As well as being The Observer’s architecture and design correspondent, he is a consultant and author.

Christine Joos In your article in the Observer few months ago you compared pre- and post credit crunch design choices and I was wondering in what other ways you expect consumerism and lifestyle might change now?

Stephen Bayley Personally speaking I have always disliked excess, but I think the current economic circumstances force everybody to understand that excess is not just vulgar, it’s also stupid and wasteful. I think all the old arguments about design are not so relevant any more, I think the current economic circumstances probably will force people back into realising the value of making things and almost like the values of John Ruskin and William Morris.
I don’t mean antiquarianism but I mean it is going to be economically, socially and culturally necessary just to make things, that are no longer abstractions, no longer luxury goods.

CJ It’s more about quality than quantity then?

SB Absolutely.

CJ But I think William Morris, wasn’t it so at that time that only rich people could afford actually what they made?

SB Yes, there is a terrible paradox in William Morris. He was a great idealist, an almost wholly admirable person. The paradox is that the things he made turned out to be very expensive, not very democratic. The achievements of modern design in the 20th century were remarkable. Democratising luxury and giving everyday objects aesthetic value, that’s marvellous, but I think, all the old assumptions have gone. It always seems to me design was one of the great organising principles of the 20th century, you know when skilled individuals applied their arts and intelligence and taste and ingenuity to great industries. I think that’s sort of gone now. Design is now everywhere. I am always meditating about the Design Museum, which you perhaps know I was responsible for making. We started thinking about this 30 years ago, long before e-mail and the internet and in those days design represented a specialist expertise and we needed to make a museum about design, because it was not properly understood. Now it’s everywhere and you don’t know what you need a design museum for.

CJ You joined Sidhu & Simons a PR agency promoting luxury brands, automotive, Formula1. How are these brand strategies going to change now?

SB I don’t know how brand strategies are going to change, that is up to the individual company. These are very big questions. I mean once competitive advantage came from having expertise in manufacturing or having technology, which your competitors didn’t have. But now, everybody has got access to the same technology. It has become flat; there is no competition in technology in the developed world. So compared the advantage comes from, I don’t like the word brand, but it comes from those mystical attributes.
For instance, Volkswagen Group is merging now with Porsche. Porsche is taking over Volkswagen. And what’s going to happen is instead of having ten different manufacturing units -they’ve got Volkswagen, they’ve got Audi, Seat in Italy. There will be now one factory but they will keep the brands. The designers just have to think about, what is the essence, what is the essential thing. All these machines will have the same components. The whole Volkswagen Group is going to be just a brand operation and eventually they will probably shift the manufacturing to China or India, so it won’t say ‘Made in Germany’, it will say something like ‘Designed by Volkswagen’.

CJ And then, the quality, is it going to be losing?

SB The problem is that what made Volkswagen great in the first place was the fact that it was made by Germans, it was made methodical, it was very reliable and it represented Dr. Porsche’s design theory. But when you separate brand from manufacturing I think you get into all sorts of philosophical difficulties. I mean you can do it for a few years, but in twenty years time when Volkswagen has lost touch with the original Porsche philosophy.

CJ It’s all going to be air then.

SB Exactly. Karl Marx said that all that was solid melts into air.

CJ And how about corporate brands like Coca Cola and Sony… is there going to be a change or is it going to go on as before?

SB I think this is a very strange moment in history. I am not anti-progress but I think the idea of progress, novelty and newness it’s not so relevant as it used to be. People are more concerned with quality. They want to have better stuff and less of it. No one is anticipating any radical innovations in technology or materials. Do you know about the theory by Nikolai Kondratiev, a Soviet economist. He had a theory that all business, social, cultural, artistic activity is on long sinusoidal waves of about fifty years. And the creativity and activity are on a fifty years cycle and it is always stimulated by new energy sources to you have coal, electricity, nuclear. It’s mysticism rather than science but it’s probably true. I think Kondratiev is generally speaking correct. We are now entering a completely new phase. The old phase which began at the end of the Second World War and lead to globalized products, the global design phenomenon, global fashion. That phase is now coming to an end. The problem with the finance and the banks, that’s not the cause, that’s the effect of the great changes; we are just going to reinvent…

CJ And how can we reinvent us, redesign us? What shall we do now?

SB Design is not going to help at all. That is the truth. I don’t say, there is no work for designers to do, but I think the idea that design is going to change the world is one of the great, I don’t want to say it’s a fiction, but it was a very persuasive theory of the 20th century.
Of course I believe we need more beautiful, useful objects, of course I do. But I think the idea that designers move into the manufacturing industry and change the destiny of corporations, I think that was a valid and true idea for a large part of the 20th century, but it’s no longer plausible. You know, designers are not going to walk into Volkswagen Group and change a thing any more.

CJ But design can visualize changes, because if you look at –it’s maybe hard, but– for example in the third reich the graphic design identity of Hitler was kind of a really strong identity.

SB I am writing about that this afternoon. I am writing an article for Ferrari magazine about the importance of branding.

…

I disliked the idea of branding. I am not saying it does not exist, it is obviously a real phenomenon, but the interesting thing is that my own motivation has always been to try to teach people to appreciate quality which goes beyond the superficial. I mean, branding issues are very badly misunderstood; people often say that BMW is a great brand, well, it is a great, it has become a great brand, but it’s only become a great brand, because they have made great products, consistently, with absolute consistency. And they had great advertising, super graphics and everything. They weren’t sitting around in München in 1990 and saying: ‘Hey guys, let’s create a brand’. They sat there and said: ‘We are going to make a certain kind of motor bike, a certain sort of car and we won’t make trucks, we won’t make busses, we just do…and they did it with absolute … you know that’s how great brands evolve. What I am trying to say is that Tom Ford is a really clever guy and deserves his success, but I don’t think in a hundred year’s time anybody will be talking about Tom Ford, but they will probably still be talking about BMW. The whole thing about branding is like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that as soon as you investigate atomic particles, they change their behaviour, so you could never understand how atomic particles actually behave, because even looking at them changes their way…I think it is the same with branding: as soon as you get self conscious about it, it changes.

CJ Some of them are positive brands, but some are aggressive, brands like Starbucks can be kind of annoying because they are everywhere and make a city look like the other.

SB Absolutely. Well, I think we come to the end of that now, I hope so. It’s what’s going to happen next in architecture. You know, I am not an antiquarian, far from it, I am passionate about the future, but I think the idea of celebrity architects like Rem Koolhaas, we will have generic cities, please, God, no! You know I want Hamburg to be different to Seville. The big challenge for architects now is to make buildings which are contemporary but also respond to local character…

CJ …to the context?

SB Yes. They have to respond to the context but without copying the past. That’s the big challenge. That’s why the big debate today between the Prince of Wales and Richard Rogers, which I wrote about in Sunday’s Observer. I think it’s fascinating, because I think Prince Charles it wrong, but I also think Richard Rogers is wrong. I am not talking about compromise. Richard Rogers is a great man. He is a major figure and very admirable, but who wrote the rule, that modern buildings have to be hard edged, aggressive and constantly challenging? Sometimes they can be and that is fine. Why can’t modern building also be gentle and friendly? The current architecture debate is so annoying because it just forces people to extremes. You have Prince Charles at one end, who just wants everything to look as if it was made three hundred years ago and you have Richard Rogers who just wants everything to look like a factory. They are both wrong, but Rogers is less wrong than Prince Charles, because the thing with Richard Rogers is that he has got huge talent. But there is good optimism in what Richard Rogers says and does even when the execution is wrong, but with Prince Charles, there is no optimism at all, it’s very defeatist, very negative and therefore bad.

CJ Maybe these times can stimulate design?

SB Well, constraint is always stimulating for creativity. I wasn’t going to talk down design, I spent my living being involved in design. I think, if you like, the business model is going to change, as I said in the 20th century we just had an idea that you were big corporate designer or you were a big design consultant, like Raymond Loewy was the model for the that. It does not happen like that any more. Everybody now understands that things should be well designed, you know there is more and more work for designers, but I don’t think it’s going to happen through big consultancies, you know, again, it could be individuals doing precious work on a smaller scale.
I am pro-technology, I am pro-industry, but I think the idea of global products is a very, very dated one. I think major things are going to change in the future like travel: people will travel much, much less.

CJ Why?

SB Travelling is horrible.

CJ Maybe it’s going to be made more convenient?

SB I think it’s going to get even worse. It used to be that travel was a romantic privilege, an adventure.

CJ Flying especially…

SB Yes –it used to be. I remember when flying somewhere was fabulous. They treated you as if you were a princess and they were pleased to see you and there was never any delay and now it’s horrible. No matter what end of the airplane you go on, it’s horrible, utterly horrible. And what is the point? I used to go to Sweden quite a lot and I went to Stockholm again for the first time in years and years and years recently, it’s a lovely city. When I first went to Stockholm thirty year ago there were real Swedish shops, there were real furniture makers making stuff in the center of Stockholm –wonderful. No you go to Stockholm and you see Calvin Klein, you see Prada, Louis Vuitton. What’s the point? Everywhere it becomes the same. What’s the point of going somewhere? Particularly if you live in London, which has got everything apart from the sunshine and mountains? Everything in the world is available in London. So why would I go to Stockholm where the food is worse, the shops are the same.
London has got the best food in the world now. When I was in Paris last week, I visited my daughter and I love Paris, but it is terribly difficult to eat well in Paris. Food is one of my real passions. Everybody interested in architecture an design is always interested in food. The ideas occupy the same parts of the brain. Function, nutrition, it’s about style and taste, deliciousness, has to look good and work well. It’s the same thing.

CJ Do you know about the Slow Down London Festival? It is connected with the Slow Movement?

SB I know Carlo Petrini who founded the Slow Food Movement. Petrini is great. He says there are only two things necessary for the progress of humanity: that is food and sex and each is best done slowly. You know, I love machines, cars and airplanes, but we don’t need to travel any more, we don’t need to be so quickly.

CJ Now you can purchase those little houses you can place in you garden and work there (http://www.officepod.co.uk/) and I think that is kind of solution to many things, because you could just do home office very often.

SB Yes, absolutely. I think that is the way of the future. You know when I was a child, my father bought a nice car and in those days you would get a car and actually use it, use the dar to drive somewhere and it was a rational way of making a journey and often a very pleasant one, but now? Not just in London, anywhere, in New York, Paris, wherever, you can’t use it. Why would you choose to drive anywhere? Again, check on Kondratiev’s waves: so much of the last super cycle was based on ideas of travel, speed, change, novelty, demand. I think the American thing of the middle of the 20th century is marvelous. I love mid-century America, but that idea that you can improve life by continuously consuming more goods is wrong. It is a very beautiful idea, the idea that your life could be made perfect if you bought a new fridge.

CJ We now know it’s not true.

SB It was a beautiful idea, but it’s over.

CJ I mean definitely people need some things and it’s nice to consume.

SB Of course it is. I am not a puritan. But pleasure is more intense when it’s disciplined. Yes, everybody want’s a fridge, but what we don’t want is a new fridge every year. We want a really seriously well made, well designed fridge which will last for thirty years.

CJ Products are conceptualized so that they are not repairable. it is expected that you throw things away if they are broken and buy new things. But that’s maybe something that could change, because how annoying is it, if you constantly have to research on new products, buy them and then read the manual and things like that.

SB You are absolutely right on the manuals: it’s not a pleasure any more. Pleasure is very important. Design is partly about what Freud called the pleasure principle.
I am glad to say my beautiful pen and my beautiful watch will last forever and I don’t need a manual.

CJ Thank you very much for this interview.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/past_exhns/beauty/bayley/index.html

You want to be part of Change and want to make things yourselves?
No problem – Participate!  is a series of Happenings organised by Novinow, taking place from 21st to 26thh June 2009 during the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design Graphic Design Degree Show. These Happenings shall bring together people from various backgrounds for an interdisciplinary discussion of Change, to have fun, to make things and change our environment. They are connected to the topics you can read about in this booklet. See you there.

New Old T-Shirts

Sun 21st June / 12:00 – 14:00
You find your T-Shirt boring or don’t like that print any more? You leave it sadly lying around and think about abandoning it?
Don’t! Revamp your good old T-Shirt: Bring it in and get a new print on it.

Designer Patches

Sun 21st June / 15:00 – 17:00
Support the idea of sustainable clothing by proudly wearing your self designed patches! Come in and find out how to make them.

We Make Seedbombs!

Mo 22nd June / 17:00 – 19:00
Have you seen one of those sad empty lots or neglected places in you neighbourhood which need a flowery make over?
Pop by, make some seed bombs and change your environment!

Newspaper Scrapbooks

Tue 23rd June / 12:00 – 14:00
You find your T-Shirt boring or don’t like that print any more? You leave it sadly lying around and think about abandoning it?
Don’t! Revamp your good old T-Shirt: Bring it in and get a new print on it.

Super Slow Tea

Tue 23rd June / 15:00 – 17:00
If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! The need for nearness and care, and for a little love!
This is given only through slowness in human relations.
Fans of the Slow Movement believe it is better to do things well rather than as fast as possible and that life is much more enjoyable without constant rushing.
To celebrate the Slow Movement come to the Super Slow Tea.Drinking tea is important. In war or peace, the British have always relied on a nice cup tea and a sit down. Have a nice cup of tea, sit down, read a bit or have a chat. It’ll make a difference, you’ll see!

Dont miss it and sign up in the Contact section, so you will always be topped up with the freshest news from Novinow!

Schedule

Sun 21st June / 12:00 – 14:00 New Old T-Shirts
Sun 21st June / 15:00 – 17:00 Designer Patches
Mo 22nd June / 17:00 – 19:00 Seed Bombs
Tue 23rd June / 12:00 – 14 :00 News Scrap Books
Tue 23rd June / 15:00 – 17:00 Super Slow Tea

Location

Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse
Bargehouse Street
London SE1 9PH

Interaction Design Space
1st floor

Ken Garland is the author of the First Things First Manifesto of 1964. It rallied against the consumerist culture that was purely concerned with buying and selling things and tried to highlight a humanist dimension to graphic design theory.

For NOVINOW he answered the following two questions:

1. In which way do you think the current economic crisis will change our values and our society and do you think (or hope) such changes will be enduring?

I can only answer for myself; I do not attempt to be a spokesman for any group or tendency. That said, I must tell you that none of what has happened during the last year has altered my views in any way. I always thought the greedy, conscientiousless assholes in the money markets, who contributed absolutely nothing to our real wealth, our well-being and our feeling of self-worth, would drop us in the shit; and they have. So I just feel as I always have, only more so. capitalism has shown itself to be an ugly mockery, unfit for decent people. the only possibility for effective change is socialism.

2. Which role does design play in this context and how will such changes be portrayed and might there be new forms or directions in design?

Design, whatever that is, can only play a supportive role in making effective changes. first, we dump the pathetic fools who have messed up our lives; then we find those among us who can advance some sensible political proposals; then we vote them into power; then we offer our particular skills for the remaking of our social structures. any new forms must come out of social needs, not self-regarding posturings of designers who cant think beyond their own inflated egos.

One would probably be right in assuming that one or two years ago most people’s economic knowledge might have hardly been sufficient to explain terms like inflation, base rate and recession.

But since credit started to crunch we have to cope with a flood of magic words like sub-prime mortgages, short selling, troubled assets and their relief, credit default swaps, toxic debts,  just to name some of them. We are following evening shows about economic theory and the latest gossip on whether the recession might be L-, V-, U- or W-shaped.

Aren’t we starving for some (quantitative) easing from the flood of the purest of financial reality to leave it back to the well paid professionals even though we don’t understand the compensation they receive for dealing with such dry matters? Or do we actually enjoy the insight into a world we never thought about, but which seems to be essential to keep the economy ticking? Do we enjoy or disgust our new soberness? Or did we loose faith, because we feel no-one knows what he’s doing and it’s all a big hocus-pocus?

Make it yours before it dies! It turns out that running a pub is a tough business in times of economic downturn, smoking ban, cheap supermarket booze and all the rest of it. But it also turns out that local communities don’t care about the number crunching. And with 40 or so pubs closing every week, locals are determined to fight back to preserve their regular hang-out. They gather together in community companies to buy their pub and run it themselves. All over the country, locals take over not only their pubs, but also post offices, petrol stations and shops.
Do you think there is hope that individuality in businesses is on the rise? Could more and more places be able to escape from the big multinationals and their global marketing concepts which make so many places look and feel the same?

Read more at:

www.guardian.co.uk

www.dorsetecho.co.uk

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk

news.scotsman.com

A recession is the perfect time to escape the vicious circle of speed which took over our lives, proclaim the ‘Slow Movement’ gurus. The Slow Revolution drips into all areas of live and there is talk about Slow Food, Slow Living, Slow Travel and Slow Sex. Their philosophy is very plausible: In modern live we are cramming as much as possible into every minute and race through live at the cost of health, relationships and the environment. But slowing down in awareness of the preciousness of every minute of our limited lifetime can help us to make our lives more enjoyable and sustainable.

Philosopher Guttorm Floistad summarizes the relation of Change and Slowness, stating:
“The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.”

Journalist, editor and poet Harry Eyres, who writes the Financial Times Slow Lane column, (find the full interview here) told me he believed that it will be very interesting to see whether more people turned to a slower lifestyle in the near future; a reason might be that money, which is the actual driver for many peoples restless lives, all of a sudden appeared not to be as solid as we always reckoned it was.
Rising awareness for Slowness led to the London Slow Down Festival. Curious about the subject I decided to join the Slow Walk, which was only one of the events during such festival.

On Friday, 24th April at around 5pm a group of around 80 people gathered together at the Victoria Embankment near Waterloo Bridge holding signboards, showing a yellow hand with a smiling face, saying Slow Down London, chatting and waiting for the first event of the first Slow Down London to start: A very slow stroll over Waterloo Bridge during rush hour.

Then the crowd started to move. When we reached the bridge it appear to me, that this would be far from a relaxed stroll: the participants of the slow walk where in a visibly good mood, slowly moving forward, whereas a bunch of reporters hastily ran around them with cameras, voice recorders, microphones and other heavy equipment. I hoped they would not come up to me because I did not feel like speaking in front of a camera and had been looking forward to a relaxing walk as the weather that day could not have been nicer: mild, beautiful warm and sunny. Also, as I am normally walking rather quickly I found it rather challenging to go now forward with the speed which would make it difficult to overtake a snail.

I took some pictures of the people and started to chat with the woman walking next to me. She told me she had helped organizing the walk and showed me how to do walking meditation. Then she kind of slowly rushed off to another part of the crowd where she intended to show how to really walk slowly instead of walking fast, standing and waiting a bit and then walking fast again for a bit, as some participants seemed to handle it.

Read more at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/24/ethicalliving.creditcrunch

Partisans, arm yourself with blades, seedbombs, crops and freshwater! You might join your local cell which has hatched the plan for the night. Or you might operate individually. Its easy: You grab one of those ugly spots of neglected land, crying out to be primped up by locals who care about their surrounding. Guerrilla Gardening is on the rise and the community is well organized.

On guerrillagardening.org combatants find all the right contacts and everything else they need for their battle to spread natural beauty into the concrete desert which is surrounding us. Be it gaps in public flowerbeds or spots of soil on roundabouts, footpaths and streets, there will always be a potential guerrilla gardener around who might exercise civil disobedience and plant all sort of colourful flowers. Guerrila gardening cells are gathering together on disused commercial areas and plant their veggies and flowers. Where access is hard to get, the guerrilleros even use seedbombs to spread fertility.

Do you support the idea of Guerilla Gardening?
Do you want to share your experiences as a Guerilla Gardener? You can send us your pictures to info@novinow.net.

For further information: www.guerrillagardening.org

Credit crunch and no money for designer clothes?
Wear designer patches instead!

Selling, buying and mending used clothes is not only more sustainable than buying new clothes and throwing it away after a while. It is certainly much more creative and individual.

Support the idea of sustainable clothing by proudly wearing these elbow patches!

The quotation marks on the patches frame the wearer like a statement.

To order a pair of hand screen printed designer patches for £7 plus porto use the form here.

Fancy creating your own patches?

Come to the Novinow Patches Event at the Central Saint Martins BA Graphic Design Degree Show 2009 London.

Check out the Participate! Events Schedule for times and location here.

‚Eat the rich’ and ‚Burn a banker’ are some of the slogans recently heard which symbolize the current public anger. Bank employees needed to turn up at work in jeans and unshaved to avoid getting lynched by an angry mob of anti G20 protesters. So-called ‘smug-bag millionaires’, who were speculating with other people’s money seem to get away with large pay-offs and bonuses despite their failure and the tax payer having to pick up the bill. Such appreciation seems to be public consensus and polls suggest that most people request banker’s pay should be cut. Politicians proved successful in a crack-down on tax heavens where the wealthy hide fortunes from the fiscus.

But where is the public opinion going? Do we appreciate the benefits which modern finance has brought to the economy over the last decade and do we just request some sort of shared responsibility with regards to the risks and rewards from its managers? Or do we go further and feel disgust for a whole industry? Or might we get grumpy with all the rich, as people did in previous recessions? Will we soon include sport stars, entertainers and entrepreneurs on our list of hated rich people?

Have your say.

Read more at:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13405314
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13356676

Prohibition on narcotics celebrated its hundredth birthday recently. What did it achieve? Gangsterism flourishes on all levels of an illegal industry worth around $320 billion a year. Imagine the massive costs of combat against all drug related crime. Look at emerging countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan which are in the tough grip of the drug cartels. Despite all such consequences drug consumption did not fall.

The Economist believes the 100-year struggle was not only pointless but also illiberal and murderous. The paper questions why we transformed the issue from a public-health problem into a law-and-order problem and suggests to legalise a regulated and taxed drug trade. Tax proceeds could then be used for education about the risks of drug taking and to treat addiction.
If you dont take illegal drugs, then ask yourself: Would you do so, if it wasnt forbidden? The answer is probably: No.

Do you think we should stick with prohibition as there is still a theoretical chance that it prevents us and our children from taking drugs? Or are you prepared to trade off such chance of prevention through prohibition against the one of massive crime reduction? Or do you think it’s acually prohibition which makes drugs interesting in the first place, and so has an opposite effect? Do you think education can achieve even more than prohibition?

Have your say.

Read more at:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13237193
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7166748.stm