A Culture of Confidence

we can fuel the debate of how we change the world in which we are creatively co-acting

I have two questions inspired by the postcards in our packs. 'Are we a bunch of paddles trying to pull together to a common purpose?' or 'Are we are we a flock of sheep, trying to resist being herded by a sheepdog, looking for a door to escape from a field of control?'

I’ve just joined Northumbria University in the design school from Philips Design, and I’m just coming to terms with what it is, in a really old-fashioned design school, to teach or actually better learn the known, with the corresponding complexity of trying to collaboratively learn the un-yet-known or the as-yet-unknown. How can we do that in a school together, trying to use the age-old practices of transferring knowledge from a master to a disciple? And how do we in this school build a culture of confidence where we can transfer competencies, we can learn to do things we can learn to behave as designers.

But at the same time, our own creativity can enable us to learn together the as-yet-unknown, so that we can fuel the debate of how we change the world in which we are creatively co-acting.

In my previous job at Philips Design we weren’t really a German company, we were a Dutch company pretending to be a German company, where everything had to be 'in Ordnung'. This morning's breakfast table conversation told me that in German if things are not planned and perfect, if they are not 'alles in Ordnung' there is a big problem. In Dutch I learnt that if something isn’t quite right, it’s heel vreemd, which means it’s very strange and it must be wrong. And in English I have learnt, after moving back to England after 12 years in the Dutch / German culture, that 'We don’t do things like that around here, do we?'

But that’s what designers do, they don’t do things like that around here, they are in the process of creative transformation. Changing the world through debate, things don’t happen linearly, they happen simultaneously, across all the three horizons as I used to call them. All the three horizons – developing an object, developing the company, developing the nation, developing the world – have changed. We are responding to the world issues by taking positions.

We do need to pull together the four paddles, the strategists or the business modellers, that’s why what Lucy Kimbell is doing at the business school is so fundamental. We have a business school next to us in Northumbria but there is a bit of a chasm to get across, I’ve tried it from the second floor window and it doesn’t easily work. There are the social scientists but for some reason in our university they have been split from the psychologists, there are the technologists in another school two miles away. And then there are the designers all of whom are creative, but still have not found a way of working together to affect change, or even debate about the possibility of change.

Dean of the Design School at Northumbria University in Newcastle. Prior to this he was Senior Director of Design Research & Innovation at Philips Design and a member of the Philips Design Global Leadership Team. He also holds a number of adjunct professorships in leading design universities in Europe and Asia. Steven is regularly published in conference papers and books and is often invited to give keynote speeches at international conferences.