Design isn't just the icing - it's the cake

04 March 2010

I was recently interviewed by a much-respected journalist. ’Did I think the recession was over?,’ he asked me. ’No,’ I replied. ’It’s about to start.’ My gloom was based on the inevitability that whichever party wins the General Election will have to cut spending and raise taxes, and that clearly won’t stimulate growth. ’So,’ he countered, ’there’ll be less spent on design?’

That remark seems to crystallise an all-too-common view that design is not an essential, but a nice-to-have, pleasing add-on, like leather upholstery on your next car. It is enjoyable if you can afford it, but not crucial.

But design isn’t the icing, it’s the cake. Design is the fundamental building block of anything that’s made. You can’t produce something as complex as the new Porsche or as simple as an invitation to your office party without designing it first. There’s no such thing as something that’s made but not designed. Imagine asking a factory to make something without first having a design for it. Whether something is designed or not is a false distinction, as everything is designed. The real distinction is between good and bad design.

And that, sadly, is where the journalist is likely to be right. In a tough economy, spending on design will be under threat. You still need a design for a house if you’re a builder; you still need a design for the frame if you make spectacles. But the big temptation will be to devote less time, less energy and less money on that design. Yet that is the one activity which should never be short-changed. If the design is right, you can save money on manufacture, distribution and marketing but still have a success. If it’s wrong, you can double the spend on making or marketing, but the product will still fail. In bad times, design should be the most important thing you do, not the most dispensable.

Design matters more than anything else, because it’s the foundation stone on which everything else rests. That’s why, when money’s tight, design is even more important.

If you want a vivid, though painful, example of why design matters, here’s a cautionary tale. In the 1990s I was head of Granada Group’s leisure division, and we made a bid to run the then-undefined ’millennium experience’. There was a mountain of National Lottery money, an ambition to do something good in 2000, and an army of civil servants, bureaucrats and jobsworths to stop you. We had offers of help from an amazing array of exceptional idea-generators, from Richard Rogers to Harvey Goldsmith, and Melvyn Bragg to Terence Conran. We were trying to create a strong central idea for what the millennium experience would be. But whenever we spoke to the bureaucrats, they were so preoccupied with the budget, the timetable and the boxes ministers needed ticking, that they didn’t have time to discuss the strong central idea - which is what a design really is. We eventually decided that without that idea, the project would fail so we walked away from it. My good chum and fellow author Stephen Bayley took much the same decision at much the same time. Eventually, a large domed roof was built, but with no clear plan - no design - for what would go underneath. The result was a roof that kept the rain off disgruntled guests for a bad party, and then kept the rain off disappointed visitors to a dull and directionless exhibition.

What a waste of a momentous date and nearly £1bn of public money. Of course, it has latterly been rescued by O2, which has, albeit retrospectively, created a design, a sense of purpose for the space. Three cheers for O2, but no cheers for the Government, whose determination to get it done without a clear design for what ’it’ was going to be blew all that money. A pity: you could probably get a couple of good hospitals and a decent school for £1bn.

So if you’re going to make something, whatever it may be, design matters. It matters more than anything else, because it’s the foundation stone on which everything else rests. That’s why, when money’s tight, design is even more important. Get that right and it will be easy to save elsewhere. As I said, design isn’t the icing, it’s the cake. And if the cake is good enough, it doesn’t need icing. Good design may cost more than bad design - yet paradoxically, in the long run, good design is always cheaper.

Of course, cynics will say that my view is special pleading: that I choose to believe in design because I earn a living in it. They’ve got it the wrong way round: I choose to earn a living in design because I believe in it.

Roger Mavity is chief executive of Conran Group

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