Blog Post #17 - A visit to the Design Museum….and Thoughts
A few weeks ago I had an afternoon off in London while working nights and I wandered into the Design Museum. I have mixed feelings about it… the good, the bad, and the thought provoking!
The building, like the Tate Modern in St Ives, is fabulous and a great space to spend a leisurely hour or two. Also like the Tate, the content is mixed. I found some of the statements in the exhibit cards frankly narcissistic and ridiculous. The kind of thing that gives design, and designers, a bad name as pretentious idiots, especially since it seemed to me that it came from people who produced the least practical or useful objects and products.
At the other end of the scale the examples of great industrial design, from the later nineteenth century onwards, were inspiring. These came unadorned with pious statements of intent. They were the result of a real need being met efficiently, elegantly and commercially, albeit not always profitably. Consider why something, that is later hailed as a design classic, failed to sell.
I think the difference between the two groups is that in the first it is the designer’s wishes and views that dominate, in the latter, the user’s needs are paramount. There is a view that art and artists are somehow precious, separate, more sensitive beings to whom the boring rules of the real world do not apply. I do not agree. The great artists of the Renaissance were jobbing artisans, craftsmen, technicians who would supply the decorative product that the customer wanted. Michelangelo provided paintings and sculptures, but he also produced mantelpieces, ornaments, designs for fabrics and buildings. In short, anything that put bread on his table. There is honour in that honest work.
He focused on his customer’s wishes, how they wanted to be seen, their image. The successful industrial design has to satisfy the wishes and aspirations of the potential customers, with a combination of aesthetic impact and functional effectiveness, not the ego of the designer. I think it is that focus that, for me at least, gives the appeal of the commercial product designs, rather than examples in the first group that seemed to owe a lot to institutional or government favour.
Overall, I found the place thought provoking and a useful wake up to my own creative thinking, which has been rather stuck in a rut of late. The final port of call is, as always, the museum shop. This one has a surprising lack of good design posters, which I wanted to frame for my office, and some interesting knick-knacks that purport to help fuel your creativity, like 100 art related tasks in 100 days, or books of different gridded papers, even a kit to build an SLR camera. I was tempted but in the end bought two books. One, on branding, I have yet to read. The other, on the process of innovation:
It is one of those books that suggests that successful innovation can be reduced to a more or less simple system. I deeply question that. It cites many examples, of different organisations and situations, where innovation, as opposed to incremental improvement, occurred. There is, I think, survivor bias in this sort of study. You hear a lot less about the companies that tried to be wildly creative and failed, though some examples are cited here.
Corporate culture is clearly important, bureaucracies do not innovate, places where personalities are crammed to fit into awkward boxes do innovate. That is not news. Incremental improvement should not be disdained. It is natural to well-established businesses and industries. It minimises risk, builds on current knowledge and practices. It is the way nature works. It is one reason, among many others, that companies grow, prosper and die. The normal life span of a large company is not much over 100 years, even when well run, witness the members of the Dow Jones or the FTSE 100 in 1925 and 2025, there are very few survivors. All of those defunct businesses will have developed new products and many will have tried to be radical.
The idea that successful innovation is entirely predictable, can be reduced to a replicable formula, is, I think, fanciful. If it were so then there would be no change in the occupants of the Dow, we would all be flying on holiday on Bleriot aircraft and using IBM computers, taking pictures on Kodak cameras. Successful innovation owes a great deal to individuals, circumstances, luck. You can, and should, try to create a space that is open to new ideas and helps to generate them, but you cannot force them, or force them to be accepted.
All those caveats aside, this book is probably still worth your time. It emphasises to the engineer or the management of technical companies, that there are more dimensions of innovation than the purely technical and that these dimensions can yield much bigger returns for far less risk.
This is a subject dear to one of my favourite podcasters, Rory Sutherland. One of his pet observations being on the improvement of train transport. The engineer’s solution to improving the train trip from London to Paris is to spend billions on faster trains and better tracks. Measurable, quantifiable, technical challenges that can be met. Exciting stuff. If you take the lessons of this book, or Mr Sutherland himself, and think about different angles that can be pursued to improve customer satisfaction with the journey you take a different approach. You start with much more comfortable seats, improved cabin cleaning and expedited internal refurbishment, to make being on the vehicle much more pleasant. You could ultimately progress to his suggestion of hiring armies of charming staff to ply the travellers with free champagne. At this point people would want a slower train, a longer journey. If this had been factored in at the start then the engineering bill to build the line in the first place could have been radically reduced: conventional trains employed, lower specifications for tracks etc.
Read this book or ones like it, extract the tips that are applicable to your circumstances or could be adapted, and heed the examples of failure.
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