August 2007 | Blueprint

Shuffling towards Bethlehem

So what rough beast, its hour come round at last, emerges for the worlds of architecture and design, from Gordon Brown’s summer rejig of ministerial posts?

Here are the facts. Today the Barking MP, Margaret Hodge, oversees architecture at the department for culture, media and sport (DCMS). Yvette Cooper, a member of Gordon Brown’s inner circle, attends the plentiful cabinet meetings at which her brief, housing, comes up. And at a more senior level, the much loved Hazel Blears controls the department of communities and local government (CLG); clever Balliol graduate James Purnell, 37, leads the DCMS; John Denham, a Blairite with a background at War on Want and Oxfam, heads Britain’s first department of innovation, universities, and skills (DIUS); and John Hutton, a still stauncher Blairite, now runs a new department of business, enterprise and regulatory reform (BERR). Under Hutton, Malcolm Wicks retains responsibility for the key issue of energy, and new competitiveness minister Stephen Timms, a Christian socialist, looks after creative industries, IT, cars, construction, retailing and manufacturing.

Despite Gordon Brown’s view that design is ‘not a part of success but the heart of success’, there’s no minister for design.  (1) Maybe that’s a good thing; but as Brown’s list of ministerial responsibilities, his terminology and his acronyms confirm, fragmentation of government policy and action will be the rule. Take Tessa Jowell. The woman who called the Wolff Olins graffiti-style logo ‘terrific’ and ‘iconic’ now presides both over the 2012 Olympics, and – at cabinet level, no less – over London too.

There is meaning in all this madness. Brown’s 2005 Budget wanted both producers and users of public services to be ‘fully engaged’ in the design of public services. So expect the Gordonistas to play up architecture and design as tools for helping consumers participate in citizens’ juries, specify the colours used on their new community centre, and personalise what they get out of education and health care.

Call it deliberative design.

Deliberative design may just delay things: already, what’s fashionably called ‘design thinking’ earns more favour than actually turning out a properly engineered artefact.  But on one issue there will be no indecisiveness. Of the state, Hodge has famously observed that ‘it’s not a question of whether we should intrude in life, but how and when’.  (2) We can thus expect everything from animation to vehicle design to feel government pressure to intrude on consumers and browbeat them into making ‘informed choices’ about their behaviour with energy, food, water and waste. Design, we will be told, can join regulation in combating market failure – indeed, in shaping markets for a better, more ethical world.

Alongside deliberative design, then, we can look forward to more design against obesity, design to grow your own vegetables, and the design of meters and ration cards to tell you what an energy wastrel you are every minute you are in your house or car. If you want to live in one of Gordon Brown’s new council-backed eco-homes, you’ll have to convince officials that you’re keen on eco-design, and you’ll have to go through a short induction programme to learn how to keep your energy costs to a minimum. In most cases, too, you’ll be provided with just a shower, not a bath.  (3)

On the international stage, we can expect the same creative approach.

Since he became prime minister, Brown has boasted how, through the Climate Change Bill published in draft on 13 March, the British state will be the first in the world to make CO2 emissions the subject of a legal framework. (4) And of technologies to make homes zero carbon, Cooper has said that turf or solar panels on roofs, wind turbines in gardens or heat pumps below cellars represent chances for Britain to ‘lead the way across the world’.  (5) Stand by, therefore, for more efforts to get planet-saving British eco-designs bought by Asia, in the way that the new Chinese city of Dongtan has bought Arup.

Purnell has long shown the way. Back in May 2005, he set what he conceded was an ambitious goal: to make Britain ‘the world’s creative hub’. Now newly appointed foreign minister David Miliband agrees: Britain, he has said, can be ‘a global hub’ not just economically, through the City of London, or culturally, but also politically, through its ‘unique set of alliances’ to the US, EU and India.  (6)

Ah, those hubs. Such an inventive metaphor! Myself, I’ve always liked ambitious goals. But when, in 1985, I wrote a cover story for the Listener titled ‘A new kind of nationalism in design’, (7) I hadn’t realised just how much, one day, Whitehall would put the hub into hubris. 

(1) Brown has said that design is ‘not incidental to modern economies but integral; not a part of success but the heart of success; and not a sideshow but the centrepiece’. Speech at the opening reception of the London Design Festival, National Gallery, London, 19 September 2005.

(2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4044815.stm

(3) JW visit to Wolverhampton eco-homes development backed by £2m Housing Corporation subsidy, 9 July 2007.

(4) http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page12422.asphe

(5) http://www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1505511

(6) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f49555aa-2d88-11dc-939b-0000779fd2ac.html

(7) See James Woudhuysen, ‘A new kind of nationalism in design’, The Listener, 12 September 1985, pp11-12.