The other day, I saw something really inspiring. School pupils travelled long distances to London for an event to celebrate their own and each other’s design work. And on the journey in from the Black Country, Cornwall and Northumberland, they didn’t just pass the time flicking through Heat and texting their friends. They worked on design problems. Can we make rail ticketing work better? Can we make reserved seats easier to find? Can we make it easier to see what’s in a sandwich? Real creative thinking and real enthusiasm. And when they got to their destination – the V&A’s Sackler Centre – instead of letting a teacher present their conclusions, each pupil got up and did it with real confidence. It wasn’t just the enjoyment and the buzz around the event, but the fact that in the lead-up to it, all the pupils had worked directly with professional designers. The experience clearly meant something to them. And it’s one I believe we need to keep on providing to more and more school children if we’re going to sustain a strong design industry. It’s not just in schools that professional designers need to ‘give something back’ but in university courses and as mentors to designers just starting out on their careers.
Why the urgency? We have a successful design industry, despite the recession. You don’t generate £11bn annual revenues unless you’re doing something right. But we need to build for a strong future too, not least because countries like China are fast building design industries which will soon be capable of great work at much lower prices than ours. When that day comes we will need a generation of creative thinkers in place, people capable of working flexibly with other disciplines to tackle the really big problems that UK design will increasingly have to take on to preserve its international standing.
The job of creating those people starts in schools, but Design and Technology (DT) as a subject is, on the whole, less about the structured creativity of the design process than making things to a set of instructions. There are plenty of great DT teachers, but many don’t have direct experience of design. They may have gone straight into teaching from an art degree and a PGCE, or moved into the subject from a completely unrelated background. Without first-hand contact, it’s like teaching French without ever having been to France. This is why input from professional designers matters. It connects students and teachers with the reality of how designers work.
Not everyone has the skills to work directly with young people. But working with teachers is just as valuable, maybe more so. Spending half a day on a design project may inspire one group of pupils, but giving a teacher the tools to bring design to life will help many more. Introducing teachers to things like brainstorming and research techniques could make a critical difference in helping them teach design as it really is, taking them closer to good design practice: challenging the brief, generating and testing ideas, and talking to users to get them right before producing a concept.
What about higher education? The industry grumbles about the quality of design graduates: they’re creative, they’re technically proficient, but they don’t understand the commercial context they’re working in and they don’t know enough about running a business, dealing with clients, working in multidisciplinary teams, or on international projects. They’re also frequently uncomfortable presenting, or defending, their ideas. However legitimate those claims may or may not be, the industry must start reaching out to education and looking for ways to help. Universities face their own pressures: rising student numbers; strain on resources, and quality targets to achieve. Any value a designer can add to these courses with a masterclass, shadowing for lecturers or structured mentoring will be gratefully appreciated. They won’t just be helping to produce more employable designers, but also to bring other people into the industry, the kind who will help to carve out an enhanced role for design.
Design agencies are already getting into territory like helping Iceland out of economic meltdown; exploring new kinds of agriculture in Africa, and getting the long- term unemployed into work in the UK. This sort of activity calls for intellectual problem-solvers, forecasters and strategists, as well as straight designers. But by the time they choose their courses, people like that have mostly been put off design careers by parents or careers advisors who see design purely as a craft discipline. The more professional designers become embedded in the education system, the more likely we are to banish preconceptions about what design actually does these days, and make design consultancy a serious option for amore diverse group of people.
Lesley Morris is head of design skills at the Design Council.
