Design Thinking

‘Design thinking’ has been a throwaway phrase I have been aware of for some time, but never took too seriously.  Like ‘Blue-sky Thinking’ and ‘Big Society’, it’s the kind of terminology I expect to hear from a businessman wearing chinos on a dress-down-Friday. But recently, Design Thinking has been cropping up in quite serious places and suggested to have meaning where I always presumed it had none. No longer a trendy concept, it is now an apparently fully government-endorsed strategy.

The Design Council’s latest report, for example, ‘Design for Innovation’ (December, 2011), reads, ‘The idea of adopting design principles at the heart of business culture and management is linked to global business success stories such as Apple, Dyson and Burberry. ‘Design Thinking’ builds on theories around creative culture and thinking styles and deploys design methods within strategic business management.’  

An article in The Guardian Weekend Magazine published in the same month introduced Design Thinking as a sort of self-help tool. In this article, Oliver Burkeman reviews a publication, entitled ‘Life Kerning: Creative Ways To Fine Tune Your Perspective On Career & Life’, by Chicagoan designer Justin Ahrens. Burkeman states, ‘No offence to the designers I’ve known, but they tend to be neat-freaks with an obsessive attention to detail (and stylish spectacles). These are excellent attributes for the job, but are they really a recipe for happiness?’, he asks. And although he starts the article on this rather sceptical note, he ends by arguing:‘There’s something appealing about treating life as a design project: it’s less cringe-inducing than ‘life as a work of art’, yet more free-spirited than life as a to-do list’.

According to an article in the New York Times in September, 2009, the term Design Thinking was first coined by David Kelley, who co-founded IDEO in 1991 originally to develop products for clients in Silicon Valley. This torch continues to be carried by Tim Brown, now President and Chief Executive Officer of IDEO. ‘When Mr Brown started out as a product designer in the late 1980s, design was mostly about creating physical things…Designers now also tackle intangible strategic  and behavioural issues, such as helping businesses and government to organise themselves more efficiently and make their services more user-friendly’, the article states.

The fact that no-one really seems able to say what it is hasn’t stopped Brown from going onto TED talks to convince the world that design thinking is the solution to almost any problem- from the global economic crisis to water shortages. That’s not to say that the TED talk didn’t clarify anything for me personally. By the end of the presentation I began to realise that the term could really be shortened to just plain Thinking. Even if it is thinking in interesting ways, can we really call this design? According to the NY Times, Design Thinking has the potential to ‘redefine the profession’, but if this is the case, I’m not sure if this is a good thing.

I am sure that for Hal Foster Design Thinking would be further proof of the re-configuration of design as a pure marketing concept. In this book, Design and Crime, Foster describes the hollowing out of design since the 1980s. In an era where everything ‘from our genes to our jeans’ are designed, he asks  what can the word mean anymore? It’s a question I’m sure that Design Thinking doesn’t have the answer to.

Enid Marx at Pallant House Gallery

Yesterday, I made my first visit to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and it was a real treat- from the beauty of the building itself and the excellently stocked bookshop, to the two stimulating exhibitions: Edward Burra and Enid Marx.

The Enid Marx exhibition opened last week in the De’Longhi Print Room. A range of Marx’s iconic work is on show, covering her 70 year career as a textiles designer and illustrator. This includes screenprints, illustrations, linocuts, greeting cards and other ‘ephemera’ from a collection presented to the gallery in 2006 by her executor Dr Eleanor Brewing and her official biographer Dr Matthew Eve.

The work is not presented in any obvious chronological or thematic sequence, so that you can enjoy Marx’s work outside any imposed strictures. Marx’s work is so striking and distinctive, that it is enjoyable to take in the beauty of the work on its own. However, I found myself being especially drawn to the works on show that held more obvious clues about Marx as a personality- an invitation to a cocktail party for example, or the New Years and Christmas cards she designed.

Upstairs at the end of the Edward Burra exhibition, in a video filmed at the end of his career, Burra asks the question ‘Why do people always want to know about the personalities? Why can’t we just show the pictures?’. It was in fact ironic that he made such a point of this issue, considering that the preceding (fantastic) exhibition of his work was decorated with many archival artefacts that satisfied our curiosity of Burra, the man, the artist, the personality.

This question upstairs in the gallery got me thinking about my own impulse to see more of Enid Marx, the personality, in the downstairs exhibition. Burra’s question was a good one. Why are we so interested in the act of being an artist, the lifestyle and the profession? Why is it not enough to just look at the work on its own?

Perhaps the reason I found myself looking so intently for Marx’s identity as a designer comes from my interest in the fascinating context that surrounds her work and progress as a professional designer in the inter-war period. Marx has figured as a prominent figure in the CSD archive, as a Fellow of the SIA in the 50s and 60s and a member of the particularly active SIA textiles group in that period. She has a uniquely interesting story to tell because of the circumstances in which she worked-as a woman designer at a time when the designer’s professional identity was consistently defined in masculine terms.

A forthcoming exhibition at the Fashion and Textiles Museum might be a good place to explore these issues. Entitled, ‘Designing Women’, the exhibition, opening March 17, is to focus on the ‘art of textile design in post-war period’ by designers Marion Mahler, Lucienne Day and Jacqueline Groag. In an introductory photographic display, curated by yours truly, I’ll present portraits of women designers in the post-war period to broaden the context and provoke questions about the professional identity of women designers, from Althea McNish to Barbara Jones. The pictures are selected from a unique holding of designer’s portraits from the Council of Industrial Design at the Design Archives, Brighton.

Burra is right- we always want to know the personalities. But I hope that this is in response to our desire to understand the context in which it was made and where it came from, as a means of appreciating the strength of the work on its own.

‘Top 10 Lawyers’

Great article in today’s guardian in adulation of ‘the lawyer’: the profession of all professions. 

It would be difficult to compile a similar ‘top ten’ for designers in popular imagination. Architecture might be easier- Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead springs to mind and gets a good mention in Andrew Saint’s book Image of the Architect. 

Can anyone think of fictionalised heroic figures of the design profession in popular culture?