It's the Economy, Stupid

The exciting question to ask is how we actually capture the collaborative design process work of the last ten years, but bring that back to the origins of design in terms of economics.

Like a lot of people in Cornwall, I wear two hats and have two jobs. (A lot of people in Cornwall have a lot more than two jobs.) Having just gone back into business after having ten years of really only doing academic things, my perspective is informed by some of the ways in which I see design has changed since I was embedded in it as the head of a design school, but really wasn’t doing it.

Design it seems to me has become more collaborative, less professionalized in that time and also less exotic. It seemed when I was training to be a designer that I was constantly explaining to people what design was. It was quite a complicated, perhaps exotic profession that my mother didn’t really grasp. And now she does and you know the media and the compulsory design education in schools and so on have done the job and people get design. Or they get what design was. Now we’ve added a whole load of other things which we call design, which makes that kind of task more complicated again.

Today nobody has talked very much about design as in a generator of profits, business, value added and so on, except perhaps for Emily Campbell who touched on the founding of the RSA as in Arts, Design, Manufacture and Commerce. People have referred to what we’re talking about today as 'this stuff 'or 'this kind of design' or 'collaborative design'. How do we bring the two back together again?

Because the reason we’re doing this activity in Cornwall is because of an economic imperative… it's to do with how we grow value-added, higher-value jobs for people in this place.
And I think somebody has to refer to where we are economically at the moment. I guess it’s too early to have measured the impact of the recession on the design industry, although you know the Design Council may have done it. But I do talk to a lot of businesses and it seems to me that those people who are doing marketing-related graphics or web type work are doing quite well, as businesses are trying to build resilience into what they’re doing. And the architects and interior designers and so on are the ones that are really suffering.

In this year's budget there was an annoucement about more student places – great. University people are really happy about that. But there was a very clear focus on where they’re going to be – science, technology, engineering, mathematics. If you’re running an art and design school, it’s quite clear how you’re going to be thinking and how you’re going to be aligning your courses.

The exciting question to ask is how we actually capture the collaborative design process work of the last ten years, but bring that back to the origins of design in terms of economics.

John has a mission to encourage and support innovation in local businesses and is setting up projects for the new Academy of Innovation and Research (AIR) at University College Falmouth to do this. He previously established the Metropolitan Works centre in London and was Director of the School of Design at University College Falmouth from 2005 to 2009. John now divides his time between UCF and MARK Product, a leading British furniture brand based in Cornwall which he runs with co-director Anna Hart.