18 August 2008 | Design magazine, May 1980

Message from a grand old man

Interview with the late Raymond Loewy, the man who invented industrial design

Raymond Loewy is 87 on 5 November this year. He’s in excellent form though, speaks quite slowly but with little hesitation, and sports a dashing mauve blazer with a NASA emblem on the top pocket. Plus, of course, a shirt and cuff links monogrammed with RL. Just about the first thing he says is ‘Death doesn’t scare me, but it does bore me terribly’.

Loewy is caustic about a number of current product design trends. ‘I want to see more simplicity, reliability and maintainability and less clever technology. Today design means design for the masses, so quality and quality control are matters which relate to a manufacturer’s sense of social responsibility. The customer isn’t supposed to be a guinea pig. When General Motors recalls half a million vehicles for checking, it makes a big song and dance about its integrity in so doing. It shouldn’t. It should spend less on advertising and more on making sure its components don’t go wrong.

‘The point about microelectronics is it doesn’t mend easily. It has to be failsafe or it’s no good. As for the trend towards “black box” design: I think the reaction against it, the “retro” style, will only last five or ten years or so. After that l think we’ll see a turn back to essentials’.

Though Loewy plays a purely consultative role to the London and Fribourg, France offices of Raymond Loewy International, he speaks enthusiastically of the group’s plans to establish a two man technology reconnaissance unit on America’s West Coast. It is part of his credo to keep in touch with the world by traveling widely: ‘Too many captive designers - ones who work in house – live in small towns, do a nine to five and take boring vacations. I’m not sure that British designers move around enough, or that their minds are open when they do. Look at the simplicity you can learn from Japan, the sense of colour you can acquire from a place like Peru’.

Loewy is sympathetic to the French design profession’s efforts to make up for its late arrival on the international design scene. Some 90 per cent of the staff in his group’s French offices are French born and Loewy feels they are doing excellent work - particularly as the recession has driven some of their local competitors to the wall. Loewy is less charitable towards the Germans: ‘they take the electronic look to the threshold of non acceptance’.

About his remarkable career he can be disarming. ‘In the thirties it was very exciting to be the first to prove that giving something a pleasant appearance made it have a higher commercial value. I remember when Roosevelt came on television to talk about the slump. He told us that all we had to fear was fear itself. I took him at his word, went round telling manufacturers that they had to take design seriously, and never looked back.

‘Then as now you had to put yourself in the customer’s place. One time, when I was riding on a locomotive and working out how to redesign it, I had to relieve myself: I discovered you had to climb out of the driver’s cab onto the coal tender and use that as a toilet. So I decided the cab needed a proper toilet of its own, otherwise you could lose your life at just the wrong moment when you passed through a low tunnel. I got letters from the railway workers’ union months after that.’

Loewy does tend to be expansive about his clients. He says that though the recent furore over Afghanistan has made his work for the USSR harder to organise, the Kremlin has called to say how it wants to resume collaboration once the whole thing has blown over. (The Russians are particularly pleased about a tractor Loewy designed for them. It ploughs at both ends and has a dual control system which drivers just swivel their chairs round to face when they are at the end of a furrow. That way they don’t have to turn their machines round. Loewy says the effect on agricultural productivity in the USSR has been a significant one.)

He waxes lyrical about his friendship with John Kennedy. ‘The President liked the carpets I designed for his room in the White House. He said “what else can you do?”. I said “well, let’s redesign America”. He thought that was a great idea.’ But, as Loewy recounts, with some sadness, JFK’s plan never came to fruition: ‘He put James Schlesinger on to it. We had a meeting and talked to 9pm. We agreed to draw up an ambitious programme. But two days later Kennedy was dead.’

His instructions to young designers today? ‘Have a sense of humour. Be curious. And meet good looking girls. They’re proof that God exists’.

17 August 2008 | Design magazine, July 1982

Interim report

Interview with the late Herman Kahn, the man who pretty much invented forecasting

Herman Kahn is big. He always was big. I can still remember picking up copies of Time magazine when I was a kid and seeing pictures of his enormous frame. The pictures were always next to sentences that had the phrase ‘think-tank’ in them. Kahn looked like a think-tank himself. Kahn would be in Time because of his books on the Bomb. His books had good, weighty titles like On thermonuclear war (1960), Thinking about the unthinkable (1962) and so on. Later, Kahn would be in Time writing about The emerging Japanese superstate. Over the years, his concerns seem to have become more and more relevant. Today everybody worries about arms proliferation, everybody worries about Japanese car imports. But Kahn got there first. Now, he says, he’s writing a book about the future role of West Germany.

Kahn’s kind of crystal ball gazing has always had an expansive style about it. His World economic development (1979) was ambitious in scope, to say the least; and his background - physics at CalTech, research for the RAND Corporation - reads like a cipher for everything to do with American brains and American technology. Today, Kahn is director of research at the Hudson Institute, New York, and, in that post, charts out mankind’s progress for the next 20 years with enormous self-confidence.

So where does he think we’re going? ‘You don’t have to ask why people are still poor - why millions are still earning less than $500 a year. That’s normal. The real which got through the $500 barrier ever did so in the first place.’ Kahn believes that world poverty can be ended, but only if its persistence is seen in long term historical perspective.

In the 10 000 years between the demise of hunter-gatherer societies and the Industrial Revolution, Kahn says, ‘man spent most of his time playing games with and against nature. Then he turned his attentions to playing games with and against materials; now he’s into playing games with and against organisations’. The problem, says Kahn, is to complete what he terms ‘the Great Transition’ - a three-century (1775-2175) period of upheaval which, barring war and bad management, should see want eliminated. Once that’s done, he hopes, industry and even today’s mushrooming information sector will make up only a small part of human endeavour.

At the moment, though, prospects look bleak to him. After two periods of boom (1886-1913 and 1948-1973), we look like we’ve drifted into a recession almost as long as the last one (1914-1947). Surprisingly, perhaps, Kahn also feels that the very idea of progress is still under threat from ecological, ‘small is beautiful’ attitudes and pressure groups. In addition, he has sharp words for health and safety legislators, denigrates hedonism and describes hostility to ostentation and materialism as ‘upper middle class show’. What’s needed, he argues, is a renewed commitment to technology, ‘not as a panacea, but certainly as sine qua non’.

Kahn is very specific about the kinds of technology he has in mind. Like Raymond Loewy (DESIGN, May 1980, page 55), he remains convinced that space exploration will bring manufacturing industry real benefits: growing very large crystals in a weightless environment will, he suggests, provide us with materials of unprecedented hardness, resistance to corrosion and general durability. In fact, Kahn sees materials technology as a whole as continuing to have great potential: ‘Right now the innovation there is going on like a house on fire. The thing to watch for is the development of, superconducting metals capable of operating at room temperatures rather than at Absolute Zero.’

Though Kahn notes that increasingly sophisticated transport, telecommunications and information systems have made Western culture more suburban than urban, he doesn’t ‘think that society is going to start working at home rather than at the office: ‘People like to go out to work,’ he says exuberantly. But he does suspect that homes will become highly automated, with programmable vacuum cleaners and voice-operated kitchens becoming commonplace within the next 20 years or so. Oddly, however, he also sees a growing role for domestic helps: ‘one good servant,’ he insists, ‘is worth scores of appliances’.

Other Kahn technological bets: by the year 2000, natural gas, not coal, nuclear power or oil; solar power, but only by AD2100; trade-related construction projects like super
ports; the ‘hyphenated sciences’ (biophysics, bioelectronics); sensors; and artificial intelligence.

How does he rate the prospects for British business over what’s left of this century? ‘The UK,’ Kahn says testily, ‘is too much like Europe. In America, management achieves flexibility by firing people. Men come home from work every day and tell their wives “I got fired” and tell their and their wives think nothing of it. In Japan, management achieves flexibility not by firing people, but by changing their jobs, giving them new tasks. In Britain, as in Europe, you in Europe, you achieve flexibility by death - by letting people carry on in the same old posts till they’ve had it. You’ll never get the technology you want or bring in the technologists and designers you need unless you change that attitude.’

17 July 2008 | Battle of Ideas

China... pollution solution?

How China's economic growth can help the world's environment

16 July 2008 | Radio 4

Nothing Romantic about environmentalists

The great nineteenth-century English poets waxed lyrical about nature, but they still believed in humanity - unlike today’s eco-pessimists

15 July 2008 | Forecasts proved right

Freddie Mac – when are you coming back?

What my book Why is construction so backward?, written with Ian Abley, said four years ago about today's financial crisis in the US

’In the second quarter of 2003, General Motors earned three times as much from selling mortgages as it did from selling cars. [1] And over the much longer period 1995-2003, America’s 50 top banks raised the share of their portfolios held in mortgage-backed securities from 47 per cent to 62 per cent. In so doing, they exposed themselves to the dangers of what Business Week called ‘refi-madness’ –– US consumers’ willingness to refinance their affairs by borrowing more on their homes with the help of declining interest rates. [2]

‘Those financial institutions that have offered cheap loans on property have received an enormous and much-needed boost to profits. In June 2003 it was revealed that one of the largest of such institutions in the US, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, popularly known as Freddie Mac, had indeed deliberately understated its profits by billions of dollars. Why? It wanted to keep profit levels smooth beyond the early years of the new millennium –– so fearful was it of the risk of a later property crash and ensuing profits collapse.’

[1] Dan Roberts, ‘Depressed profits, flat demand and growing pension liabilities: the era of cheap money takes its toll on business’, Financial Times, 21 July 2003, p15.

[2] ‘High anxiety for banks’, Business Week, 9 June 2003, pp48 -49.

14 July 2008 | Times Online

Eco-imperialism is alive and well in the West

The West's pleading with China to cut carbon emissions bursts with ulterior motives

11 July 2008 | IT Week

Will insight lose out to inanity on the mobile web?

Mobile web’s business potential may be undermined by its more frivolous aspects

7 July 2008 | SAB Miller Globalisation Debates

Are global consumer brands a force for good?

Panel speeches and discussion at the Royal Society of Arts, with SAB Miller, Interbrand, Coca-Cola and brand guru Stan Slap

30 May 2008 | IT Week

Innovators must follow Frank's example

Sinatra’s My Way might be a hammy song, but it’s the right policy in R&D

28 April 2008 | IT Week

Experience trumps youthful exuberance

Firms must resist calls to indulge the techno-whims of the MySpace generation

31 March 2008 | Battle of Ideas

The ‘Regeneration Games’, London, 2012

Don’t let the 2012 Olympics become another Dome or T5!

28 March 2008 | IT Week

Race to be green saps creative energy

The energy conservation fad is symptomatic of IT leaders’ narrowing ambition

9 January 2008 | Radio 4

Reality Check on housing and the Land Question

The UK government plans millions of new homes. James comes face to face with a developer, the Sustainable Development Commission, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and a woman who is desperate to buy her own home

1 January 2008 | The Register

The Electric Car Conspiracy... that never was

What a hit movie really tells us about innovation

| Design Council

Mission creep; the limits of design

Transcript of speech at the Intersections conference on design, Newcastle, 25 October 2007