ThinkTank: The Future Designer

Lauren Parker: Hello, everyone. Thank you, and welcome. My name’s Lauren Parker and I’m Head of Contemporary Programmes at the V& A and I just want say thank you very much to everyone for taking the time, especially in the evening, to come and join us. Before we kick off, I just wanted to give a very quick background to this series of events. The idea really started, I guess, from, from our side during the V& A’s 150th anniversary celebrations, and in those we kind of look back at the origins of the Museum, and also celebrated some of the leading practitioners working today. But, in response to this, we also started to think about what the nature and role of the design movement of the future might be, thinking about the kind of next 150 years. And so, this is the first in the series of really informal debates with an invited audience which will explore aspects of how we can teach, talk about, collect and display design now, and in the future.

Over the course of this year, we’ll explore ideas around the future designer, which is the topic for tonight: the future object; the future environment and the future audience. Critical to the success of each event is that they should become a single partnership with another organisation, and I’d really like to thank the RCA’s partnering the V& A on this particular event, and particularly to Jeremy whose thoughtful input has really helped to shape not just this evening, but also the series as a whole.

Before I hand over to Jane Pavitt, who’s going to be chairing this evening’s event, I just wanted to mention a couple of housekeeping bits and pieces. The bar will be open throughout, so please feel free to come and go as you like and keep yourself topped up. There’s also… I’m sure most people know, but the loos are just by the lifts. The more formal part of the discussion should finish by eight o’clock, but I hope that many of you are going to stay on for a little while longer after that, and we’ ll be serving drinks and canapés.

And, finally, we want to keep refining the format of these events, and so we’ve got a few comments, forms and feedback forms around, and it’d be great to get some feedback from you afterwards, because I think that will help us think about how we might organize these in the future. And, finally, I’ d just like to thank Jane for agreeing to chair the event; for our four provocateurs; to Zoe and Kaia for helping to organise it, and most of all thank you to all of you for coming and taking part.

Thank you very much.

Jane Pavitt: I’m just going to say a few words to get started. I’d like to welcome you all here. I’m delighted that we have such an illustrious room full of speakers and guests, and I’m sure that some very lively and fruitful debate’s going to occur.

Now, as Lauren said, the intention of the Contemporary Programme of the V& A has been to set up a series of debates as a way of extending its initial remit, which was never to be simply an exhibition programme, but to engage with design culture in more diverse and provocative ways and, and one of those ways was to become a platform for critical debate. And so it’s in the spirit of this that Lauren and Zoe and the team have organised this event.

And when I came to make some rudimentary introductory notes for this… for tonight, I realised it had been a while since anybody had asked me to think about contemporary practice. I’m kind of buried in preparations for an exhibition on post-war design, but I could therefore think of 100 different ways in which designers had framed their ambitions and their potential role in society in the aftermath of World War II. This generation were oft as not moralisers: they were proselytizers; they were prophets of the new world, where the job as the designer, as they saw it, was to contribute to the building of a new, humane and progressive society and it seemed an interesting place, at least for me, to start. And maybe throughout the next generation, through the 50s and 60s, designers divided themselves – or were divided by politics or circumstances, perhaps – into two camps: the kind of divisionary camp or the bureaucratic camp.

If you fast forward to the 80s, there’s been an emergence of a kind of celebrity culture for designers, which I’m sure we will come back to tonight, where signature becomes a kind of brand name and we were just as likely to see designers in the pages of the Sunday papers as we were perhaps describing their perfect weekend or the contents of their fridge. A few years on, and the fridge would have become full of organic produce as designers declared their environmental credentials. Now, of course this is a kind of clichéd account of the shifting positions and perceptions of the future role of designers.

But tonight we’re going to hear from four very different perspectives on the future roles from four people very closely involved in shaping the way in which design, and designers, will perceive their role in the future.

Jane Pavitt: So without further ado I would like to introduce my first provocateur - lovely term, isn’t it - Jeremy Myerson. Jeremy, as I’m sure you all know, is director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre and Professor of Design Studies here at the college. He’s been a writer, broadcaster, curator, an educator in design for, for many years, and his chosen topic tonight is going to be The Designer’s Collaborator in a Co-Design Process.

Jeremy Myerson: Thank you. Well, good evening, everybody. I have been thinking about the subject of design authorship for quite a long time, and I’m... I think you’ve picked up my notes. [Laughter].

And even though I’ve been thinking of it for a long time, I can’t keep it in my head [laughter] for two minutes. But when I first started talking to the contemporary team of the V& A, they were kind of thinking, where do designers fit in? Is there still a role for designers as tastemakers, as the sole artistic author? And this whole issue around design authorship in an increasingly kind of complex world. Can designers still look out and, and be the masters of their own kind of creative destiny? And this is a very, very interesting subject, and I’ve been thinking about it for quite a long while.

A number of years ago I did a series of books which sold very well at the V& A, incidentally, Conran Octopus, called The Conran Design Guides to the Twentieth Century; I wrote them with a writer called Sylvia Katz.

And what we did, with Terence Conan’s very close involvement, personal involvement, was sit down and try and do a chronological, art-historical survey of various artefacts through the 20th century and pick the key designers and the key objects. And we did it in lighting; we did it in tableware; we did it in kitchenware, and one or two other categories.

And, and of course if you take something like lighting, you know, at the beginning of the century all goes swimmingly, this, this approach: you know, Lalique, Tiffany, Wachenfeld and the Bauhaus, who’s on the cover, and so on and so forth. Where it all began to fall apart was in the late 1980s when lighting becomes so complex: such an engineering problem, so much new science, so many different inputs, that it becomes very, very difficult to pick the sole artistic…; to find out the kind of key breakthroughs. And luckily the books ended in 1990 when they were published; otherwise I think we would have been in big trouble. Because the story of the last 15-odd years has been one of the architect before, no longer the master-builder, the designer - and here I become provocative - getting lost in a kind of new creative space, which is becoming very crowded.

Now, of course we still have design heroes. Here is one, Peter Schreier, who gained an honorary doctorate as a graduate of the college, an automotive designer, for his work on the Audi TT. When you study the design of the Audi TT, and how it was developed, and what went actually on inside the company, there are photographs of 40, 50 people who claim design authorship of this car. Which bit did Peter Schreier really do? You know he did some of the early drawings, and he talked about the influence of the Bauhaus on the shape of the car, and so on and so forth. But, you know, a modern industrial artefact like the car has a - success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, and this was a humungous success and - which bit can he claim sole authorship? Well, perhaps yes; perhaps not, but those of us who, who are involved in the automotive industry and modern cars know that from any product launch or from any presentation, the teams are huge.

And on the left you’ve got the Ford Verve and the team around that. And on the top right, you’ve got your McCallum and the team from Jaguar: just one of a small number of people. And of course the team members in producing this are not necessarily designers; the creative auteurs in the traditional sense: all kinds of different inputs are in there, and so design is becoming a multi-disciplinary team-base event, lasting, in which different teams of people come in over different periods of time, and it’ s extremely complex. And so the idea… if you go back to the museum setting of saying, well this person was responsible for this artefact, it becomes a very, very fraught enterprise.

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, then you get the phenomenon of the user, the customer, the consumer, playing a role in the development, and even the design process. There’s a very good book by Eric von Hippel called Democratizing Innovation, in which he says that the user is now the most powerful agent in the creative process. If you take something in an industry like kite surfing, extreme sports - it’s not something I do myself, but those who do kite surfing say it’s amazing - manufacturers nowadays are little more than receivers from very powerful user-groups who talk to each other through social networks on the web and what they do is they e-mail in their specification: make it like this, and if you don’ t make it like this, there is no market for this product.

And the guy on the, the guy on the right is Lego Mindstorms. Now, if you were to put Lego Mindstorms into the V& A Contemporary Design exhibition and label it from the Lego Company, it wouldn’t be the whole story. Because Lego thought they were designing a construction toy for 12-year-olds. What happened was that adult hackers hacked into the software, completely rewrote the software and turned these toys into savage killing machines. And all over the world now, there are Lego Mindstorm meets where people are actually coming together and having these battles, and it’s become an international craze, led by consumers in a way that was unintended by the company and the company’s designers. And in the end, Lego invited representatives from the user groups to go to Finland and Denmark and sit down and write the next specification of software and hardware, so the customers designed the next product.

And this is not an isolated outbreak. All over the world I know there will be the counter-arguments about designers’ art and the signature designers and all of that; I’d argue that’s a very small niche part of the market. The big part of the market now is increasingly sophisticated, quantitative techniques: not just to ask customers what they want, but to engage customers in the creative process, and this happening all over the world, in lots of different contexts, in lots of different product sectors.

So not only have you got a world of co-design; of user-led creation. And I know John Thackara is not here tonight, but if he were, he’d talk about the work of Dott 07 festival in Gateshead where they designed with the local community, projects, design projects through the Design Council, to do with urban farming, mental health, alternative energy, and so on.

So we’re in a very interesting stage in the development of the designer, and it’s really not what one would have perceived when I was elegantly lining up all those Tiffany and Lalique lamps several years ago. We had a conference at the RCA last year, called Include, and the speaker on the left is Jane Fulton-Suri, the head of Human Factors and I know that she’s British, but she’s based in San Francisco, and she gave a very provocative paper. And she said we’ve gone from designing for people to designing with, and by, people. And she said there’s now a conversation taking place between the makers of product services and systems and the people who use them, that has been unheard of since the craft era: we are entering a kind of new craft era.

The person on the right is Paula Dib, a Brazilian designer, who works an incredible company called trans.forma design, works in Brazil, and she goes to impoverished, southern, rural communities, and works with the local community. She finds that she uses their waste; she uses local pigments and dyes, whatever plants are available, and they create craft objects. They design them; they make them as a community, and then they take them on buses up to the large northern Brazilian cities, where they sell them in galleries. It’s absolutely fascinating what is going on in this process.

So, I think that what I would throw into the mix this evening is that there is a big question mark over where the designer is running. In an age of multi-disciplinarity, of co-design, designers are now sharing the creative space with scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs within the company, and with customers outside it. And the lines are blurred, and authorship is contested. And that asks a lot of very serious and searching questions on how museums collect for display contemporary designing. So I’ll stop there.

Jane Pavitt: Thank you for a provocative start. Our second speaker this evening is Gareth Williams. Gareth is curator in the department of Furniture, Textiles and Fashion at the V& A; specialises in 20th-century and contemporary design; author-curator of a number of [unclear] putting shows on contemporary design, the next of which is going to be a show exploring the role of narrative in design, which is at the V& A 2009. Now, Gareth’s provocative position is rather different from Jeremy. So Gareth’s going to be talking about the rise of the designer as celebrity.

Gareth Williams: Well, perhaps I should leave the question mark up there, since I don’t have any visuals at all, and I’m not quite as organized as Jeremy and I think I’ve been given the subject as The Designer as Celebrity to speak about, and I must admit I feel rather ambivalent about it. And the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more complicit I find myself in it, in the system, but I’ve got a few thoughts about it.

And I would suggest that, probably as a reaction to the kind of system that Jeremy’s described to us, of designers getting somewhat lost in this matrix of, you know, are they working for the consumer or are they designing for themselves, for a manufacturer, for the market? Where do they exist? One way forward for some designers is to make themselves into a brand name; to make themselves into a celebrity, and this very room we’re all standing in, and the institution that we’re standing in, is very responsible for that, as design education is, in part, promoting and teaching designers to be celebrities: designers to be famous, I would argue. And museums, like the one that I work for, and the collections that we form, are bolstering that kind of idea of what a designer can be, as well.

And why should this come about, really? Well, I think that designers now, certain sort of designers, and we’re talking about designers of things with attitude: those things that [unclear] or things with that appeal, things with [unclear], things with attitude, so their very particular area of design is about signature objects which Jeremy has already referred to and signature style pieces, and it got me thinking, well, why would designers choose to go down this path? Well, I think it’s because there’s a vacuum left by contemporary art, perhaps, to produce works which are provocative in their own right, or which are meaningful and have an interest to significance in culture. Maybe it’s not a vacuum from contemporary art, maybe it’s actually the shape of enormity of contemporary art and the money that’s swimming around in contemporary art, that leads designers to think ah, maybe we can get a slice of this. Perhaps that’s part of it, and I’ll perhaps come back to that. But I think actually it’s a broader, cultural position that leads designers to brand themselves as brands. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean that designers - and they’re taught in design schools - to produce a signature style, a particular way of working, something which represents their, their modus operandi, and perhaps even a particular visual style for themselves - perhaps they wear a silly felt hat [laughter] I don’t know. [Laughter]. Perhaps they’re known for wearing a certain colour.

Designers, successful designers of the sort I’m talking about, brand themselves and create a kind of set of values around themselves which is what they sell to the people that employ them. And what they’re selling is a brand value. I suppose a designer may be selling a certain kind of quality, or they may be selling a certain kind of danger, or they may be selling a certain kind of sexiness - which is what the consumers, and ultimately we are all the consumers, but in the first place it’s the manufacturers who they are seeking is the first point - those are the brand values which they’re looking to pick up.

So, designers like Tord Boontje is a great example of someone who has a fantastically eloquent, personal style, which he can then roll out across a whole multitude of different forms, media, etc, etc, and his [white?] copy, that comes later, work very deliberately to create that style, create that Tord/Tordique brand through his personal work and his personal products and projects, none of which were really viable products for the mass marketplace and weren’t intended to be, but signalled an intent.

The next thing a designer needs to go is get the kind of heavyweight manufacturers, the elite manufacturers, on their side, and in the furniture area, which is my area, that would mean getting yourself an Italian, and making sure that you’ve got Campolini, or B& B, or Marosa, on your client list, which is exactly what many of these designers that I’m talking about may do. And only then can you actually start making some money. Because of course this, at the end of the day, is what it’s all about: designers need to live, I think, and, and they’re attracted by celebrity culture, like we all are, which is a possible lucrative way of living, so Italian manufacturers aren’t going to earn you a whole lot of money, I don’t think, but Target from the US might. So you can only go mass market once you’ve gone elite, and been paid; condoned by the elite market. Perhaps get a few pieces in a few museum collections along the way. That helps, doesn’t it?

Now, Alice Rawsthorn has talked about mediagenic designers. And, and I’ve elsewhere talked about ego, the ego system. I think we’re really talking the same thing. It’s a kind of coterie of design, which is inhabited by these branded designers who get all… apparently get all the best jobs, who are the style leaders. But it worries me; it worries me very deeply that this is design in the service of public relations ultimately. I was in Paris a week or so ago, for a huge event by Swarovsky, with 100 designers, both in products and fashion, all contributing gorgeous, beautiful things to a fantastic exhibition of gorgeous, beautiful things to do with… well, obviously to do with Swarovsky crystal. And you think, well, this is fantastic: it’s marvellous that all these designers are getting promoted; they’re getting backed; they’re getting paid for this work. So ' and?' you feel. You know, where is this taking us? Where is this contributing to broader cultural society? It’s, it’s all about the cult of the label and the brand and the co-brand: in this instance, between Swarovsky – a wonderfully supported company, I must say, for designers – and all this raft of 100 designers.

More recently still, I was at a talk with Marc Newson – I don’t know if any of you were there at the V& A on Friday – and there we had the mediagenic designer. This was the designer that Alice Rawsthorn was referring to as the ultimate mediagenic designer; the celebrity poster boy of design, if you like. There is a man who has succeeded in every realm, you would’ve thought, as a designer, and he was talking about his dream project, he could do anything. He’s done the concept car; I’m very interested in, we were talking about how many people it takes to design a car; well, according to the Marc Newson methodology it takes one person, Marc Newson, to design the forward concept car.

Jeremy Myerson: How many people were driving around in them?

Gareth Williams: Well, quite, you know, so, this, that’s design in the sense of PR, unfortunately. Mark’s dream project is a rocket to take space tourists into orbit. I mean, it’s fantastic, amazing, startling, innovative. And I, kind of, thought, how disappointing, really, that that’s where this trajectory may lead; a celebrity design idea.

And, finally, the last point I’d make is that the celebrity design idea obviously and inevitably leads to the idea of design art, where collectivity and uniqueness meet in the gallery space and where desirability of the branded designer meets the inquisitive nature of the great collector. And, so, therefore, we see a rash of these days of carrara marble versions of production furniture, which, of course, is a very weird concept to me but, somehow feeding from all these different areas of design to bolster the idea of the celebrity designer. That’s rather a muddled, kind of, exposition and I’m clearly right to keep that question mark up on the screen but I hope that gives some kind of provocative thought about this.

Jane Pavitt: Thank you. I love this term, mediagenic. Our third speaker this evening is Daniel Charny. Daniel is a senior tutor in design products at the Royal College, whose work ranges - he trained in industrial design - but his work ranges across furniture and [unclear] design, to curation and writing and teaching. And he' s been advisor to a number of museums, on building design collections and it' s not intentional that I' m, kind of, shifting the debate toward the topic of museums but, given Gareth' s last comment, I thought it was an apposite moment to introduce it. And Daniel is going to talk about the designer as catalyst. Thank you.

Daniel Charny: Well, it' s the title that came up in my conversation with Lauren on the phone and, yes I do a provocation [unclear]. Since then I think I would' ve changed it to accelerator, but I' ll keep catalyst for the meantime. But it' s more to do with, I think, this idea of contemporary practise, there' s one thing that hasn' t changed and, I don' t think will change, and it' s the fact that designers bring in the conceptualising element. The ability to take ideas that other people have, the ability to really tap into the one thing that the client has said, among many other things, to pick something a user has said, to pick something the industry has made so many times and keeps on breaking. No, no, pick on one thing and conceptualise the change, and this is the one thing that has always happened, from the Tiffany to the cars, to, if you' re a brand or you' re an anonymous designer, this is the thing that designers can do and this is what' s being, now, touted as design thinking and design being sold as, kind of, a way of doing things. This is the thing that the talent, that the drawing, being able to, kind of, pour out an amazing drawing of a whole city without even getting up from your chair, like [unclear] or people like that who can conceptualise something that we know in a different way, challenge the paradigm, change the typology through this conceptualising. I think this will remain and the thing that museums do at its best is keep things that remind us of these changes.

So, now to the things that are changing. I think one of the things; when I trained in industrial design in the late 80s, and worked in a kind of, contract office furniture, talking a lot with engineers during the 90s, always, you have an idea and then talk about how thick it will be, for months. This profile, this is it, you know, people touch it, this is the whole experience. We were taught, in industrial design, you are between the industry and the user, you must protect the user; that was the position of industrial design at that point. Since then - and just one more thing - from that time it still holds the ethos of the Eames statement that the designer is the perfect host; that was still, in the 80s, was still very strong.

I think, slowly - and this is the brand and this is the thing that' s happening with - to an extent that I can - the very ridiculous extent with the limited editions, which are really limited - is that the designers become the guest. From host, you become the guest, and this is kind of wearing off; this just isn' t leaving sometimes. And it' s time for the designer to be a bit more aware of what they bring onto the table and, therefore, the idea of the catalyst is something that' s always been there, but it' s also, I think, the way that a lot of young designers want to see themselves; as being able to be in the right place and, as soon as possible, within a process, to be that catalyst. To be involved in setting the brief, to be involved at that very important stage where things are started, because the influence of the brief on the result is immense.

I think, in terms of teaching, I' ve been involved in various types of teaching, and for me, one of the most important elements is the combination between the content of the brief and the way it' s presented. And this is the thing that in industry is beginning to be what, again, is called this design thinking element; trying to understand what designers do when they are presented with a brief, this kind of goal. Shifting the goalposts or re-writing the brief, this was part of the ethos of the celebrity as well, kind of, ' can you make me adore it?' , ' no' . But this is what you need, this kind of ethos of changing the brief and still succeeding. That was the greatest achievement I think.

Now the greatest achievement, I hope, will be more and more being able to set the brief together with the clients to be more ambitious and to really be about bringing in the change that fits, not just the change that demonstrates your creativity. So the catalyst is always part of the… comes from the idea of the two components; cannot function alone. The process cannot happen without this type of work, and I think in that sense, what it means for museums is that the criteria for what is shown and how that solution was reached is just as important as the solution.

Jane Pavitt: Our final provocateur of the evening is Kevin, Kevin McCullagh, who is director of the product strategy consultancy plan, and formerly a director of Foresight at Seymour Powell. His clients have included Ford, HP, Nokia, Orange, and so on. He' s a regular writer and broadcaster and speaker on design technology in society as well. Oh, and he' s written about the design synthesiser.

Kevin McCullagh: Which might be the same as catalyst? Hi, everyone. Okay, so this, I think this debate has been framed and between two polar opposites; kind of on one side the humble facilitator of co-creation, mass collaboration, collective innovation, or collovation as I heard it called recently; and on the other side the genius, the individual genius, the creative genius. And I think if I' m going to be provocative, I' m going to have to say a plague on both your houses. I' m not going to buy into that for a few minutes anyway. And I say that from a kind of some familiarity with both perspectives that back in the 80s when I was at college I secretly saw myself as a budding Philip Stark who dreamed of having his kind of aesthetic tour de forces published in double page spreads in Blueprint. And that was very 80s of me really. And then in the 90s, you know, left college, recession, but wised up about the complex ways of the world, and I got very much into situating design in context, so understanding the social, economic, technological, cultural drivers of design. And hell, I even taught a course on it for a while. But in practice, that basically meant working on design and understanding perspectives of, and the language of, engineers, marketeers, product planners, and what have you.

Moving on to the noughties in a more sort of strategic context, more stakeholders enter the tent, so it' s now the brand guardian agency, the user, the consumer; they' re all invited into the tent. So gradually, basically, the workshop' s got bigger. More and more people are in the workshop. Workshops went from afternoons to two or three days, and it all got a little bit dispiriting to be honest, because the bigger the workshops got, the longer the process got, the more people entered the tent and learnt the lingo of innovation, the less innovative the design got, and the actual outputs became more and more generic and need-to and soulless. And then I also kind of had a revelation a few years ago where I realised I was missing the point. The quality of the design was no longer the main objective. The primary objective was engagement; it was engaging the public, it was engaging the different silos of the company. It was all about… the process was the end in itself, everyone feeling good about being involved and all the rest of it. And meanwhile, the actual end products were becoming more and more insipid.

So to kind of sum up on these two poles, I think the individual genius is a myth. Design… apart from if you' re talking about pots of chairs, I think in general, design is, and for a long time, has been a collaborative process. It' s a social collaborative process. But then if you talk about everyone being invited to the tent, and design is just one equal partner with the consumer and the logistics manager, or whoever else has been invited to the workshop, I think that' s just plain disingenuous, because design talent is distributed very unevenly. Most people are crap at design, including lots of people with design degrees I have to say. But basically, we need to probably define our terms a little bit because, of course, we' re all designers. Everything to misquote Goethe, everything that is not nature is design. Designing purposefully, planning and solving problems is what makes achievement. But pension plans are designed, scientific experiments are designed, so I don' t think that' s what we' re going to talk about. I think what we' re here to talk about is design in a visual cultural context that I think I' m paraphrasing Chris Frayling and Ron Arad here, but it works for me. So I think that' s what we' re talking about, and I think before people start mentioning Linux or Wikipedia, software design is different. It can' t be scaled out to the design we’ re talking about, and so I think individual talent has still got a very, very important part to play.

Now just to be a bit more measured for a second, I think that there is… there are obviously many futures for design, and I think there' s a very bright future for the star egos. There' s kind of a whole niche market opened up on the back of the art boom for those one-off pieces that sell through galleries and will only ever be seen once they' re sold in the gallery in penthouse apartments, and I think that' s probably a very valid part of design for the V& A to track, because people can' t buy that kind of stuff in department stores, or Scandia, or what have you.

So there' s a bright future there, and because design is now a top table issue, both in business and in the public sector, lots of people want to be involved, and there' s going to be plenty of work for the facilitators as well. So I think there' s money on both ends of the spectrum. I' m just going to get to the part of the spectrum that I' m interested in now which I' m going to call designer as synthesiser with attitude. And basically, just to give you an idea about where I' m coming from, I' m with a strategy agency and work very much for the private sector, so there' s obviously a part of the design world that I' m interested in. But what these private sector clients are increasingly asking us to do is basically take quite a lot of the spectrum in so that they' re asking us to definitely be multi-disciplinary, definitely understand what the engineers are saying, what the market segmentation is, what the consumer insights are, and very much respect the process, take part in a process. But they' re also expecting us to be really bothered about the aesthetic sensibilities, aesthetic craft, and having a very, very strong point of view. So they come to us as a point of synthesis if you like, and I think that' s kind of what was being talked about earlier with the catalyst.

And I think just to situate that in a wider discussion, I' ll give a plug to a book that was my favourite from last year which was Howard Gardiner' s Five Minds of the Future, and he basically argues that there are certain types of intelligence that are going to become more of a premium in the future, and other sorts of intelligence will be less important. So, for example, he talks about information recall was an important skill in the past, when you' ve got 24/7 access to Google, less important. But because you' ve got access to so much information, we need to filter it, make sense of it, synthesise it, it becomes more important, so the synthesising mind is one of his five minds for the future. So I guess what I' m kind of putting forward as one vision of a design of the future is a kind of synthesising design strategist who can knit together lots of different threads into a coherent whole whilst still staying in touch with the human behavioural elements, the sensitive experiential elements and the aesthetic craft if you like. So I' ve done my best to be provocative, but I' m basically falling somewhere in the middle, and I' m not quite sure what it means to what the V& A puts in its glass cabinets either.

Jane Pavitt: Thank you, Kevin.