Advancing Sideways
By KENNETH
J. ROBINSON WHEN I was fleeting the time carelessly as Senior Promotion Officer, Grade Three, of the govern- ment-sponsored Council of Industrial Design, a distinguished oveiling (Grade One) asked me the 64,000 dollar ques- tion. 'How,' he said, 'would you spend an- other ten, twenty or fifty thousand pounds a year on the Council's behalf—if you had it?' Pushing aside the greedy impulse to ask for a carpet Just like his, I suggested it should be used to help the Council in its long-established policy of advancing sideways. It could not, I felt, go for- Wards on such small sums; they could only strengthen the work it was already doing. Going forwards would have meant setting up a fabulously expensive testing service, so that every one of the three thousand products which reached the Design Centre each year did so not Only after being vetted on appearance by a panel Of design 'experts' (advised by a technical assessor for each type of product)—as it is today —but also after being subjected to a standard test of its efficiency. (A lot of people hope that even if the Council is never able to set up such a service the Government will eventually find some way of providing it.) If, however, I were still on the Council's staff today I would suggest the setting up of tests for Design Centre Award winners - if for nothing else. I say this after looking at the 1961 batch, which arc now on view in the Design Centre, and at the judges' reports on the thirteen 'out- standing' things they have chosen from the three thousand on view last year. Not that I have doubts about the efficiency of most of these handsome products. But the way they are pre- sented makes it clear that the Council should decide in future to take its awards either more seriously or much less seriously.
It really must do one or the other. The main purpose of the awards is, of course, to pub- licise the Council, the Centre and good design generally, but things that are so well worth pub- licising deserve a more effective publicity cam- paign. This year some of the comments of the award judges are so fatuous or so half-hearted that they may well deaden the impact of the campaign on the public mind. The fatuous examples include the deliciously ambiguous comment that a litter bin 'lends itself to use in a wide variety of situations' (no, no, not that!); the meaningless claim that the 'absence of obvious styling' on an oil-fired boiler expresses 'an archi- tectural conception,' and the tautologous state- ment that the three pieces of a carving set are 'carefully related to each other to form a related set.' Elsewhere you can read of shapes that are either 'simple' or merely 'kept simple' (what, I wonder, is the difference?), 'expressive' (what does that mean?) or 'subtle' (a carving fork is said to have 'particularly successful' subtlety).
In all this I am not really sniping at the un- fortunate judges. They were in the unhappy position of anyone who is expected to say not only what he likes but why he likes it. The Council ought to spare the judges the terrible task of justifying their choice of outstanding designs. I would prefer to see no comments at all than the sort published this year. But to do this the Council would have to take its awards less seriously. Better than any judges' comments would be a straightforward description of the winning products (which we get now) together with the published results of successful tests on them. (The unsuccessful should, of course, be disqualified. I don't think I'm giving away an important secret by saying that one year a chosen award winner was removed at the last minute because it broke down during tests. And it was tested only because one of the consumer associations happened to have the right sort of testing equipment in operation at that time.) If the Council cannot or will not see the wisdom of ensuring that its annual award winners are foolproof, it should at least prevent its two selec- tion panels (one for the Awards and the other for the Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design) from choosing products they feel in the least doubtful about. This year the winners in- clude a photographic slide projector with a handle that is 'unpleasantly hot' and a radio set— the one that got the Elegance Prize—with a colour on it the judges blenched at and controls they thought might be confusing. These were tiny criticisms, but there must surely be Lt least thirteen other products among the three thousand shown in 1960 which could have been given awards without qualified approval.
My own award to the judges for the most naïve choice of the year goes to their selection of a perforated metal litter bin which they say is attractive to look at and easy to clean. This object could, I am sure, cause a strike among the park-keepers of Britain—not just because its whiteness will soon match that of the Other Brand, but because the holes in its sides will need hefty work with a toothpick after a typical Bank Holiday of rain and discarded tomato sandwiches. Last year when the same bin was awarded a Design Centre diploma in a litter bin competition, the selection panel suggested it would be difficult to empty. How then did it manage to become a Design Centre Award winner? It might, more logically, have won the Elegance Prize. After all, the judges have said a lot about the appearance of the so-called 'elegant' radio, but nothing has been said of its standard of performance—something that must concern everyone who buys it even more than what it looks like.
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