Des gn
Design for Obsolescence
By KENNETH J. ROBINSON
LAST week the Duke of Edin- burgh went to the Design
Centre to choose, with a panel of judges, the most elegant pro- duct shown there in the past year. The product selected for from now? That may sound a pretty silly question. But there is so much pressure nowadays from people who want to bring high fashion design into furniture and other consumer goods that we shall probably wake up one day and find that our fibre- glass chairs, our plastic bread bins and our emotionally charged, teenage bicycles are neither elegant nor practical, but intolerably old- fashioned.
It wouldn't be so worrying if the high-fashion pressure came only from the sort of person who is always talking mumbo-jumbo about design at places like the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I wasn't particularly perturbed when one of these specialists in design-mystique presented a tele- vision programme for sixth-formers the other day. If Associated Rediffusion want to indoctrinate tomorrow's citizens with the theory that industrial design is all a matter of fashion—of status symbols and tail-fins devised to make cars look like jet machines—then they and the sixth-formers are in for a lot of harmless, juvenile fun, and I don't suppose anyone will suffer much lasting damage. But ri shaken when I suspect that a similar attitude is taken by the Furniture Development Connell which carries out research for the manu- facturers. The Council has just published a statisti- cal report which says that `if present trends con- tinue, by 1963 the public will spend a smaller proportion of its total expenditure on new furni- ture for the home.' Tut, if I may say so, tut. How dare the public stop buying furniture just because it doesn't want any more? Anyway, the Council has a remedy. It deplores' the habit most people
have of keeping furniture for twenty or twenty- five years. 'Manufacturers,' it says, 'should take steps to overcome this attitude and make new furniture match the attraction of a new car.'
This can mean only one thing—that furniture design ought to be a seasonal affair, like fashion design. Nothing could be less in keeping with the principles of the good designer, who would never produce something with a built-in sales gimmick. A good designer makes it his business to provide something that will both work well and look good. Sometimes, while he is improving the product's appearance, he will find a way of improving its efficiency. And sometimes, while he is making it work better, he finds he is making it look better as well. But no one will produce a good design if he is thinking first of how to make his product —refrigerator, lamp or pepper pot—different to look at from last year's model.
The Furniture Development Council didn't specifically ask for high fashion in furniture. What they did ask for—to encourage a public that is now (so they say) sitting at home with and on its furniture more than ever—was more technical and economic research (so that prices could be reduced), a large-scale publicity campaign and 'a study of the changing needs and habits of poten- tial furniture buyers.' This last suggestion is a tricky one. There are two sorts of user research. One of them—as Sir Gordon Russell said in a recent lecture at the Royal Society of Arts—is based on the idea that by questioning an impres- sive number of people, and accepting the lowest common denominator of the answers, you can design a product that will appeal to the greatest market.
The other sort of research is conducted in a smaller way. The best example I know is the method used by two friends of mine. Whenever they have a new design in hand, they order proto- types for use in their own house. The results are sometimes amusing. About a year ago they in- stalled a range of dining-room furniture. During the year they noticed that guests who were told nothing about it either said the chairs were very comfortable or took them for granted. The first time they told a guest he was using new furniture he tried the chairs again and said ,they were too high, and then put his full weight on the weak end of the gate-leg table and complained that it wasn't steady. But he had to admit that both table and chair had seemed perfectly satisfactory when he was using them without thinking about them.
What this proves I don't know. But I do know that I would rely just as much on the work of these designers, who make their own tests where they should be made, as on products that are tested to destruction in a machine. I would also expect to like and keep their designs for twenty- five years, which is very wrong of me because the Furniture Development Council asks us to turn envious eyes on America, where people have progressed to the stage of changing their furniture every ten or twelve years.
A Christmas postscript from America, where the 'season's 'necktivity'-1 quote from a glossy magazine—began with advertisements for Kistle- toe Chimes. The same magazine offered Jumbo Prunes, Whisky Toothpaste and Perfumed Manure. And women readers were advised to give Wind Speed Indicators as 'constant lifelong re- minders of how really important he is to you.' For those who didn't want to commit themselves there was the Jayne Mansfield Hot Water Bottle Ca duplicate of the curvaceous movie queen'), a pedometer 'for the busy home maker' or a vibrat- ing car seat which plugs into a cigarette lighter and massages the driver. But before spending too much on presents wise Americans laid out five dollars on the predictions of Nostradamus, which include the date of the next world war—first taking the precaution of buying themselves a useful gadget which is also a mid-century symbol, a Do-it-yourself Blood Pressure Kit.
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