Creative Accounting

Designers, your country needs you! Gordon Brown is vexed about the economy's competitiveness and thinks designers are part of the solution. He wants them to raise productivity and push the UK up the ‘value-added chain', away from low cost BRICs economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Last March he gave design its first ever mention in a budget and commissioned Sir George Cox, the chairman of the Design Council, to report on how Britain's creatives can boost the country's competitive edge. In September Brown pitched up to open the London Design Festival and declared that ‘creativity and design [add] value that will make the difference between economic success and economic failure'. The Cox Review closed the year by reporting that the key ‘barriers' include business's: lack of awareness and belief in design, not knowing where to find designers and limited ambition. It recommended an awareness-raising program, tax breaks for R&D spending, and more enlightened business education and public spending.

Sir George kicked off the New Year with an ‘Innovation, Creativity and Design Strategy' debate in Davos, the annual smooze-fest for the global business elite. Here he bemoaned the creative state of the nation: ‘I come from a country that is creatively rich and application poor...We don't make iPods but export people who design them - Johnnie Ives.'

It's worth recognising the difference between the current flurry of activity and the Cool Britannia period of government gushing over design. The Cox Review rejects the new economy notion of living on the thin air of creativity and funky business models. There is now an emphasis on integrating design into old economy sectors like manufacturing and on how small companies might exploit the expertise of the creative industries. This is a step forward, but only a small one - it still confuses a symptom of the problem with its solution.

The big cliché in these discussions is to big up Britain's star designers, assert that creativity is a national trait and then contrast this with the supposed irony of industry's inability to capitalise all this talent.
It is neither an accident nor a paradox that Britain is internationally renowned for both its creatives and its industrial decline. The former is a result of the latter.

The reason why London is a creative hub, and so many of our brightest and best work for foreign companies, is that British industry is awful at innovation. This is not due to a shortage of ideas, but a lack of the investment needed to bring them to market. Britain fell behind its major competitors on this measure over a century ago and has steady slid down the R&D investment charts ever since. If you discount spending on pharmaceuticals, aerospace and biotech, investment in innovation by British industry is just plain pitiful.

This steady industrial decline coincided with the blooming of British design. As opportunities within industry dried up, more designers either worked for foreign firms or consultancies that had to chase work over seas. British designers were therefore forced to promote themselves on the international stage.

So can this situation be fixed by raising the profile of designers and awareness of the benefits of design? Whenever awareness raising is put forward as a solution, I smell an issue being fudged. Britain's creatives have never been so feted and their output more admired - whether it be the iPod, the Gerkin or the Aston Martin DB7. A decade after design went mainstream, are we really expected to believe that the captains of small industry are still blind to its charms and don't know who to call?

Don't get me wrong, I think design is part of the solution to reviving the British economy; it's just that other crucial parts of the equation tend to be missing at management level. These include a genuine ambition to make things better, the willingness to take risks and the dedication of adequate resources to get the product or service right. Put another way, for design to make an impact, designers' need an innovative host environment - ask Jonathan Ive. After all most Apple products under his watch were highly forgettable before Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1996.

Lack of ambition and aversion to risk are recognised by the Cox Review, but it will take more than a few workshops and national centre for design to turn this situation around. British industrialists lost the habit of ploughing profits back into new product development and technology generations ago. The accountants who run British industry are much more comfortable investing paltry amounts in a brand tweak or an ad campaign to shift existing products off the shelves, than develop new ones. Meanwhile British designers are well advised to seek out the companies to take innovation seriously - on whatever shore they find them.