Do we spend too much time trying to innovate when we should design instead? This was one of the points raised at a very interesting debate at the Design Council last week, which considered the question ‘Should government have a design strategy’?
The speaker pointed out that government always likes to link ‘design and innovation’ and then think that because it has focused on innovation it has ‘done’ design, too. However, design and innovation are often two different approaches. Innovation often focuses on expensive R&D, the development of new materials and establishing IPR. Design is more commonly about taking a fresh look at what you already have and finding exciting and effective ways of putting these together. In this respect, the designer has the same information as everyone else, but has a much better sense of what to do with it.
The point the speaker was making was that government does not necessarily understand what design is, and that design can easily get trampled in a rush towards funding for glitzy innovation. A few months ago, DCMS Minister John Penrose MP described government as ‘a dumb client for design’, which makes you wonder whether government can really be trusted with a design strategy. Interestingly, in a room full of 100 designers and representatives from the design sector, the more the debate went on, the more sceptical people became. A vote taken before the presentations and discussion showed 73 per cent in favour of a government design strategy. After two hours, this had fallen to 53 per cent and my feeling is that if we had talked for longer we’d have talked ourselves right out of it. By the end the mood of the meeting was still in favour of a design strategy for the UK, but pretty sceptical of government being willing or able to play a major role.
Hot on the heels of this debate came a feature in The Observer about the phenomenon of ‘social innovation’, which is about crowdsourcing solutions to social problems by using existing materials in innovative and pro-social ways. As social innovators point out, the advent of television, together with the necessary infrastructure for correspondence courses, enabled the creation of the Open University. Add cars to older people in need of a regular lunch and meals on wheels is born. Once again the social innovation movement highlights how, as a society, much of our money and effort in research and development goes into industrial processes and products rather than into encouraging people to make really effective use of the abundance we already have.
Looming up behind all of this comes the depressing news that all the wizard wheezes that were meant to reduce our CO2 emissions without our doing very much have comprehensively failed. 'Decoupling’ economic growth from energy use, carbon offsetting, ‘clean coal' – the net effects of our efforts over two decades has been an increase of nearly 50 per cent in world CO2 emissions. Perhaps eventually the world will stop trying to devise an exotic derivate-style financial mechanism to shove climate change off the global balance sheet and actually consider its costs properly. Perhaps, too, it will spend less time on expensive and far-fetched ideas like geoengineering or launching thousands of mirrors into space. Then landscape architects can lead the design thinking on how we make sure the one planet we currently have to live on can be a healthy, enjoyable and civilised place for us all to live.