The School of Life

Alice Rawsthorn on Good Design

Ahead of her secular sermon for The School of Life on Sunday June 28, International design critic Alice Rawsthorn, puts out a call to arms for young designers.

The numbers seem nutty. There are 6.5 billion people on this planet, 90% of who can’t afford basic products and services. Half of them, nearly 3 billion people, don’t have regular access to food, shelter or clean water. Yet whenever we read, or talk, about design, it’s invariably about something that’s intended to be sold to one of the privileged minority – the richest 10%.

The £1 million chaise longue. The super-smart phone. The fast car. The beautifully bound book. The elegant typeface. The cute digital device.  Museums, books, magazines, and blogs are stuffed with them. Tens of thousands of designers devote their working lives to producing more.

 

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. No one forces billionaires to pay £1 million for chaises longues at gunpoint, and I can’t pretend to feel the least bit guilty about loving beautiful books. But when you look at the bigger picture, doesn’t it seem odd that so much time, energy, talent and resource should be devoted to creating luxuries for relatively few people, when so many more people are in desperate need of designers’ skills and ingenuity?

 

More and more designers, mostly young ones, are addressing that need by designing everything from emergency housing, water purification devices, cheap forms of transport, educational resources, to new business initiatives for “the other 90%”. They are also tackling the problems of mature economies like our’s by working in collaboration with other disciplines such as anthropology, economics, ethnography, psychology and the social sciences to develop new solutions to acute social problems in areas like crime, education, healthcare, housing, joblessness and ageing.

 

At the same time, the combination of the economic recession and environmental crisis is prompting designers to re-assess the value of their conventional projects. Many of the values that underpinned design in the 20^th century are now redundant. Technology is no longer seen as a panacea. New things aren’t necessarily better than old ones. Big isn’t always best. Why buy something when you can borrow it for a time, before passing it on? Then there is the realisation that most designers’ work will end up rotting – or worse, failing to rot – in landfill sites? And that the design phenomenon of this year, iPhone apps, was dreamt up by amateur designers, not professionals.

 

If you look back historically, design has always flourished in periods of change. It is an agent of change that can help us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to interpret shifts in science, technology, culture and the economy into things that can help to make our lives more efficient and enjoyable. This is a time of unprecedented change, when those shifts are accelerating as are the extremes of speed and scale that confront us daily, while the social and political systems that once ran our lives are collapsing.

 

All of this creates extraordinary opportunities for designers, if they embrace a new approach to design – one that is more fluid, responsive, collaborative and inclusive. They will have to win over an increasingly demanding and knowledgeable public. They will have to design intangible formulae, as well as things, and then devolve responsibility for how them. Designers will also have to accept responsibility for ensuring that their work can be disposed of as responsibly as it should have been sourced, manufactured, sold and shipped. And they must focus on the needs of the under-privileged 90%. If they succeed, we will have a new definition of “good design” – one that has less to do with chairs, and more with the aspects of design that really matter.

To book tickets for Alice Rawsthorn's sermon on June 28th, click here.

David Lawrence on the thrill of motorways

Motorways are exciting, really they are. Apparently thrown down in unremitting vectors to get us from one conurbation of life to another shopping experience and on to granny’s house, motorways are fascinating corridors of life concentrated, concealed and dislocated. Our M1 holiday will discover and uncover some of this phenomenon.

From 1959, when the first meaningful portion of motorway M1 opened, the new roads became playgrounds for the fast and rich rubbing shoulders with the newly affluent and motor-borne middle and working classes. This very real expression of the democracy envisioned by post world war governments created an environment of exciting potential. In almost five decades of high-speed roads, Britain has become wedded to the private motor vehicle, and consequently the motorway is a space, a territory, of continental proportions in which we spend much of our time and perform various roles: driver, passenger, holidaymaker, adventurer, consumer, lover.

Motorways feature innovative engineering undertaking on a sublime scale. They reveal a panorama of landscape not possible from the railway train because in the car we are contemplating the ever-receding horizon as well as the views to left and right. Motorway signs are a perfect example of British modernism in graphic design. Motorways haven the subject of songs, texts and films.

We still drive on our stomachs. Motorway service areas are little towns by the roadside. Located at uniformly spaced positions according to a maximum limit of travel which motorists would be prepared to undertake, such places were to provide the everyday conveniences of life. With a history only as old as the motorway, their names recall ancient hamlets and landmarks which were often the only settlements preceding their development.

The service areas were developed by commercial companies under the supervision of a severe and controlling Ministry of Transport. Consequently these facilities, which have now become objects of fascination and criticism, have come to form a particular expression of what architects and interior designers considered to be ‘modern’ in terms of planning, form and material. The aspirations of the architects were filterd through the catering companies’ aspirations, and the very peculiar strictures of the Ministry. The emerging hybrid spaces are iconic, dynamic, confusing, and like no other building. How do the accepted notions of place, space and anchoring in history apply to these highly contrived environments? Does a new type of space emerge? We will discuss these questions on our trip. The associations we make with these buildings refer not to the architecture, but to our experience of the interiors. They are not memorable in their sense of place in the way that one might consider the great nineteenth century train sheds to be, or indeed London, Moscow or Washington’s subway stations, or the more expressive and adventurous airport buildings. Instead, we think of the food quality, the crowds, the smells, and the noise. We will also see that service areas are great places to observe life and humanity.

With the forthcoming Tour of the M1 tour, and in the company of some wonderful individuals we are inviting to join us along the way, we aim to discover and experience some of the many curious and intriguing aspects of life on the motorway and at the service area.     

David Lawrence is a design historian, and author of Always a welcome: the glove compartment history of the motorway service area. He led The School of Life Tour of the M1 on 24 October 2008. Find out more about the trip here.

Sophie Howarth on David Spero's Churches

David Spero's new book Churches is my favourite photography book of the year. It documents an array of buildings currently used as churches, none of which was built for the purpose. Often temporary, semi-permanent or unconsecrated, the buildings are located where we would least expect to find them, in industrial estates, shopping parades, houses, garages, cinemas, above pubs and commercial properties. Spero finds a spirit (whether Holy or not is up to us) in the most unlikely places and even for a non-believer like me, there is something very moving about the places in which people can manage to find meaning. What really comes across is a sense of striving for spaces of community and support in the face of the displacements caused by modern urban existence. We're stocking the book in The School of Life on on our shelf 'for those with a God-shaped hole'.

Sophie is Director of The School of Life