assumed a sharper cutting edge. 'Design is still regarded in too many British firms as a marginal activity that can be postponed or dis- pensed with in times of difficulty,' and too many companies had been acting upon this short-sighted assumption. Whether their myopia had doomed Britain's pretensions to be design leader of the 1970s was left unstated. What was stated, with clarity and force, is that it is especially in times of economic challenge that extra resources need applying to activities that render industry more com- petitive in world markets. Of these, attention to design 'remains the cheapest, yet one of the most effective.'
This, presumably, is the message the Prime Minister is expected to drive home to the management conference on 'Design for Ex- port,' due to be opened next month. The con- ference—part of a joint project arranged by the British National Export Council and the corn—will feature eight specialised seminars for senior management. In addition, the whole of the London Design Centre will be given over for about six weeks to two supporting exhibitions. The area just vacated by the dis- appointing Danish display (typified in my memory by a picture of a small girl picking her nose and captioned 'The proper tool is half the job') will house a thematic exhibition presenting nineteen case-histories demonstrat- ing how good design has helped particular British firms to export better. The rest will show a thousand modern products, selected from the COLD design index, which export well.
The dead set the COLD is making at would- be or should-be exporters will bring an ironic smile to the lips of its early advocates. Sir Gordon Russell, doyen of British industrial• designers, recalls that at the war's end the idea of a Council of Industrial Design had few friends, and many foes—some of whom re- garded its activities as little short of treason. What would happen, he wondered in 1947 on becoming director of the COLD, if several im- portant export trades ganged up and went to the President of the Board of Trade saying that the Council was discrediting profitable export lines by pointing out faults of design? `In retrospect this time seems a most hazardous one, but it was at least stimulating and I always tried to calculate the odds.' That he calculated them correctly for twelve years--confining to his sanctum his 'unfathomable blasphemies' regarding detractors—is not the smallest debt society owes to this awesome all-rounder whose just published autobiography, Designees Trade (Allen and Unwin 60s), is both an edu- cation and an entertainment.
It was one of the arguments used in favour of the corn that raising the level of public taste would stimulate a discriminating home demand which must, in time, beneficially in- fluence the export trade. What has happened, as Sir Gordon Russell's son-in-law Ken Baynes has pointed out, is that while the general stan- dard of design has been able to rise on the basis of popular concern, the designer remains the prisoner as well as the servant of the com- munity. `So long as a manufacturer can argue with justification, "Well, what I suggest is not as good as your idea, but it will sell and it's what the public wants," the designer has not a completely valid reply.' It is the philistine consumer (not you, dear reader) who keeps the philistine supplier in business and makes it unhappily true of Britain, as Oscar Wilde once said of an actress, that she has the remains of really remarkable ugliness.
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