‘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.

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.

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?

It is entitled: ‘The century is over, Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth Century Architecture’.

Google has been hugely influential in academia, spearheading new methods of using and presenting data for research purposes. It is no coincidence that a trend for mapping history emerged around the time of Google Earth and Google Maps; convenient tools that enable us to present research in apparently innovative ways. Yesterday evening I went along to the fifth in a great seminar series held at the LSE on this very subject, ‘the Uses of Space in Early Modern History 1500-1850′. The seminar was led by Prof Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary university, who presented some extremely thought-provoking ideas about ‘the Cartographic Rhetoric of Early Modern Globalism’.

The underlying theme of the seminar was the problem of ‘what has happened the globe in globalism’, tracing the image of the globe from the 1500s to the birth of the ‘modern global image’ in Google Earth in 2005. Brotton argued that Google Earth has turned the globe into a logo. The ‘general perspective’ view of the globe in the Google Earth image suggests a neutrality, but at the same time, it becomes redundant in the ‘mapping’ Google offers. Although the image of the Globe brands the maps tool, the orientation is towards the parochial- it wants us to look at where we are, what is near us, and therefore threatens to dissolve the global. Crucially, our conception of time is absent.

The seminar made me think about the very thoughtless way in which I have been using Google in my mapping of the design profession. Based on interviews Brotton carried out with the geospatial experts at Google HQ, he showed how Google intended to make the planet itself a web browser, organising all search results geographically. There are clearly some worrying aspects of this technological innovation. All the data used is not open-source and Google has therefore imposed a monopolisation of geographical data. Additionally, the driving motivation for profit margins means that they are manipulating data and spatial orientation to put labels and advertisements on how we see the world around us.

This seminar was by no means a discouragement for historians to think spatially or continue to use maps a method of presenting research, but it did make me question the apparent neutrality of maps a canvas on which to project my image of the design profession.

This video, entitled, ‘The Image of the Graphic designer’ is from the design council’s website and gives an interesting contemporary viewpoint on the definition of what a graphic designer does, how they work, as well as commenting on the major shifts that have changed the ‘image of the graphic designer’ since the 1950s.

The image of the graphic designer in this clip is, I think, a very familiar one. The open-plan office/studio reflects the informal, ‘creative’ and ‘dynamic’ environment we all imagine the designer to work in today. This is very different in comparison to the images of design offices I have found in my archive work. Additionally, the centrality of the Apple Mac in this video compounds the message of the main speaker Neville Brody, who argues that the availability of the PC in every household has been hugely influential on the dissemination of public knowledge and understanding of what graphic design is. This assertion is, I think debatable, but it made me think about the iconography of the Apple Mac as the graphic designer’s tool.

Of all the stereotypes of the artist, the Bohemian has surely been the most seductive and enduring.

I must admit that as a non-artist, (perhaps because of that), I am endlessly enchanted by stories and tales of the Bloomsbury group. I was therefore really looking forward to a seminar held this evening at my university by Virginia Nicholson, who recently published a book on the subject entitled, ‘Among the Bohemians’. Nicholson is a granddaughter of Vanessa Bell and the book is therefore made up of both personal memory and archive research, a combination I always find very interesting.

The sub-title of her book, ‘Experiments in Living’ gives away the main focus. Rather than a history of the creative output or ideas of the Bohemian movement, she shines a spotlight on the daily habits and characteristics of the group’s main personalities, looking at their dress, food, incomes and expenditures as manifestations of their creativity. Nicholson explained her motive for this very convincingly at the seminar this evening, arguing that ‘being bohemian’ was as much about what was eaten or worn, as it was drawn, written or said.

I find this approach extremely interesting in light of my own research into the lifestyle of the designer after the 1930s. One of the most recurring features of my research has been their conscious rejection of these Bohemian values and lifestyle choices (grubbiness, unreliability, impulsiveness, eccentricity). Misha Black and Milner Gray were very blatant in their opposition to the ‘experiments in living’. They sought security, conventionalism and money. To do so, they moved the designer from the fringes of the studio, into an office, with a manager, and a professional society and a professional code. The suits they wore and gentleman’s parties they held represented a direct reversion to the traditional British ideals of professionalism.

Bohemianism appears to be an apparently endless source for writers, both popular and academic, to draw from. As Nicholson said this evening, the number of biographies on even obscure artists loosely associated with the Bloomsbury group is astonishing. However, the most interesting thing for me was the active role these artists were playing in creating caricatures of themselves by which they would be remembered. Through dress, parties, food and even poor personal hygiene, they actively invented a culture and stereotype by which they would be endlessly admired and emulated.  (and i dont mean by sienna miller in 2004)

Taking a break from writing my first chapter, I found this recent news story rather amusing. It describes how the release of some police files in the National Archives have offered a ‘true’ account of the infamous drug squad raid on Keith Richards house. Keef’s version of events has become a foundational story well story not just of rock folklore, but  public memory: (the police breaking into his house where he was with Anita Pallenberg, finding 25 cases of drug possession, a loaded ‘French Nobleman’s gun’ and his heroic escape from these charges with a fine of only £250). Not only does the police report state that the quantities of drugs found was ‘very small’, it also describes the gun as Belgian shotgun, in poor condition and not intended for use. The archive records have now rather exposed the mythologised nature of  Keef’s status as rock’n'roll hero and shown him up to be a bit of a fibber.

It reminded me a book by one of my favourite cultural historians, Antoinette Burton: ‘Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History’, (2005), which explores the relationship between evidence and history and argues that archives can act as a really interesting point of intersection between academic discourse and public memory.

Sometimes it takes an insight into another design culture to bring into focus some fundamental qualities of your own research. This evening, I attended a seminar given by Wendy Kaplan, curator of the Californian County Museum of Art exhibition ‘Californian Design: 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way’ and it threw up some interesting contrasts against my own research of British design culture in the same period.

The exhibition aims to tell the story of the period 1930-1965 as one of ‘exhilerating innovation’, setting the stage for a ‘uniquely Californian manifestation of ‘living in a modern way.’ As the book to accompany the exhibition states, ‘After 1945, a burgeoning,newly prosperous population – intoxicated by the power to purchase after the period of the Great Depression and the wartime rationing of goods- turned the state into America’s most important centre for progressive architecture and furnishings’. This is illustrated via a number of wonderful objects such as the ‘Swinger Camera’ designed by Henry Dreyfus, who moved from New York to Pasadena in 1944 and said, ‘On the Pacific Coast, there are fewer shackles on tradition. There is an unslackening development of new thought. There is a decided willingness to take on new ideas’. In fashion, the play-suit and some new experiments with swim-wear reflected an emphasis on leisure so synonomous with the ‘Californian dream’. Interiors and architecture, some of which have been replicated for the exhibition, also visually articulated a synergy between indoor-outdoor that broke boundaries and made a statement about a new modern lifestyle.

Two things really struck me about what I learned from Kaplan’s discussion of this era in Californian design. First, was the blatantly open way in which designers used exhibitions to sell their design directly to a new middle class consumer. This movement to embrace the commercial is totally at odds with the contemporary designers in Britain, such as Misha Black and Milner Gray. These gentlemen took their ‘responsibility’ of building a reputation for design in Britain, vey seriously and with a great dignity. They saw this goal as more important than personal profit and did not use exhibtions as opportunities for sale. As David Gentleman said at a recent event celebrating the Festival of Britain, ‘we were never under the impression that we would make anything as nasty as a profit’.

The second thing that I took from this seminar was the curious emergence of the ‘Designer-Craftsman’ as the idealised identity for Californian designers at this time. This is a term which, although I have seen, appears very rarely in the language of British designers of this period. Although they may have acknowledged a shared inheritance with the arts and crafts movement, designers at the time of the formation of the Society of Industrial Artists were consciously styling themselves in opposition to the idea of the craftsman. Where the craftsman was seen as an isolated figure, often unshaven and therefore unreliable and ‘bohemian’, British designers sought to establish themselves as serious professional men, who worked in an office, wore suits, Corbusier-glasses and worked in teams of other similarly suited individuals, like in the Design Research Unit.

Such contrasts between design cultures remind you of the very particular origins of any country’s design output, dependent on many social, economic and geographical factors unique to that place and moment in time. Of course, these identities and values are constantly being re-invented and modified, as my research is exploring. I wonder to what extent designers today would identify with the figure of the Designer Craftsman and if the idea of commerciality in design is still treated as a taboo by those who value it most?

With this in mind, I recently came across the revisions to the Code of Conduct of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers in 1985, which, as this picture shows, for the first time sought to neutralise the gender of the document, so that a designer is no longer ‘he’ or ‘his’, but ‘their’ or ‘they’. The society’s first Articles of Association in 1930s stated clearly in its explanation of terms that ‘words importing the masculine gender shall include the feminine gender’ and this remained consistent in the society’s publications until the 1980s.

Undoubtedly, the society had given women a voice before 1985. This gender revision to the code of conduct was not re-defining or revolutionary in any sense; people already knew that women could be practising designers. However, the official act of altering this terminology is significant, however retrospective it might be.