Inspired at Bedruthan Think Tank

Dott Cornwall's March event may have been called a Think Tank, but it could easily have been renamed a Talk Tank. Organiser Andrea Siodmok designed the event to enable all participants to have what she called 'proper conversations' – and they needed little encouragement. It would be practically impossible to capture the entire exhausting but inspiring day of intensive and impassioned discussion, debate and occasional disagreement – so here is our thematic guide so some of the issues raised as designers, academics, artists and architects (among others), debated the evolution of design practice.

People

Professor Jeremy Myerson, Director of the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre, summed up the issues for many when he traced a move from 'designing for people' – the traditional view embraced by the production economy – to 'designing with people', which he outlined as the emerging practice of participatory design. But he did not stop there.

'Can we make the next step? And what does that mean for authorship for designers? […] Can we move to designing by people, in which we are not inferring needs or translating needs but where people are having their own self-recognized needs? That involves a fundamental shift in practice – in the meaning of practice, and the education of practice. Are we ready to make that change?'

Many others recognised that changes in the way design is and could be used will mean changes in the way design is practised. Sometimes this was about recognising the need for small but significant changes in the ways that designers do their work. Mary Rose Cook, founding partner of Uscreates, argued the need for codes of ethics for designers involved in collaborative work, while architect Tom Drury from the Eden Project asked that designers try to stay involved longer in projects, so that 'the process of disturbing can [ultimately] be a benefit.'

If we just want to design projects, we can go on like this [...] coming to conferences like this one, we can present our projects and publish books and case studies. But maybe we won’t produce any change, only the fantasy of producing change.'

Asier Perez, Funky Projects

Others debated the new forms of relationship between designer and client. Bas Raijamakers, co founder of design research company STBY, wondered if designers are demanding too much of their clients when they simultaneously ask them to 'give us space to do very new things, and to hold back, while at the same time asking them to be very involved and to engage with the new ways of working we are introducing.' Asier Perez of Funky Projects talked about up his company's frustration with the unsustainable practice where designers are no longer nvolved in projects after a design commission finishes. This, he challenged, is an issue for all designers.

'If we just want to design projects, we can go on like this [...] coming to conferences like this one, we can present our projects and publish books and case studies. But maybe we won’t produce any change, only the fantasy of producing change.'

Pedagogy

Academic and educational design practice also came under scrutiny. Andy Polaine from Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland proposed that higher education 'is becoming more like school, and not just more like school but more like the worst sort of Victorian school.' Others echoed his concerns about how – and if – cross disciplinary working happens in practice. Steven Kyffin from Northumbria University in Newcastle talked about the 'chasm' between design and business schools, social scientists and psychologists. Bryan Clark from University College Falmouth proposed that designers in all areas need to seek out inspiration from provocateurs, military commanders, musicians and dancers, while Northumbria University researcher Lauren Tan asked whether design research was changing enough in line with the changes in design practice. Lucy Kimbell was from Said Business School at the University of Oxford warned the audience of design's inherent laziness:

'We don't go and read, we don’t bother to understand the different ways of doing ethnography and the different underlying philosophical implications [...] and I think this has implications for the claims that we make.'

Lucy Kimbell, Said Business School, University of Oxford

'We don't go and read, we don’t bother to understand the different ways of doing ethnography and the different underlying philosophical implications [...] and I think this has implications for the claims that we make.'

Her push to get designers to consider what they can do individually was echoed by Matt Hocking from Leap Media. Drawing from his experience working with schools, he warned that educational institutions might be 'more interested in Ofsted points, rankings […] new builds and looking good … are we forgetting about children? What is our role as creatives within future learning?'

Policy, Place and Making it Pay

Many speakers commented on the simultaneous possibility and danger inherent in pushing the boundaries of design. Emily Campbell, Design Director at the RSA, summed this up.

'Do we recognize that actually, as design begins to be invoked in everything from synthetic biology, to public service reform, we really run the risk of losing a grip on what design means?'

Others were more keen to emphasise the opportunities that might arise from broadening the scope of design practice. Robert Woolf called for designers to present data in more meaningful ways 'if they want to change behaviour on a global and local level,' while landscape architect David Buurma asked how designers could help people regain confidence in making things themselves. Mark Irlam and Tom Tobia of Something from Us talked about design as a tool for tackling issues around public engagement, while Emily Thomas from Aequitas Consulting asked how design was going to help the public sector in a time of budget cuts and rising taxpayer expectations. Bob Young from Northumbria University contended that 'influencing the influencers and the policy makers' is as big a task for design education as it is for individual designers, while Ruth Hasnip from the Design Council questioned whether existing political systems could only ever stifle design-led co-creation and participation.

While these are global and national concerns, and are no less relevant for being so, some of the day's speakers brought the issues back to their local context in Cornwall. Justin Marshall and Katie Bunnell talked about the potential for digital tools to create new, post-industrial local production models. Brand communication consultant Phil Gendall reminded the audience that Cornwall had 'managed to convince Europe' that it was a region and a culturally distinctive one at that. Is there, he asked, 'a danger that in all this new thinking we could throw the culturally distinctive baby out with the bathwater?' John Miller from University College Falmouth and Cornish furniture brand MARK asked another question – whether in all the talk of collaborative design we had forgotten the ultimate economic imperative 'to grow value-added, higher value jobs for people in this place.'

So in a day's conversation about design practice that covered everything from Cornish bal maidens to 'animal-friendly butchers' and much in between, it's hard to pull out one theme to end on. Perhaps two calls to action will suffice, linked as they are by their desire for designers to take responsibility in an era of change. John Thackara warned that 'we need to know the costs and the consequences of our actions as designers and as people changing reality'. And Clive Grinyer, while not diminishing 'our fantastic shared faith and optimism in design', warned that 'design does not seem to be well designed for the huge new scope it's got. […] I think we have to pull design into a new shape.'