TRANSCRIPT OF KEYNOTE - Clive Grinyer

One of the many problems in my job at the Design Council, and I've been there about a year now, is to stop being a designer and designing and to start talking about design.

My life is now about redefining everything. I am dealing with so many views of design and I am redefining so many words in my vocabulary.

Design research for me has been quite a problem area, especially in the context that research is something to do with art or science. It is one of those cultural problems that design research is not terribly well understood by research bodies and the funding agents of research. I sit on a number of such boards of research where there are requests made for huge amounts of money, and where a bunch of artists or a bunch of scientists are trying to grapple with what design research is. Design Research is not understood well by others around us.

Design and research are actually verbs. They are things you actually do. So real design research at its best is about actions. It is about what might happen if you do something. So that means you go into uncharted waters. It is going into the new. And it is about bringing together different actors, and it is about being interdisciplinary which is interesting.

Also it is very future focused. It is about something that might happen if you understand it. Jeremy Myerson's and Anne Chick's examples show how it is about understanding something that might be better in the future. It does have some very real outputs.

I talk to Research Boards who do research in a very abstract paper-driven way and then it is put somewhere and they say 'done that'. Designers being designers are much more about useful outputs, and hopefully about outcomes.

For example, there is a piece of research done by Philips European Commission that talks about how you might connect technology into a community, where you have social scientists, product designers and technologists all working together on how you might replace an ' I've lost my cat notice' posted on a tree.

But you also have some more specific things that Jeremy has been talking about, where there are very tangible outputs from research.

If we are looking for design research definitions, which we are at the Design Council, we are interested in that. But we also should focus on the value of design and design tools going into other areas of life and other disciplines. So we are interested in what design can do for other disciplines.

So let us talk a bit about the Design Council and what we do. We are here to inspire and enable the best use of design by the UK, in the world context, to improve prosperity and well-being.

So that is where we want research to take us.

Our role as a body is about business, public services, creating policy, taking a lead and helping people with a knowledge of design, and sharing knowledge, and taking people with us.

Defining design is the fundamental thing I have to do and that is a tricky thing to do with people like popular TV presenters on home interiors around. Most people consider this to be design. You may weep at that. But you should not necessarily because people now realise that design is not just about painting ones room and going to B&Q for the paint but it is actually about thinking about 'do I want it' and a process is being injected there. So despite his appalling taste in these programmes they are helping to educate the public.

And on the other hand there is someone like James Dyson. Is he a designer? Again the public would say absolutely yes. Is he an inventor? Is he an engineer? Is he a fantastic marketer?

There are a lot of problems with defining design. To inspire design we do a number of things - to communicate, to inspire people to understand what design is all about we make television programmes with designers like Dick Powell and Richard Seymour, and broadcast these to many people. We do international exhibitions where you talk about design and the creative industries. We collect inspiring stories how people have actually gone about design, and there is a lot of research activity there in finding great examples of design work and show what actually went on. And we try to inspire individuals and make a connection with people like you.

We talk about the big signups of what we do in five terms.

1. We talk about design for the quality of life.

We call upon the work of others who have done research and design around the ageing population. Here we find that the people we design for are not the same people we thought they were. And that does not just involve design research. It uses the social scientist and forecasters who spot the fact in the first place that the world is changing. Then what we can do is find design responses to that, then to find the design tools that will help make the world better.

2. We talk about design for working and learning.

This is concerned with architecture but we don't want to talk about buildings but what goes on in them. We could say - that is fantastic looking building, or a fantastic looking graphic design , or whatever. But this is not our role. Our role is to say you can do something better with 'design'. … It is a better school through design. It is a better hospital because of the impact of communication design, or product design or whatever.

3.

We are interested in 'Sustainable products'. Design for a better environment is a big area that we are concerned with.

Other people like Anne Chick and The Surrey Institute are doing great things on design and the environment. It is our job to understand it and show that leading activity in a very tangible way. So we can show Millennium products that are very sustainable. This is a remarkable pencil that comes from one of these things (vending machine cup) And we have the remarkable chair made from waste black plastic bags. This was a response to a company which made large plastic bags, and will be forced by legislation to collect those plastic bags. Therefore it had a problem . A design intervention was brought into place to see what processes can be identified for use of that material as a strength-component for a very flexible chair that can go around a tree. So in this example, a black plastic bag manufacturer can become a park furniture manufacture through the intervention of 'design'.

Traditionally the Design Council has had a number of research topics. It really does not do much research at all. It just collects information as to what is going on.

'Longer living' was one of the first topics, and 'flexible working,' as with different ways of home working was another. But we are talking about all different activities - the way you organise working patterns, how people work, how they communicate, what quality of life at work they have and things like that.

4. We are interested in 'e-futures'.

What is the world like if it is all coming through a screen, which has a huge impact on the way we live and the way we communicate. The notice pinned up on the 'lost cat' becomes different though 'e'. We held a series of dinner debates, which brought people together, who are completely unconnected except they are connected in their interest in the future. We bring them together with lots of wine and we film them, and we can live off that research for several months.

5. 'We are interested in Smart' products.

There is a huge amount of technological change. How will that change the freedoms of design, if you like, to come up with new solutions, as you know the materials can do more for you. It is about how the world can be different if the world is 'smart'. A whole load of possibilities start erupting where design can start to control and help create a culture that allows all these things to happen.

It is about how we can really harness creativity, with a small 'c'. so those research topics lead to a number of new initiatives.

At the same time a number of initiatives come from government. They asked us to look at two very disconnected ideas, that seemed disconnected at first, the whole idea of crime and design was raised as to the question. Is there a link between crime and design?

Crime is often 'opportunistic'. If a 17 year old has not got any money for a new mobile phone and s/he sees one lying about then it may well be taken, but if s/he knows it is not going to work when they nick it then you do not get a criminal at 17 but someone who grows up to be a law abiding citizen like the rest of us.

At one point the project had hardly any design involved at all. This is a danger with this kind of interdisciplinary research when you bring in all the people who know about the subject only. Where does design come in?

It is very important that you show ideas by example. You have to use those design tools of visualisation - of building something, even quite crudely, before it is real. This is a core design tool. So by designing out opportunities for crime you can prove how design intervention can work, and you can take that to the people who make the bus shelters, or town planners who create the urban environment, and show them what you are talking about, and show them a different way of thinking, that can make a difference.

A very conventional response to show this is through working with manufacturers. Show them how to 'go that extra mile'. We are telling them that there is a link between design and crime and that design will reduce the opportunity for crime. This became very visible as in a project done at Central St Martins College of Art & design, where a review of the most popular café chairs in Europe, as seen in St Mark's Square in Rome and throughout the cities in Europe was made. A common classic one was identified. They made a design intervention to reduce crime. Generally what they did was to add a detail to prevent a handbag being snatched..

You take this classic design and make a simple design change, and bingo you have a buttock on the strap and no one can snatch the bag. There is a tremendously powerful link between design and crime. We have researched it and used design tools to make people understand what the issue is, and to say this is what you can do with design. This becomes very powerful for planning anything from station concourses to wherever this kind of crime happens.

We have begun to understand what design research is from our point of view.

The real power of taking design tools to the right places is something we are doing now with a very live and very real work that we have just started. It is about being very multidisciplinary and also very interdisciplinary, about being research-based and creating action-research.

This new project is about building good design for future needs and it is called DFFN - Design For Future Needs.

DFFN is funded by the EC - and thank you very much EC. It involves several organisations - APCI , a French version of the Design Council in Paris, which interesting only has three people in it, a scientific organisation concerned about innovation in a very scientific sense , UIAH, a design school in Helsinki, BEDA - the body for designers of Europe. The CSD being the UK organisation, also involved is Interaction IVREA, a design course again but which is totally about interaction with technology, and of course us at the UK Design Council

DFFN is really about how do we understand 'what is next', because we live in a world where technology is driven very hard and we begin to understand what is next by listening to those technologists, and by listening to social scientists. We are living longer and there are demographic changes and barriers are coming down to people working in different geographical areas.

But how do we get there ?

We get there by planning - by having what the French call 'Prospectif', which is a sort of visioning of the future. We do that in Britain and other parts of Europe with the EC Foresight Programme.

Where on earth does Design fit in?

The output of the EC Foresight is very cold. Reports are produced that take ages to read. So what can Design do with it's emotional interpretation, that kind of looking to how things 'could be' rather than what the 'are', For example by putting hardware and software together in an appealing way , which results in for example, a mobile phone being bought for its colour and for that reason alone. There are lots of things like that which economists, sociologists, and technologists can't get to grips with as its 'illogical Captain'.!

We know 'design' is driver of the irrational, the emotional and the innovative. We know that people can be convinced to buy products that are twice as expensive as other stuff. We know that people will buy Robot electronic dogs that you can stroke and they sit up and say 'thank you'. Phillips said 10 years ago ' would not it be good if we could build electronics into clothing that keep children safe. We have products now that enable kids to be secure as we can know where they are if they wear 'techno-clothing. Five years after that vision such device did exist because the research was done with the technology to create that vision. So design leading technology is very important.

The aim is to "open a dialogue between designers and policy makers to emphasis the potential for design thinking to assist in the anticipation of change and prepare solutions for these changes"

It should " identify tools, techniques and methodologies used in design forecasting practice in industry, the public sector and government policy throughout the EU to enhance understanding of how design thinking, planning and foresight initiatives in these areas can improve the ability to respond to social, economic and technological trend."

Project outputs are important. There is an opportunity for designers to show what design and design research can do. Politicians are running out of ideas and where to get ideas from beyond the usual sources. They need better tools. They want to stop wasting huge amounts of money on technology that nobody wants.

We brought somebody from Foresight into the project team. They point out that there are many areas that Foresight Programme is looking at. What is the link between these Foresight Programmes and design?

Why not Science? Science is there to create the possible out of the impossible, but what for? What is the purpose?

Why not technology? It is created but of what value?

We don't make many microwave cookers now in the UK. UK technologists invented microwave cooking, then someone else gets to make the cookers. The 'technology perspective' has meant huge amounts of money spent on developing 3G mobile phones - some £25 Billion. But it forgot to ask 'do people actually want it, and importantly, how?'. People might say 'If it is this big I don't what it, I only want it if it is this big.'

Bluetooth technology! What a great idea. That's got to be good has not it? What do we do with it now? Nothing. So what happens when designers sit down and ask what do people want to do with it? They find people want to send emails in the way they are used to writing so a pen emailer has been designed. Now Bluetooth is working. Now there is a vision that makes sense.

Why not marketing? Marketing is in the present tense or the past tense. Maybe it could take things forward but it does not. It is a reaction to the present. Design is totally about 'forward visualisation'.

Why design?

Design and innovation is about connecting ideas and emotions. It is about connecting those great ideas, with the emotions and the values of people. Idea - here is a box. Let's put all the parts of a computer in it. Great idea. But not until Apple iMac did it work. Connecting the idea to emotions. The emotional impact of the iMac is hugely more than that of the one in the first one shown.

We live in a context where a lot of people see design differently. Is it invention, innovation or what?

I think 'invention' is the transistor. Innovation is the portable radio. And design is 'let us put some more bits together in an interesting way and create a new kind of product - a timy mobile radio, which has nothing to do with the original transistor but it came from that route. My idiots guide to invention, innovation and design.

Design Process is about user research - not just knowing what people want, but what they need.

But what interests us in this research project is how the tools of design can be applied to something else - something big. So user research is important - knowing what people want and need. What are the things they are not telling us about? Finding out about what people's implicit needs are and well as explicit needs. You ask them what they want - Red or Blue. They say they want red, but what they really want is blue.

The Design Process is about creating alternative visions by testing something out crudely, even with sticky tape and modelled with foam - action research appropriate to many things.

The Design Process is about creating experience before it is real.

Orange, the mobile phone Network company, has a research Centre that allows everything to be done with your mobile phone. Any stupid idea with a mobile phone can be tried out. Not that they want you to do all these things. They want to find out what is actually worth doing here.

The Design Process is planning the route to the future.

So that is what the project Design For Future Needs is all about. Here is design thinking and here are design tools, We will show through this experiment that better world will result from the use of what Design can offer.

We are working with business, with science and technology, with the public sector through transportation, health, and education.

So Design Research from my point of view is about connecting design thinking to real needs, and to identify effective and sustainable possibilities.

That is the end of my talk to you today. Thank you.

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