The changing agenda of design challenges

Last week saw the first ever entry of an OU student to the Royal Society of Arts Student Design Awards. This prestigious competition has been run by the RSA since 1924, originally created to ‘support talented young craftsmen and designers in producing well-made items for British homes’. Its launch was in the context of the early years of the 20^th century which were a time of design reform. The ideas promoted by, among others, the Bauhaus movement in Germany, led (self appointed) custodians of taste to question the integrity and aesthetics of mass manufactured goods and buildings. Their belief was that good design should not distinguish between form and function and artefacts should not pretend to be something they are not. A report from the Council of Industrial Design (COID) on their Scottish Design Congress (Maynard A. 1954) expresses in layperson’s terms some of the issues, which led to the setting up of the COID in 1944, the emphases are all original.

“If at almost any time in the street, in a shop, in a hotel and yes, sometimes in a room in which we are sitting, we stop and look with a fresh and critical eye at what surrounds us we are apt to get a shock. As Sir Colin Anderson* said with reference particularly to the typical street scene: “We will suddenly face the alarming fact that every one of these things has been designed by somebody, designed on purpose, DESIGNED JUST LIKE THAT by someone who was presumably doing his best. It is a fearsome thought, in fact almost an incredible one. It is extraordinary, too, how much ugliness we all take for granted, just as if it were unavoidable. Frankly, we are all hardened to ugliness and there is room for a great popular movement towards a feeling for good design; a feeling which would bring about active criticism of errors and aesthetic in public places”

More than 60 years on from that statement, designers of all kinds shape the aesthetics of our world. Though these aesthetics are still hotly debated, we are now aware of a different kind of ugliness, that of unsustainable design. The pressing concern of our age must be to question the social good and environmental sustainability of the thousands of design decisions that are made every day. The contemporary RSA Student Design Awards address these issues by challenging design students to propose solutions to real and important social, environmental and economic issues. These are big problems, ones that are not easily solved by designing a new product or even a new service or system, though through the competition, some ingenious ideas emerge. Perhaps more importantly though, in addressing the challenges, the upcoming generation of designers are provoked into thinking about the wider contexts and needs of the society they serve. The RSA Student Design Awards competition is a venerable institution and one which the OU can now say it is proud to take part in.

A page from “The Value of Good Design” showing state of the art design, the caption on the fire place gives an insight into the design community’s attitudes towards popular taste.

* Sir Colin Anderson was a ship-owner and patron of the arts who championed the notion of ‘fitness for purpose’ and modern interior design in the Orient shipping fleet.

Reference

Alistair Maynard (1954) The Value of Good Design A report on the Scottish Design Congress, Edinburgh, 1954, The Council of Industrial Design Scottish Committee, Glasgow.