December 2005 | exclusive to Woudhuysen.com

Why do research? The questions for design

It is not Britain's science, engineering and technology 'base' or high educational standards that receive the government's attention, but knowledge transfer.

Lord Sainsbury’s December 2003 report for the Department of Trade and Industry, Competing in the Global Economy: the Innovation Challenge, inadvertently provides a useful answer to the old chestnut. Innovation is of relevance to every designer, after all.

In his Foreword to the Sainsbury report, Tony Blair blithely opens a paragraph with the words

‘Innovation, the exploitation of new ideas, is absolutely essential...’ (p3)

Sainsbury, Britain’s minister for science and innovation, goes on to echo this definition of innovation (p10). Indeed, the idea of exploiting ideas occurs more than 60 times in his report - not too much innovation there!

In one sense the definition is correct. Innovation cannot be reduced to invention, and the commercialisation of new ideas and inventions is important to innovation.

But even technological innovation is not just about bringing inventions to market. Technology is also reliant on innovation in science, market research and, not least, innovation in knowledge generally. Less technological kinds of innovation - the organisational sort, or the social sort - are likewise dependent on new insights gained from research.

In some ways the government recognises this. Sainsbury acknowledges that one of the state’s roles is to go ‘developing the significant range of public goods that are essential for a dynamic and innovative knowledge economy, including a strong science, engineering and technology base, incentives for knowledge transfer, and high educational standards’ (p10). But in practice it is not Britain’s science, engineering and technology ‘base’ or high educational standards that receive the government’s attention, but knowledge transfer.

It is not the challenging generation of new knowledge, through research, experiment and debate that bothers the government. What exercises it is the much easier, investment-lite communication of existing knowledge - knowledge that the government believes is ready to be free as soon as it confronts the market’s occasional failure to channel information properly. Following Marshall McLuhan’s old proposition (The medium is the massage, 1962), the feeling is that the form in which knowledge is distributed is more important than the content and development of new knowledge itself. It is not pathbreaking, research-intensive substance that preoccupies, but the speed, direction and efficiency in which existing knowledge can be spun.

That’s a pity. But this superficial account of innovation has emerged for real reasons. The government believes, along with millions of others, that Britain, still a nation of boffins, has great ideas for technology, great inventions. Through a one-sided view of this country’s economic history, however, the government also believes that after the boffins come the botches. While other countries rip off our science, the old story goes, in commercialisation we fail - through an exasperatingly British mix of

* ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome
* the stigma that attaches to making mistakes and going bankrupt
* the lack of a US-style venture capital industry.

The whole problem, in the government’s mind, is that Britain’s inventive powers are too confined within universities, too uncommercial, too governed by airy and naïve propeller-heads working in garages and endlessly refining their prototypes. The whole task then becomes one of berating inventors, boffins and creative intellects generally for not getting out there in the real hard world of commerce and market forces.

Now, the British design sector loves to flatter itself that it is a world-beater in creativity - and Sainsbury himself everywhere studs his report with kind words for design. But at the same time Sainsbury believes that the UK should be a country ‘famed not only for its outstanding record of discovery but also for innovation’ (p7). This is a common-sense view, and it is certainly true that, in design as elsewhere, good research, ideas or conceptual breakthroughs are not, by themselves, enough to ensure success. However, given Britain’s longstanding philosophical and political distaste for ideas, and the current cultural climate in higher education, we should resist any and all of today’s worldlywise attempts to downplay the significance of research in favour of the pragmatism of the market.

In the official and popular imagination, James Dyson has done well in invention and design. It is conveniently forgotten that, to become one of Britain’s richest men, Dyson claims to have experimented with no fewer than 5000 prototypes of his cyclonic cleaner - so much for the caricature of inventors as stupid perfectionists. Instead, what resonates is how rare Dyson appears to be. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, is no millionaire. Colin Pillinger, inventor and fund-raiser for the Mars probe, Beagle, has met with disappointment. Thus the consensus in UK universities, and elsewhere, has become that the issue in innovation is not so much to deepen or broaden research as to orientate it more firmly toward the market.

For myself, I am all in favour of serious investment, in design as elsewhere, in market research, the filming of user behaviour, the development of sensible business plans, and all of that. But in today’s risk-averse atmosphere, the slavish desire again and again to ‘de-risk’ the whole series of processes that surround innovation by orientating to market signals - this amounts to devaluing all the independent research that is led by commercial suppliers, and indeed by postgraduates and faculty researchers.

It is right, in design, to be inspired by users. But it is wrong to be driven by them. Researchers, like designers and educators, must retain the initiative. Too much user-centredness amounts to dumbing down. Users consist not just of needy individuals, but also of talented groups. Yet even the most talented users of design and innovation, and even the most sophisticated markets, are no substitute for professionally trained expertise.

I am not defending an exclusive orientation to ‘blue sky’ research, even if, over 20 years, I have had enough of brainstorming sessions. But with Sainsbury we learn not just that training should be more demand-led (pp11, 32, 44), but that, in its Technology Strategy, the government will work with business to ‘pull through’ technologies through an ‘industry led-technology programme’ (sic, p53). A Technology Strategy Board will be set up to ensure the technology priorities are ‘market-focused’ (sic, p53). Just in case we forget, we learn on the same page that the Technology Strategy ‘will be based firmly on market pull’.

In fact, Sainsbury makes a sensible observation on the previous page. Britain, he says, needs to improve both the supply side and the demand side of its research accurately performance. But with three raps of the knuckles in favour of the demand side on page 53, this balanced approach is pretty much overturned within a few more paragraphs.

Why do research? Too much research is now regarded as an economic luxury. It is also seen as being potentially dangerous to humanity and the environment. For all the talk of the knowledge economy, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has become less of a rule and more of an exception. So it’s time to mount a serious rearguard defence of research, knowledge, enquiry and experiment.

Future generations will not remember this one for the facility with which it transfers knowledge. They will salute us for the fresh designs we bring to the world. Good communications is an essential part of design and its management, and designers today lack good communicators. But the production of radical designs - drawing, prototyping, testing and, not least, researching them - should still be the business we are in.

So join the research counter-culture now!