Inter­view: Guy Julier

Are design grads still sprout­ing like mush­rooms in other coun­tries? How are other indus­tries get­ting bet­ter at integ­rat­ing design think­ing in their work? Are TV shows like Grand Designs good for the design industry? Design expo­nent, writer and pro­fessor Guy Julier vis­ited Design Stud­ies in Dunedin late last year, in his role of Wil­liam Evans Fel­low, and tackled a wide range of issues within design indus­tries and cul­ture. He spoke to design­ers, staff, stu­dents and plan­ners about sus­tain­able iden­tity, design act­iv­ism, design edu­ca­tion and community-led design ini­ti­at­ives. And weirdness.

Inter­view by Alex Gilks, Depart­ment of Design Stud­ies, Uni­ver­sity of Otago.

Alex: You talked about that nice com­munity pro­ject in the vil­lage of Meth­ley in Leeds, and about trig­ger­ing the ima­gin­a­tion of the people who lived there with the ver­nacu­lar kind of sig­nage and the pub­lic screenings.

Guy: What shif­ted the ima­gin­a­tion was that they turfed the street for one week. There were two parts to that. One was really just about hav­ing some fun, get­ting people out onto the street, get­ting people to know each other a bit more or bet­ter and so on. But the other thing was about shift­ing the realm of pos­sib­il­ity in people’s minds. I think if design can do that, if design can not just cre­ate beauty but also cre­ate a refram­ing, rethink­ing about every­day life, then that’s really good.

Alex: What about cre­at­ive work places? How much is cre­ativ­ity a func­tion of the envir­on­ment, and can you really have a meth­od­o­logy for the creative?

Guy: On a huge lar­ger scale of course, the big influ­ence in Europe has been the work of Richard Flor­ida, an Amer­ican former aca­demic, who wrote this book called The Rise of the Cre­at­ive Class about five years ago. It has had a huge influ­ence on cul­tural plan­ning. Basic­ally his argu­ment is that the eco­nom­ic­ally suc­cess­ful cit­ies, at least in the US, are those which have large levels of cre­ativ­ity going on. Places like Los Angeles and San Fran­cisco. His argu­ment is that weird­ness stim­u­lates cre­ativ­ity, so you have to have what he calls third spaces: bars, res­taur­ants, cafes, and also cul­tural infra­struc­ture for cre­at­ive types. I sup­pose that con­cep­tion is also trans­lated into some areas in com­merce as well. It’s really get­ting away from a Taylor­istic or Ford­ist notion of what the office is. A cri­tique of Florida’s concept is that you can’t just para­chute cre­ativ­ity into a place even if you’ve got some sort of infra­struc­ture of bars, cafes to make the places attract­ive – you also need a mean­ing­ful infra­struc­ture of industry to host that cre­ativ­ity. LA has got the film industry, and then it’s got a big fur­niture industry that to some degree feeds that film industry and so on. So what’s hap­pen­ing in UK and European and per­haps Amer­ican cit­ies is a con­stant of that ‘me too’ sort of approach that some­how the cre­at­ive indus­tries are going to really regen­er­ate places. Well the cre­at­ive indus­tries in UK cit­ies rep­res­ent about (depends where you go) between 5% and 8% of the GDP of those places, which is quite big but it’s not massive. But it’s inter­est­ing the way that cre­ativ­ity is not just seen as an end in itself, but as being about a sym­bolic value for a place. What does it say about the pop­u­la­tion there? Going back to work places though, weird­ness can be good.

Alex: Weird­ness in workplaces!

Guy: Although many every­day office jobs have become increas­ingly what George Rich­well called ‘Mac­Don­aldised’. For example work­ing in bank­ing has shif­ted from being about mak­ing fairly autonom­ous decisions to basic­ally a com­puter oper­ator going through a point­ing sys­tem to decide whether someone’s worth 10 grand or 50 grand on their credit card. So I think what’s hap­pen­ing at the same time is this: it’s a bit like the TV show The Office. A lot of work is incred­ibly mundane and routine so you invent sort of weird­ness now and then just to keep people inter­ested in work­ing there.

Alex: Like jel­lied staplers and that sort of thing. That brings us to this art­icle in the local paper: this pro­posed har­bourside devel­op­ment in Dunedin. You’re say­ing there’s some danger in those things hap­pen­ing – some­thing that you’ve wit­nessed in other met­ro­pol­itan areas.

Guy: Yeah. I’m encour­aging of it only if it’s done inter­est­ingly, and cre­at­ively, and with ima­gin­a­tion. I think if it’s not going to be done with those three things, don’t do it at all. As I’ve said before there’s an argu­ment to be made for not doing some­thing some­times. I was talk­ing the other night about this thing in Rot­ter­dam where they’ve cre­ated design-free zones and it came out from a report by a group called Urban Unlim­ited, a kind of rad­ical plan­ning group in Rot­ter­dam. They argue that, for example, if you want cre­at­ive indus­tries in a place you’re bet­ter off leav­ing people to it, rather than cre­at­ing these clusters and cre­at­ive quar­ters … partly to do with the fact that design­ers tend to net­work across very broad areas.

Alex: When these kinds of devel­op­ments do go wrong, in your exper­i­ence, what par­tic­u­lar parts of the pro­cess go wrong?

Guy: They go wrong when prop­erty developers, who are basic­ally box tick­ers, say things about inter­ac­tion with the local com­munity – con­sulta­tion, stim­u­la­tion of local employ­ment – often they’re pay­ing lip ser­vice to these things. The thing is, water­front devel­op­ments cre­ate prob­lems in all kinds of ways, and they may look fine in them­selves, but they run the danger of drain­ing cap­ital and resources (both private and pub­lic resources) from the rest of wherever the place is. That has happened to some degree in many places such as Cardiff. The second thing is that they basic­ally rep­lic­ate mod­els of all other water­front devel­op­ments around the world, and water­front devel­op­ments have been around for a good 20 – 25 years now. They star­ted off in Amer­ica in the 1980s, par­tic­u­larly in Boston. You’ve got this gatey com­munity effect as well, because often a water­front devel­op­ment is look­ing away from a city and look­ing out to sea. And you’ve got then this prob­lem of con­nectiv­ity between the main part of a city and this water­front devel­op­ment and so on. It’s a very del­ic­ate thing.

For the [Bar­celona] Olympics in ‘92 effect­ively they grew a new city out of the old city. It turned the char­ac­ter of the city, because sud­denly you’ve moved from a city whereby you could walk home from most places in the city reas­on­ably eas­ily to a much big­ger met­ro­polis and so the con­cep­tion of that city has shif­ted. You’ve got to deal with that in terms of con­nectiv­ity, you’ve got to deal with that in terms of trans­port, you’ve got to deal with that in terms of the iden­tity of the place as well, and in so many of these devel­op­ments you end up with a ghost town approach to these things. I was in Dock­lands recently – it’s a huge devel­op­ment to the east of Lon­don which took place in the 1980s. I was at a con­fer­ence, there was a con­fer­ence din­ner that was about half a mile away and you couldn’t walk there, you had to get there by rail­way cost­ing about four pound sev­enty and they didn’t have a Bicing [pub­lic bicycles] sys­tem. Often, as in Lon­don, you’ve got people who are using these spaces already, often they are large ware­house spaces either being used by industry, and you’ve got artists and people using the low rent oppor­tun­it­ies of those kinds of spaces, sculp­ture work­shops and so on. In Leeds they’ve developed a kind of cre­at­ive media centre type of place on the water­front and they had to evict the Leeds Sculp­ture Work­shop in order to develop that area, so they had to evict cre­at­ive people in order to cre­ate this cre­at­ive area.

If you do water­front devel­op­ment in the stand­ard formats, I think that it’s run it’s course and lets do some­thing dif­fer­ent, lets think of a har­bourside devel­op­ment as part of a wider city plan, in terms of what a city might be about. In Bar­celona they were able to do it, they had a polit­ical res­on­ance because their open­ing up of their water­front was about the ori­ent­a­tion of the city across the Medi­ter­ranean to the rest of Europe. What Bar­celona really wanted was to turn their back on Mad­rid and the rest of Spain and say “we are Catalan, we are European and we are out­ward look­ing” across the sea to Italy and France and so on. They were able to do some­thing sym­bolic with it. A har­bourside devel­op­ment in Dunedin could be a great oppor­tun­ity … what do we want to make dis­tinct­ive about it, I don’t mean that in mar­ket­ing terms, I mean in terms of it’s every­day life and aspirations.

Alex: Behind every great real pro­ject or stu­dent pro­ject is a whole lot of other stuff. A lot of it is not so impress­ive, and that’s hid­den from the pub­lic isn’t it?

Guy: Yeah, but the thing is, it gets dif­fer­ent when you’re work­ing with ser­vice or inter­ac­tion design, because always by defin­i­tion the out­come is open ended – a ser­vice or inter­ac­tion is always going to be evolving. So whilst, I sup­pose, a cor­por­ate iden­tity pro­gram can be summed up in a logo (even though many brand and cor­por­ate iden­tity people say that’s just one part of it), at least there’s some­thing then, whereas with ser­vice design or inter­ac­tion design, what you’ve got is a whole sys­tem, a kind of net­work rather than an object.

Alex: Did you have a flour­ish­ing ter­tiary design teach­ing industry in the 90s and early 2000s like we had here? Have you got a huge sat­ur­a­tion of design graduates?

Guy: Huge, huge. Stat­ist­ics often show that art and design have expan­ded in the ter­tiary sec­tor faster than any other aca­demic dis­cip­line apart than medi­cine in the UK. It’s some­thing like 10 years ago 47,000 stu­dents study­ing design at higher edu­ca­tion level now it’s prob­ably around about 60 — 70,000, some­thing like that.

Alex: That’s a lot of designers.

Guy: That’s a heck of a lot of designers.

Alex: Even if a fifth of them get a job in the industry.

Guy: Abso­lutely, and I think this is to some degree neg­at­ive. You might be accused of train­ing stu­dents for which there aren’t jobs of course, and in a sense why should there be. There’s only 180,000 to 200,000 design­ers in the UK.

Alex: The turnover’s not going to be that great.

Guy: Right. On the other hand, hope­fully you’re turn­ing out more design-aware kinds of people when you look at edu­ca­tion. I’ve been party to a lot of these kinds of debates of “are gradu­ates design industry ready?”

Ready for what? For what industry?”

I think there’s a huge amount of work to be done still in the pro­fes­sional world in gen­eral around being a good design cli­ent. And that’s grow­ing, there’s increas­ing num­bers of design man­agers or cre­at­ive man­agers or some­thing like that. And brand man­agers, to some extent, in the pub­lic and private sec­tors. For example, in the UK in local author­it­ies, and in the National Health Ser­vice and things like that, we’ve got these things called ‘design cham­pi­ons’. They are people who are meant to be cham­pi­ons of design and within the health ser­vice. Their job is very much about design pro­cure­ment and brief writ­ing, that sort of thing. Now I’ve spoken with a lot of these design cham­pi­ons and a lot of them feel very nervous about that, because they haven’t got any back­ground train­ing. They just happened to be at the exec­ut­ive meet­ing and no one else would step for­ward, or they had a copy of World of Interi­ors or some­thing like that in their bag. But I think the issue is that if we can have people in those kinds of roles who actu­ally do have a design train­ing or par­tial design train­ing I think we’d get more demand­ing cli­ents. Cli­ents are get­ting more demand­ing any­way, but [we need] more aware, more flex­ible, more ima­gin­at­ive clients.

Alex: And relat­ing to that, what about the por­trayal in the media and columns, tele­vi­sion news and tele­vi­sion pro­grams, book shops, that kind of thing. If there was a con­tinuüm of design which was beau­ti­fic­a­tion and con­sump­tion at one end and along the other end crit­ical and ima­gin­at­ive ana­lysis of how we live, do you think there’s a big shift or a small shift in recent times towards that more crit­ical and ima­gin­at­ive area?

Guy: There’s a small shift, and you can see it even in the TV media. I always start with the Chan­ging Rooms thing, which you’ve had in New Zea­l­and. The concept was star­ted 15 years ago or so, in fact it was a design his­tor­ian and a lot of design­ers who were up in arms about this thing, because it made design really banal. I actu­ally felt it was quite pos­it­ive because it showed the inac­tion and nego­ti­ation that takes place in design. Albeit in very dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. But you could see the pro­cess and pro­duc­tion, also the con­sump­tion, you could see the response to that. On chan­nel 4 in the UK, they’ve recently screened a really inter­est­ing series about the regen­er­a­tion of a town called Cas­tle­ford. The show is called Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan. The TV chan­nel put 100,000 quid into kick-starting a pro­ject, and then it drew in all kinds of other funds. The town itself was a dread­ful mess and so they’ve done a bridge, some parks, some exhib­i­tions and this sort of thing. What they’ve done is shown the dif­fer­ent approaches to each design chal­lenge by dif­fer­ent archi­tects or design­ers or urban design­ers or land­scape archi­tects and, OK it’s TV and it gets watered down, but it shows the pro­cess of par­ti­cip­a­tion in the design pro­cess and in the out­comes and responses to that kind of thing. So for example, in the second of the series they did three parks, one was designed by Martha Schwartz, a fam­ous Amer­ican land­scape archi­tect, and it’s a ghastly hor­rible thing – not just visu­ally, it’s ghastly and hor­rible because there’s only lip ser­vice paid to any local con­sulta­tion on this thing, and so there’s no buy in. It was, of the three, the most visu­ally chal­len­ging kind of thing. The other two were fun, enga­ging but then will have a longer life because the local res­id­ents were involved in the design pro­cess and now have become stew­ards of the space. So what I’m say­ing is that I think the media is slowly mov­ing into a quite inter­est­ing, more crit­ical approach to design where it’s bey­ond being about lovely spaces and so on. I actu­ally won­der if the prop­erty melt­down is even con­trib­ut­ing to this because we’ve had a dec­ade of hor­rible TV pro­grams about how to make your home bet­ter so you can sell it for an extra ten grand, and now that kind of race is over. Maybe it’s for­cing people to think around design is more than just fin­an­cial value.

Alex: You were talk­ing about Hans Mon­der­man, who is writ­ing about remov­ing con­straints that man­age risk for us, and instances of these changes mak­ing for being pretty nice res­ults for the users. Do people respond bet­ter and become hap­pier if there is less of this kind of controlling?

Guy: Yeah sure. On a kind of philo­soph­ical level I sup­pose it’s about trust and human­ity. But I think it’s back to this open­ing up of the ima­gin­a­tion in a way, and some­times you just live with things for so long you just don’t notice them. For example Thomas Bley was present­ing his work that he’s doing on this altern­at­ive trans­port thing, and he said it him­self, the issue is not just with the hard­ware of the vehicle you’ve designed but also the hard­ware and soft­ware of the streets in which you work. I said one way you could intro­duce this tri­cycle type of vehicle into Dunedin, which seems to be a great idea, would be to take away all the road mark­ings for a start because the road mark­ings are the width of the cars currently.

Alex: People would auto­mat­ic­ally jump up and down and say “Well every­body is going to get hit by a truck if there are no road mark­ings.” This other thread of think­ing says that people will man­age, that they’ll take care, that they’ll toot and swerve and all that.

Guy: In the Neth­er­lands cyc­lists have right of way over cars in whatever situ­ation, so it’s easier prob­ably for Hans Mon­der­man to think these things from there com­pared to from Detroit. But I think you have to keep exper­i­ment­ing, and part of that exper­i­ment­a­tion will require some eval­u­ation. They eval­u­ated Monderman’s work, and so on, they showed there’s a 40% reduc­tion of acci­dents. Hope­fully that is power to it being rolled out else­where as well. Kevin Lynch, an urban designer, talked about this notion of legib­il­ity as a sci­ence and not an art. Cur­rently under High­way Agency guidelines in the UK, they run con­trary to the dis­ab­il­ity dis­crim­in­a­tion act, because the High­ways Agency say their curbs have to be at a cer­tain height and they have to have rail­ings here, there and there, and it actu­ally makes it very dif­fi­cult for people say with lim­ited eye­sight and so on to nego­ti­ate these spaces.

Alex: So you still need some sort of empir­ical study back­ing up this philo­soph­ical instinct.

Guy: It helps to get a bit the­or­et­ical about this. Pierre Bour­dieu, a French soci­olo­gist, talked about what he called ‘cul­tural inter­me­di­ar­ies’, people like design­ers who are always on the edge and bring in new ideas. He saw it very much in terms of bring­ing stuff from the avant-garde to the main­stream. He also talks about the role of the cul­tural inter­me­di­ar­ies as being in needs pro­duc­tion. What that means is that we prob­ably need plumb­ers and elec­tri­cians cur­rently, we prob­ably need doc­tors and nurses, but the argu­ment might be that people in thera­peutic stuff, herb­al­ists or shi­atsu prac­ti­tion­ers or even design­ers and artists, you could prob­ably just sur­vive without them in some way. Now I’d actu­ally take issue with that, but non­ethe­less so much of the design pro­fes­sion is about con­tinu­ing to per­suade cli­ents that they need their ser­vices. If that means going back to object­ive eval­u­ation of things in order to make that point than let’s go with it. There’s a lot of really inter­est­ing research being done in health design around that, about the way in which design can aid recov­ery rates – hav­ing a paint­ing on the wall or a good view out a win­dow in hos­pital, things like that. There’s a huge amount of work done in the States around that.

Alex: You are show­ing many nice case stud­ies that might fall under the defin­i­tion of inter­ac­tion design. Is that a word that you’re using in your teach­ing and your stud­ies to describe these kinds of innovations?

Guy: No it’s not, and nor am I using ‘sys­tems design’ at the moment, but per­haps I should. But some­times when you label some­thing you kill if off. That’s what [design writer] John Thack­ara argues around the con­stants of cat­egor­isa­tion of forms of design. On the other hand, if it helps stu­dents to identify other examples, case stud­ies, and prac­ti­tion­ers, so they can pos­i­tion what they’re doing, maybe then that would be help­ful. But inter­ac­tion design is some­thing that is a dis­cip­line or sub-discipline of design that is still being defined. It’s a fairly new area in itself.

Alex: We’ve had a wave of vis­it­ing staff and vis­it­ors from over­seas who have taken pains to emphas­ise that design should be a lot about inter­ac­tions between people, and about new things, and that we should be pretty wary of design where it’s tak­ing always the tra­di­tional form, and the out­comes are art objects or art exhib­i­tions and things like that. So would you say that is pretty widely under­stood in the UK?

Guy: No actu­ally. In the UK you have this round of degree shows, of gradu­at­ing exhib­i­tions round about June, and then a month later, there’s a big, very com­mer­cial show called ‘New Design­ers’ where uni­ver­sit­ies have to pay thou­sand of pounds to have a stand there to show­case their best stu­dents and their art. Some­times they organ­ize this them­selves and it’s really very much the cattle mar­ket of design. And what tends to hap­pen is that because it’s an exhib­i­tion of the more tra­di­tional high design stuff which gets a lot more of the cov­er­age. For example the year before last Blue­print magazine did a review of that exhib­i­tion and they said that a lot of the work was very indi­vidu­al­istic, and that there wasn’t a lot of social design. And they made ref­er­ence to a hoodie that one of our stu­dents had designed, that it was just about indi­vidual space. But the journ­al­ist hadn’t under­stood that pro­ject at all. In fact the pro­ject itself was the fruit of a year’s work the stu­dent had done on aut­ism, and what she was doing was design­ing cloth­ing and apparel for aut­istic teen­agers who have this agora­phobic response some­times, so they wanted to cre­ate some­thing which facil­it­ated well­being in pub­lic spaces for these teen­agers. But the journo hadn’t read the cap­tion. So the prob­lem with the whole sort of exhibition-driven form of stu­dent design out­comes is that it priv­ileges cer­tain kinds of approaches to design over oth­ers – the very pho­to­graph­able fur­niture and so on.

Alex: The very beau­ti­ful graphic design.

Guy: Yes exactly. Design reports, design audits, or a sys­tem design: these are dif­fi­cult to pho­to­graph. If you look at IDEO’s web site (and I’ve had con­ver­sa­tions with people at IDEO about this) it’s all these kinds of very sexy products which actu­ally not very rep­res­ent­at­ive of what IDEO do. I think we’ve got this prob­lem with the rep­res­ent­a­tion of design cur­rently, and I don’t know how to move bey­ond it without writ­ing many words. But on the other hand, as the Dutch thinker Burt Mulder said “A pic­ture can say a thou­sand words but a thou­sand and one words can say an awful lot more”.

Guy Julier is a design author and Pro­fessor of Design at Leeds Met­ro­pol­itan University.