Greengaged

After an exhausting but exhilarating week of Greengaged ’09, I sat down to watch the ‘Design for Life’ programme featuring Philippe Starck on BBC2. For those with lives without TV (well done you) this is a series with similarities in structure to ‘The Apprentice’, but this time it’s a handful of designers who have been personally picked, by the man himself, and with the grand prize of a six-month internship at his studio.

Initially I thought 'great a programme that uses the same name as our kick off day' where we proposed putting design in pole position to help shift behaviour patterns to create more liveable and sustainable futures.

Episode three was even more intriguing as his brief concerned the ‘ecological’. Starck himself has made it known he is ‘spurning’ his past creations to focus on sustainable projects: a wind turbine and electronic car and ‘a folding working trolley, for people with minimal space’ - although why this is defined as sustainable, I am not so sure?

The participating students had a week to “Make any object that is ecological / ethical / democratic for daily use, and non-electronic - unless you could convince otherwise.”

What followed was shocking, in every way. Firstly a brief for yet another product that must save the world. We don’t need more products. Surely the best solution would be to get rid of all the stuff that already clutters up our lives, our landfills and our oceans. According to Mike Pitts from the Chemistry KTN, one of our speakers in 2008, 90% of all products are waste within six months of purchase and, for every tonne of household waste, there are a further five tonnes of materials that have been used in the manufacturing of the products consumed.

Coming from a designer who has spent most of his career creating products, a lot of them plastic and some of them he admittedly says don’t even do the job they are designed for, is rather concerning. He may have begun to see the green light but he certainly has a lot of redemption to do. Many long sessions in Futerra’s Earthly Sinners Confessional Booth for starters!

A brief so big as this cannot be given lightly and should not be given in one sentence, as I have experienced first hand when I set something similar to a group of students at Fabrica in 2007. We gave ourselves five days to come up with a global campaign to tackle the inertia settling around climate change. The eye opener for me was not the ideas that formed over those days but the time it took for these designers to get their head around it all. These issues are complex, the science is hard and the arguments are not what you think. And the real eureka moment finally comes when a designer realises the pivotal role they can play in the movement for massive change. It’s a life changing moment for some and amazing to witness.

One message came out of Greengaged this year for me, and that was ‘slow down’, or #slowdesign as some of our twitterers have decided! Design has got so fast! Briefs zip through with little time built in to think. Clients demand creative tenders in a week. Turn around time is reduced to days and mistakes are not factored in. Technology has a lot to blame for this speed. We can create something so convincing on screen and send it to the client before we even have so much as an inkling of an idea. In the words of Anna Gerber, ‘The PDF Culture’. Our clients have basic graphic programmes and peculiar collections of fonts on their computers so think "What’s all the fuss about? I could do it myself if I wanted to, so why should we pay you that kind of fee?”

Slowness is needed too if we want to continue to survive. Certainly we will need to redefine our lives: work less, travel less, find our pleasures in things other than what we consume. Look at the slow food and slow design movements springing up around the globe.

Time for me equals space to think, to explore, to throw those initial ideas away and raise the gain. If you are working on a brief like the one set by Philippe Starck, time is even more important, particularly for this set of designers who were like lost sheep in the realm of ‘good’ design. By ‘good’ I mean sustainable and useful as well as aesthetically beautiful. In the programme we watched a confused group presenting theatrical ideas that had nothing to do with sustainability, apart from the odd nod to a solar powered light or bit of cardboard.

Starck’s admission to how he would react to his own brief was insightful. “I would go back to the hotel, get horribly stressed, think ‘end of the world’, eat all my nails. Spend three days concentrate, concentrate, concentrate and at the end come up with ideas.” What kind of role model is this? It is no wonder that he has created so many products that, in his own words, are ‘unnecessary’. This is not the way to 'Design for Life' unless you are a recluse with no fingernails, friends or future.

Speaking to my Greengaged colleague Kate Andrews about the programme she furthers a concern about the way Starck’s ‘Design for Life’ hits many wrong notes about the true value and potential of designing for real life:

"For me, the most shocking thing happened in Episode 3 (28th September). After the ambitious graduates failed to turn concepts into Starck-Standard design concepts and products, we saw Starck ‘stressed’ and threatening to stop the show. In a final attempt to get these creative’s up to scratch, he turns and demands that the students “do not talk to each other and work alone.” Brilliant. This is just what we need. No context, no environmental or spatial exploration, no human interaction, no discourse, no collaboration... just another designer, stuck in a design bubble."

Design is hard and challenging and, interestingly, this is the one thing you do get from the programme. But designing for life is much, much harder. This group seems to be evidence that UK design schools are struggling to turn out graduates who know how to design in systemic sustainability from the outset and, by default, insults the many designers who are really grappling with this properly. Designers like RCA graduate Thomas Thwaites, who last week showed his Toaster Project to the awe inspired audience at Friday’s Greengaged Materials day.

Starck’s Design for Life programme is a warning. If Starck is the best designer we have I fear we are heading for disaster. And if this is the crop of the best young creatives who will be picking up his baton and designing for ALL our futures, then they need help. All design must be for life but we grapple with what that future life may look like: scarce resources, reduced energy, financial insecurity, over population…

I imagine my response to Starck’s brief would be to begin with an existing but defunct object, melt it back into its raw material and give that material a new useful life. Pass me that lemon juicer…

Listen to "A Starck Reality" by Sophie Thomas [mp3]

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Further reading:

In August 2008, Maurice Chittenden wrote a great piece, Philippe Starck turbine creates green juice for homes , for The Sunday Times.