What happened to the creative class?

[photo credit: Greg Southam of Edmonton Journal]

One of the things I love about ID is its broad scope. With an ID skill set you can design anything from toothbrushes to furniture to stores to cars, and whether the economy’s good or bad it’s a great way to move between industries, as you’re not tied to the fortunes of any one specific product.

Remember Pure Design, the Umbra-esque design firm from the ’90s? Founded by the design trio of Geoffrey Lilge, Randy McCoy and Daniel Hlus, the firm was the epitome of hip design of that era, starting out with a CD rack (sooooo ’90s) and expanding into furniture that wound up on the sets of Ally McBeal and a Janet Jackson video (ditto).

So whatever happened to them? Following the departure of Lilge in 2002, McCoy and Hlus sold the company in 2005, and it subsequently morphed into an upstate-New-York-based design retailer. And in an example of the resilience and diversity of the profession, McCoy has recently popped up on the design radar again–doing nightclubs and bars in Edmonton.

After leaving Pure, McCoy was asked by friends for help with renovations; with the successful completion of each project the requests started to pile up, and he realized he had a viable business on his hands and founded Retrofit Design LTD. Since its inception in 2005, McCoy’s firm has expanded from kitchens and residential interiors into nightlife.

The Edmonton Journal recently did a piece on McCoy and his bar design, and you can read more about him and check out Retrofit’s stuff here.

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Our penultimate session is billed as an innovation master class with the Design Council

Professor Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning at the Pentacle The Virtual Business School and the man behind the monetisation of MSN, the innovation burst at Cadbury and the turn-around of Rolls Royce motor cars introduces some principles of design-led innovation. He’s also our incredibly enthusiastic host/facilitator jumping around the stage spilling words and images at 100 miles an hour.

Eddie introduces us to some numbers: 23, 7.1m, 366,000 and 1 in 100,000

23% number of projects that set out and actually achieve what they intended
7.1million results in Google for ‘Innovation change consultants’
1 in 100,000 ideas that you have in your organisation that actually get to be realised
366,000 Number of books on Amazon about Innovation

He shares a number of diagrams with us to help us understand the change from an old world where we where able to understand and react to the pace of change to one where that ability is diminishing and as a consequence so is our inclination to take risks.

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The Economist’s Robin Bew, who opened the conference yesterday by reminding us of exactly how deep the s*** is we’re in, posed what are perceived to be the four trends (or challenges for business) that will shape tomorrow’s world.

Sir George Cox (former Design Council Chairman), in his calming, measured, reassuring way, offered some reasons why we shouldn’t all start panicking and freak out. This was a nice reflective antidote to the information overload of the last two days, and perhaps the most genuinely insightful session for those business leaders who had attended to learn what they should be planning for.

So, the 4 Trends:
1. the shift to emerging markets
2. rich world ageing
3. carbon pricing
4. a lack of capital

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Session title: How understanding the customer’s experience has led to innovative services that encourage more people to fly Virgin.

Joe Ferry, Head of Design at Virgin Atlantic Airways spent 10 minutes talking us through the recent design challenges he’s faced during the last few years. Virgin have 7,500 staff, 5,000,000 passengers and 40 aircraft, which is just a fraction of what the other major players have. Joe insists that Virgin Atlantic has no right to exist and the fact that it does and is successful is entirely due to the fact that it is different. What separates Virgin Atlantic according to Joe is service and product—design is at the heart of everything they do.

Despite the collapse in the market in response to September 11th Twin Towers tragedy Virgin undertook a multimillion dollar upgraded the first class seats and experience that launched in April 2002.

Where you sleep is now no longer where the travellers sits. The level of investment required to develop a new seat for the fleet is around £1-2m. Then to role that out across the fleet is around £100m.

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Hugo Spowers, Founder and Project Leader, Riversimple

Riversimple determinedly don’t think of themselves as a car manufacturer, although in terms of existing business models that’s probably how they are too often described. Founder Hugo Spowers believes, perhaps unusually for someone engaged in manufacturing, that an industrial society based on the sale of products will never be resource efficient. Which puts a big question mark over pretty much every industry you can think of.

The motor industry began with a notorious innovation, when Ford said something like ‘if I gave my customers what they wanted I would have had to invent faster horses.’ As we are all aware, the motor industry is no longer fit for purpose, modern-day constraints are very different to those faced by Ford, but we have yet to see another such step-change in response. Unfortunately, as a hugely advanced, mature, specialised, technology specific industry—it is now ill-suited to achieving a step-change.

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First session: How the change imperative will continue to shake business in the next three years

The Big Rethink has officially begun.

Vjiay Vaitheeswaran of the Economist and Martin Temple of the EEF opened, setting the agenda for the discussion for the next two days: how design can help us get out of the mess we’re in. It’s a good move to get two people who aren’t designers by trade to open by asserting the power of design in not just ‘business’, but in meeting the global challenges we face today – which obviously will affect, and be affected by, business. However, they are preaching to a room of the converted. It will be interesting to see how and if anyone disputes this view over the next couple of days, (but as most of the attendees will have paid 1.5k to be here: I think it’s unlikely.)

Attendees range from designers to business, economists and civil servants. We have a great line-up of speakers, and a slightly disappointing turn-out—the lecture hall is not full. It quickly becomes apparent that the format of discussion is better suited to the fast-paced presenters. And the first session of the morning has set the pace—very snappy indeed, perhaps to match the pace of change in the outside world on which we are here to reflect. (We’ve been given little remote controls to text in answers and questions.) Short shrift was given by VV to the lengthy intervention during Q&A.

Robin Bew: How the change imperative will continue to shake business in the next 3 years

Welcome to the new world of business, definitely not the same as the old world of business.

Robin Bew, Editorial Director and Chief Economist at the Economist Inteligence Unit, steps up to the platform and describes the scorched earth that is the world’s economy and reminds us of the recent traumatic past.

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Jeff Denby is Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder of PACT.

Jeff starts by sharing his ethical values and then follows up with a slide of two crotches. A guy and a gal. Could this be overshare? It turns out Jeff has developed a new business designing the underwear that encompasses the 12 foot high crotches we’re looking at. Now were looking at two generations for Calvin Kline undies ads. To date innovation in underwear has tended to focus on updating the advertising models who show off the items. In over 15 years we have only progress from Marky Mark to David Beckham it seems.

Jeff and his partner spent 18 months researching the market before stepping into it and is a firm believe that when you’re looking to innovate you need to leave the building – ‘the answer to your research is not on the Internet’. He also confesses he had to hang around in the underwear section of department stores to watch people buying and trying. Another nice gem shared was that being open about what you are interested in and researching, rather than keeping secrets, has a tendency to attract useful and generous people towards you and your business. (This is something I definitely recommend from personal experience.)

What Jeff’s company PACT do is create premium, ethically produced cotton underwear that brings three stakeholders together. Each new design is developed as a partnership between one charity (who gain 10% of all sales), a designer (who creates the pattern for the briefs) and the manufacturer, PACT (who manage, produce, distribute and sell the underwear). The value in their product lies in the stories that can, and are told, through the creative process and the connections between the stakeholders.

As Yves Behar says

• Design brings stories to life
• Stories bring design to life
• Life brings stories to design

Not content with just creating a demand for ethical undies Jeff and his gang have also focused on the packaging, designing cotton bags, created using the off-cut material from the underwear. Instead of throwing this packaging away many purchasers utilise the bags and even send photos of how they’re using both the bags and the undies back to the company (see the wedding above).

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Over the next couple of days my colleague Jocelyn and I’ll be blogging live from the Economist’s Redesigning Business Summit in London for Core77. Under the title ‘The Big Rethink‘ the event sets out to develop some fresh ideas on how design thinking can be used to seize business opportunities in our increasingly volatile world.

Over the two days we’ll be hearing from over 30 speakers from across business, academia and design. Take a look at the full programme and if you have any questions to the speakers or any particular workshops you’d like us to report on please share below.

If you’d also like to follow the event on Twitter the hashtag is #redesign2010.

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A newscast released today by CCTV discusses China’s industrial design boom. Unfortunately the newscast is poorly produced, poorly written (“industrial design” is written “industries design,” for instance) and laden with good ol’ Commie propaganda-speak (i.e. “highest levels of achievement,” etc.), although, if the figures are to be believed, there are some interesting takeaways:

Chen Dongliang, Director, Beijing Industrial Design Center, said, “The output value of industrial design in Beijing reached 80 billion yuan in 2008. Now around 250-thousand employees are working for nearly 20-thousand design companies in the city. Beijing is also expanding technology service and high-end manufacturing industries, both of them can help boost the industrial design sector.”

…The global financial crisis has made more and more companies realize that it’s not sustainable to depend on cheap and low-end products. They must think more about added value. The central government has also called for more attention on industrial design, pledging to change “Made in China” to “Invented in China”.

Chen said, “Industrial design is the key point of the value chain. Figures show that in Britain, 100 pounds of investment in design can yield 225 pounds of output. According to our survey, in China, one yuan investment could bring 13 yuan of output….”

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