28 September 2007 | The Listener, 15 October 1987

Toward the global concept

Twenty years ago, design was just beginning today's upswing – but the US had clearly begun to regain its worldwide prominence in the field

I spotted it in the best-designs-of-the-year issue of the American magazine International Design: a beautiful piece of plastics sculpture, in a confident and not-too-minty grey and bright green. What was it? A phone, answering machine and message printer, all of which turned into a sort of funky electronic address book. It had little shiny rounded green tabs, the size of thumbnails, at the side, for one to press. Tabs like those one finds on the side of old mechanical paper telephone address books.

The shiny green tabs formed a disarming manual counterpoint to all the chip power built in to this floppy, architectural phone. But in fact the product was only what we in the design trade call a ‘concept’: this phone, the work of Lisa Krohn, was just a well-sprayed wooden model. Yet it was one more confirmation of the speed with which events are now moving in international design.

Krohn worked on the product with a Manhattan industrial design consultancy called Smart Design. One of its principals also has a great brand name to conjure with: Tucker Viemeister. He and his partners are in their early 30s, but are already appearing in all the world’s design magazines. And before long, they will be turning out splendid gadgets for some of America’s best-known corporations.

Smart Design’s work is part of a major new trend in the world of products – the gradual reawakening of American interest and expertise in both the functional and the aesthetic sides of consumer goods design. America, the country that invented industrial design, seems to be searching once again for the lost single-mindedness and exuberance of the streamlined 1930s or the finned 1950s. What is more, corporate America has woken up to design. Don Petersen, the chief of Ford in America, announces that design is what has put his company ahead of General Motors. A brigade of American business schools sends professors over to Britain to investigate how American management could better learn about design.

In America, corporations already use British design consultants to shape their chairs, air conditioning units and car stereos. America can justly be proud of its indigenous design traditions – of Henry Dreyfuss’s archetypal telephone for Bell, or Harry Bertoia’s wire-backed chairs for Knoll International. Right now, however, America has clearly noticed the massive rise in Britain’s awareness of and support for design over the past few years. In the political economy of American design, the motifs are all the more fascinating, because they are European.

Last month, the EEC organised its first conference on design. The newly industrialised countries of South East Asia have also started to spend money on training a cadre of designers to take their microwave ovens and waffle irons out of the cheap-and-cheerful category and into the terra nova of design. Clearly there is an international rush to take design seriously, and it is this that America, pursued by a $160 billion trade deficit, has begun to join. But why the rush in the first place, and will the momentum persist?

You could argue that the prominence of design today is just an appalling yuppy phenomenon: a generation of brokers and moneyed professionals conspicuously consuming trendy objects styled by fast-ascending youths in jeans, set-squares and the inevitable Porsche. But though the yuppy plague is international in spread, carriers of the disease form too limited a market to explain the rise and rise of design.

It is OK to poke fun, as News at Ten often does, at ‘designer’ objects, whether telephone boxes (Sir Giles Gilbert Scott; as now exported to America and turned into shower cubicles), or riot shields (South Africa). But this tag ‘designer’, a dodgy adjectival noun that emerged with Gloria Vanderbilt’s jeans, wrongly associates design with the meretricious or excessive – with, in a word, the yuppy. That association does not do justice to the popular character of design today. Over the entire world economy, there has been a major shift in consumer preference. People of all ages and incomes are now more exercised by the visual and the tactile than ever they were in the past. People prefer good design.

In Britain there is a big future in the architecture and design of inner cities. Worldwide, the major market for design in the 1990s will be people in their forties or older. The prospects for design are not dependent on the fate of yuppies. In America, Volkswagen Golfs and Saabs are not just an elite cult but the models car thieves most like to steal.

It is hard to account for why consumers now pay so much attention to what economists call ‘non-price factors’ – the feel of a shop or a pub, the quality of finish on a bicycle attachment. But an indication of the importance of these non-price factors is that the world market for the ‘creative’ services needed to supply them, for the services of architects and designers, is probably worth £6 billion. And this is just the market for the services of architects and designers who are independent. The demand for ‘in-house’, or staff designers, must be worth perhaps £25billion.

Just as consumers want design, so it has become an internationally traded commodity, generating a massive amount of business in its own right. Yet, strangely, British designers have only fully discovered the dimensions of the ‘global opportunity’ during the past year. Their skills have for some time been sought by earnest Dutch department stores, by Sweden’s muscled world leader in domestic appliances, Electrolux, and by aggressive Yamaha, in motorcycles; but the idea that design could done day emerge as a fully-fledged economic sector, dominated by multinational players just like any other, has dawned late.

Even stranger is the revelation that no single firm of architects or designers has more than a one per cent share of the market for advice and implementation in design: there are design firms quoted on London’s stock market, but none has a turnover of £60million. To put it another way: the design industry is today at the start of its evolution, not its peak. It represents an unsaturated market, one in which any businessman or woman with the right vision could stand, during the next two decades, to create a modest Coca-Cola, a Nissan or a Bosch.

For all the buffetings he has received over the years, and at the hands of financial predators of late, Terence Conran shows what might be achieved. Conran blends design, it should be said, with magic formula of retailing. But he has shown that design can be as central to commercial success as accountancy or industrial relations. Moreover, he has set his visual stamp on much of modern Britain.

The millionaire designers of the new century will have an even more ambitious project before them: through their power, they will determine the shape of the artificial from Sunderland to Seoul. Italians will be among their ranks, of course, but so will New Yorkers. The headlong rush for prowess in design has only just begun.