Island Mentality

The Design Council is trying to keep the notion of British design alive, but is there actually any such thing as ‘British design', asks Kevin McCullagh, and what role should Britain adopt in the 21st century's creative economy?

‘Nice work' said the Chinese designer sitting next to me on the Korean conference panel after I had presented. Then came the sucker punch: ‘But we do nearly as good work for a tenth of the price.'

Britain's smug and often insular design establishment is waking up - as I did that Korean conference - to the realisation that its world-beating inventiveness might just be a myth. As Philip Dodd, ex-director of the ICA and cofounder of the agency Made in China, says, it's high time creatives snapped out of their ‘complacent narcissism'.

In response to global competition, the Government has unleashed a raft of initiatives Gordon Brown hopes will harness designers' talent and haul British industry up the ‘valueadded chain', away from the low-cost economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. While in a debate entitled Design or Die!, Design Council chairman Sir George Cox, who Brown commissioned to review Britain's competitiveness, claimed the choice was between more design and Britain becoming a theme park.

Keepbritishdesignalive.com is the web address of a new consultation launched by the Design Council and Creative & Cultural Skills. Its goal, as Britain faces up to the threat of a new world order, is to boost productivity. ‘Design a new design industry' it urges. ‘British design is the best in the world. But we need to take action now to make sure it stays that way.' Its recommendations include more business skills education, more industrial placements for students and tutors, and a professional accreditation system. Beyond the doom-laden hyperbole and the education focus, the initiative raises fundamental questions: how useful is it to talk of British design in today's globalised markets? And what specialist role should Britain aim to play in the 21st century's creative economy?

German, Korean, Japanese or Chinese product design is more straightforward. Korean design, in particular, amounts largely to Korean designers designing products in Korea for manufacture in Korea. In Germany, design often includes a signature modernist national style thrown in to boot.

However, this model has long been redundant in Britain. Richard Seymour recalls that SeymourPowell - the poster boys of 1980s British design - ‘had to go pan-European from day one in 1984, and pan-global two years later, for the simple reason that the domestic design market was practically non-existent!' Today, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, who in 1992 wrote World Design: Nationalism and Globalism in Design, agrees: ‘I think the time is gone when you could sensibly talk of British design for most kinds of products.'

The reality that Britain doesn't make much any more or that its designers predominantly work for foreign companies is old news - but is it a problem? The scene in Britain has never been so vibrant. Jasper Morrison has been the toast of the international cognoscenti for more than a decade. Design and manufacturer company Established and Sons threw the flashest party at the Milan furniture fair this year, and James Dyson's empire continues to conquer new markets. Overseas multinationals such as Motorola, Nokia, Nissan, Samsung, Samsonite, Sony and Yamaha have all opened European design centres in and around London over the past decade to be near its buzz and multicultural talent.

The Brits abroad are arguably an even more impressive list. Jonathan Ive is an international design and business icon; Tim Brown is CEO of the feted IDEO; and there's David Lewis at Bang & Olufsen. The design chiefs at Aston Martin, Ford Europe and US, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda and Volvo are all Brits.

However, only Established and Sons represents ‘a designed by Brits, made in Britain' story, and even then it is arguably more of a fashionable art brand than a product company. Ive is responsible for products that boast being ‘Designed in California', and along with Morrison - who spends as much time in his Paris studio as London - is doing a great job of reprising Dieter Rams' version of German Modernism. Two of London's hottest design exporters, Ron Arad and Zaha Hadid, are émigrés from Israel and Iraq respectively. Meanwhile, London's Sam Hecht designs products - which many think look Japanese - for Muji. Product design has to a large extent become globalised, and de-industrialised Britain has been at the forefront of this shift. As by-products of its economy and culture, its designers have long been associated with being non-ideological, commercially pragmatic and global in outlook. Companies now chase talent, not mythical national design cultures.

The whole concept of British design sounds positively quaint, and delusional talk of being ‘best in the world' smacks of a bygone Little Englander era. In the recent British Design Quest, the public voted for its 25 favourite designs - only Grand Theft Auto had been launched in the past 10 years. The ranking was topped by Concorde and littered with crowd-pleasers such as the Mini (car and dress), Spitfire, Underground map, Routemaster bus and K2 phone box. British design has ceased to exist when by my calculations the average vintage of a British design classic is 1961.

If the concept is anachronistic, perhaps Britain could best face the future by thinking in terms of what part it should play in the global division of creative labour. What should it specialise in?

A relatively new role Britain, or at least the South-East, has begun to play is that of a willing host to the creative jet set. London provides multinationals with a groovy global city and worldclass creative infrastructure. That said, if this is to be Britain's only role, it is a seriously diminished one. Coming from a company that regularly wins pitches against agencies from three continents, I believe designers here can still compete. However, the emphasis must be on permanent innovation in what kind of work we do and how it is done, as well as in the work itself. Consistently generating new knowledge and processes, as well as new design ideas, is the way to ensure inclusion in the global premier league.

Here lies the problem with the consultation on keepbritishdesignalive.com. It focuses on better benchmarking and teaching of existing and increasingly commoditised knowledge. Despite its grand call to ‘design a new design industry', it meekly recommends more of the same. Britain's product designers need not only to innovate how they do what they do, but also boldly branch out and define new high-value disciplines such as strategic design and service design. Clive Grinyer, design chief at France Telecom, would like to see new collaborations between experience designers and software engineers, to deliver the kind of beautiful and breathtaking breakthroughs that Arup and Foster Associates have achieved in architecture.

An inspiring example of such discipline-busting ambition can be found in Anomaly, the two-year-old NYC communications agency. It has already grown to 60-plus staff by breaking many of the old creative and technology boundaries. Last year, it approached PayPal, the electronic payment company owned by eBay, asking if it had considered enabling consumer transactions by mobile phone. It had, but didn't know how to make it work.

In April this year, Anomaly, with its rare mix of talent and audacity, helped PayPal launch its ‘Text to buy' service, enabling consumers to buy items such as DVDs and shoes by simply sending a short code by text message. Having generated the service concept, developed the enabling software, and set-up the server facility to process the orders, Anomaly now takes a cut of every purchase, and has spun-off the offering into a separate company called Assembly. That's how to reinvent the design industry.