Don't Waste This Crisis

It’s a job for education, a job for the industry. But as they always say when there’s a crisis, ‘don’t waste it'. I hope we don’t waste that crisis.

What I love about groupings like this is our fantastic shared faith and optimism in design. We all celebrate wonderful little projects, but then I equate that to my normal life, as I go to work on the Tube and I walk down the streets of South London and I interact with services and I realize that most of my life is actually really crap and design plays a very small part. We can be very optimistic and celebrate these wonderful little projects, but most of life is still not really working that well.

When I look at my working life in CISCO, there’s so much technology being developed, which in theory and ‘on the tin’ can do amazing things, can really enable great things. Before CISCO, I was at Orange. The mobile phone was a wonderfully enabling piece of technology, but most of it didn’t work, really most of it didn’t. There were Internet browsers on phones for five years before the iPhone, but nobody ever used them, because they couldn’t.

So why am I in Cornwall coming from CISCO? Because you're connecting Cornwall up and CISCO wants some of that business, so they were very happy for me to come here and talk about connecting Cornwall, but we also know that Cornwall is a place of a very ageing population, with some of the oldest people in the country and in Europe living in Cornwall. Connecting broadband to Cornwall - what is that going to mean to an ageing population? Are they going to be interested in downloading games and pornography faster because they’ve now got broadband? No.... I think it has a different solution, possibly.

And that’s where design begins to come back into the mix. In a big technology-led corporate, there is an incredible appetite suddenly for design.

So all these these benign viruses like Dott, like the roles we all have in education and in companies, have actually worked. And I think we can say, right that’s done –the genie is out of the lamp or bottle, there’s no putting it back in.

But the negative side of all this is design. Design does not seem to be that well designed for the huge new scope that it’s got. It has new responsibilities: it has to be sustainable. What happens when the designer isn’t there any more? How does the project keep going?

It has the wrong business model, we don’t mind if IDEO charge $500,000 to Coke but we do mind if they charge it to a local authority or a charity. It feels different and it makes it even more difficult to sustain.

As we’ve pulled design into different areas, fantastically and successfully and no stopping it, I think we have to pull design into a new shape. I think that’s a crisis that is looming and it worries me. It’s a job for education, a job for the industry. But as they always say when there’s a crisis, ‘don’t waste it'. I hope we don’t waste that crisis.

A passionate advocate for design and design thinking, Clive is responsible for thought leadership on customer experience, social and technology trends at Cisco’s strategic advisory service where he works with major business and public service clients. Prior to this Clive has held senior design management roles in major corporate brands, including Director of Design at Orange France Telecom, Director of Design for Samsung and head of design at TAG McLaren Audio. He co-founded Tangerine (with Jonathan Ive), as well as led teams at Fitch and IDEO in the US and UK. As Director of Design at the Design Council Clive developed design demonstration projects. A prolific writer and speaker at conferences on design innovation and technology, and is the author of the book Smart Design.