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Membership of the international advisory board for Premsela’s Designworld project gives me privileged insight into the country that is the envy of all others for its use of design. For a thorough and spirited essay on this subject, enjoy at Michael Rock’s “Mad Dutch Disease/I heart NL” lecture given at Premsela in 2004. At Tuesday’s meeting in Amsterdam Zuid, where Premsela occupies a mid-20th century monastery, we were asked to help define their proper ambitions to Internationalisation and Globalisation, carefully distinct.

At first I was tempted to say that Holland’s international reputation is a bit like Britain’s - fuelled by the star status of individual practitioners, rather than the whole-culture reputation of, say, Japan or France or Italy or Germany. Then our thoughtful convener, Tim Vermeulen (himself Belgian) mentioned how marvelously and peerlessly simple the Dutch self-assessment tax form is. This is interesting, I thought; now we’re on to something. The reason you have Hella Jongerius and Marcel Wanders and Juergen Bey is no more worthwhile to deliberate – and as over-deliberated – as the reason we have our own assorted design virtuosi and celebrities. But  the reason you have the world’s most usable self-assessment tax form is yours alone I want to know why.

The reason we have the world’s best underground transport map is Harry Beck. Well, ok, Harry Beck plus Edward Johnston and Frank Pick and London Transport,  mutually supporting for a decent innings. But the singulr genius of the original, by BRS Premsela Vonk (later Eden Design) in 1988, is not an adequate answer to the Netherlands tax form question. What is the design code that penetrates so deeply that designers and citizens feel it and that withstands the modifications of successors? Harking back to an early Design & Society post, what gives the Netherlands its powerful design nerve?

The other nice idea I noted was that design is the guardian of “human size” in a world globalised by economic integration. I predict Premsela will be majoring on this, and will do it well.

As little as a year ago it seemed that in-house design teams, in both the public and private sector, had practically vanished. So had senior civic roles in design: Leeds City Council was often named as the last remaining local authority to employ a Civic Architect. With a handful of notable exceptions – Apple and The Guardian, for example – it seemed to have become conventional for organisations to buy design services in from outside consultancies.

Last month the Design Council reported a 10% growth in in-house design teams since 2005, while also, quite suddenly, we are witnessing a growing trend for “embedding” design within the structure of public and private sector organisations. This means that anything from a private telecommunications provider to a local authority housing department, which might previously have subcontracted discrete design tasks, might now have designers on staff. Rather than apply their discipline narrowly to specific issues and projects arising – to corporate publications or product development, for example – these new recruits are usually paid to have a holistic view of the organisation; to apply so-called “design-thinking” to its whole structure and all its functions. In many cases, the designers’ role is described quite elusively as “service design” or as a source of unspecified but strategic problem-solving capability.

 While many designers will cheer at this new recognition of their deep strategic value, the dislocation of design from patently designed things – from publications, presentations, products and so on – does make design hard to explain.

Is embedded or holistic service design new, or a new name for something that designers have always done for organisations? Along with embedded anthropology and artists-in-residence it is fashionable, but has the interest in embedding design happened for specific social, political or economic reasons? If it has, what are they? How likely is it to stay with us as the wind changes?

In practical terms, what is the job description for an in-house designer with a holistic brief? How does an organisation intent on embedding design go about recruiting designers? How is the effectiveness of staff designers paid for their holistic view to be measured? How does the design of services, structures and strategy respond to cost-benefit analysis? How is the language barrier between designers and other specialists to be overcome? How are creativity and innovation to be managed within large and often cautious or risk-averse organisations?

 RSA Design & Society has organised a small, expert seminar to discuss all of this in a couple of weeks, conceived with the National Policing Improvement Agency as part of their bold investigation into the best strategic uses of design by organisations seeking improvement and innovation.

We’ve got Lynne Maher from the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement on the language issue; Tony Coultas of Skills Development Scotland and Ben Reason of live/work doing point-and-counterpoint on the virtues of in-house teams and external consultancy; Lucy Kimbell from the Said Business School at Oxford drawing analogies with artists-in-residence; and Simon Roberts of Intel and the Ideas Bazaar on embedded anthropology and social science.

Look out for the transcript of what looks to be a fascinating conversation, dowloadable from the Design & Society pages of the RSA website at the end of May.

“How did it get so hairshirty?” asked my friend Sorrel last week, reflecting on the evolution of design since she took leave of it to run Frieze Projects in 2007.  How indeed? I proffered a combination of yearning for austerity brought about by credit crisis and glutted consumption, and fear of the earth burning up.

The thinktank on “emergent design” organised in Cornwall by Dott and UC Falmouth had its hairshirtiness, although the accomodation was deluxe. It began with an elegant discourse by Nabeel Hamdi on how design and architecture are to address a bigger strategic agenda than is conventionally encompassed by “practice”. He used an intriguing phrase, “the intelligence of informality”,  to describe the structures that naturally emerge in places to permit human processes, and a lovely quote: “I know what a house is, but what does it do?” It all helped to give a (briefly) palpable sense of what might  be meant by “emergent design”, the preoccupation of our confident and upbeat host, Dr Andrea Siodmok.   

I and about 30 others examined our consciences aloud about design education, research and practice in a 2-3 minute “soapbox” session.  Clive Grinyer of Cisco claimed that “design is not well-designed for it’s great new scope” and that we have a “looming crisis” in which we must “pull it into shape”. Ezio Manzini’s later observation that design is a “weak discipline” because its tools are ill-defined, echoed the irony Clive had nailed. Assuredly identifying a clear separation between “design-thining” (potentially practised by everyone) and “design-knoweldge” (which is practised by trained professionals), Manzini said this benign fissure appeared when creative responsibility began to be difused to a wider group than designers and architects.  The problem, he declared, is that “design knowledge” needs to be more like a toolkit, and furthermore that the purpose of design research is to create this toolkit. 

Manzini’s most frequenly quoted pearl of the day, dispensed in a discussion of design education, was that “there can be no interdisciplinarity without disciplines”. Having looked at a few hundred RSA student design award entries, mostly undergraduate, over the years as a jury member and programme insider, I felt great sympathy with this remark: it’s usually quite difficult to tell what the student’s discipline is, and sometimes it would help if the discipline – the tool in use, the “design knowledge” –  were more salient. But we ask them to do difficult things in which the pure display of design tools – encoureged by the old pedagogical categories of ceramics, graphics, fashion & textiles, and so on  - would go unrewarded. For the sake of argument and as Chair of the academic session, Jeremy Myerson offered the simple solution that undergraduates learn skills or tools, and post graduates apply them in a discursive and interdisciplinary fashion. Simple enough until you consider what the world has started to ask of designers.

A propos, Mat Hunter wittily described how the kind of “next generation toaster” challenge on which he cut his teeth in the 1980s has morphed into the “next generation experience, service, whatever…” as design-thinking became “everyone’s new best friend”. Generally I had been astonished at the confidence with which certain people in the think-tank weilded the phrase “design-thinking”, and his scepticism was comforting. His explanation of how “the act of selling design alters it” was especially thoughtful and well-expressed, and I agree that the much-vaunted “processes” and diagrams describing creative generation over-promise results. In his words, they “corrupt our understanding”, being simplistic. Among the five things Hunter confessed to worrying about were the role of craft and, again, “what’s in the new toolkit”.

It strikes me there’s an opportunity for design to draw from craft in these diffusive times in order to reclaim some definition. But I’m not just talking about designers re-asserting their craft credentials; I’m talking about moving from the inclusive, blurry, co-design notion to introducing more outsiders to the insider’s “design knowledge”. Less design-thinking, more actual design-craft. I think this is vastly difficult, but John Sorrell told me yesterday it’s amazing how quickly children get it when you engage them in a conversation about design.

As we went at it with 80-odd Cornwall designers in parallel sessions on service design, user-centred design and collaborative design, I found it hard to forget the opening words of UC Falmouth’s Deputy Rector, Geoff Smith, a musician and therefore an outsider, earlier in the day: “I admire the way you designers see design as a frame and methodology for every imaginable question. It’s a lovely conceit”.

On the evidence of last week’s events, business has entered a curious search for higher purpose, while craft is all higher purpose and no utility.

I arrived at the Design Council/Economists Big Rethink design summit on Thursday in time to hear Roberto Verganti’s thoughts on radical meaning. We know how to improve things using technology, he said, and everyone knows studying users will help design, but we don’t know how to improve meaning. Designers have become much less visionary in the last ten years, according to Verganti, because design has dwelt on processses, methods, tools, brainstorming and ethnography – growing closer in its language to business than to its origins in arts and crafts – none of which teaches you to discover meaning. Successful companies, he argues, get close to “interpreters”, not to users.

Who are they, I wonder? Novellists, curators, illustrators, art directors? It’s that storytelling imperative again. Two case studies followed; both qutie radical re-interpretations of meaning. Hugo Spowers of the Riversimple transport enterprise spoke about selling “miles travelled as a service, rather than cars as products”, and the winsome Californian Jeff Denby told the story of his integrated organic underwear/packaging/charitable giving/social networking enterprise PACT which ”put meaning where generally there was no meaning” – i.e. your underwear drawer; true enough.

Deadly presentations about Samsung and Microsoft confirmed that their entire meaning is to chase customers (try rendering the Microsoft logo as flower-petals), and Vijay Vaitheeswaran summed up the morning’s insight as ” Good design is alwasy human-centred design”. It struck me as quite hard to find examples of design that are not human-centred; performed, as it is, by humans for humans. More a question of degree I suppose – Albert Speer and Howard Roark being less “human-centred” than, say, Lord Rogers.

Paul Bennett of the design-thinking mothership IDEO opened the afternoon with a rousing presentation about meaning, underpinned by the creed of co-creation. I liked that his presentation was entirely typographic, but was driven to mean-spirited disdain by his portentous use of the full stop (”We need to reboot our values. Our choices. Our morality. Ourselves.) and the italic (”Managing your expectations”. “So what did we learn?”). The ensuing workshops, led by valiant IDEO colleagues, yielded insights in greater volume than quality, I would say. Verganti told me later he thinks that’s a feature of “idea-generation” techniques: you get a long list but not necessarily any pearls. My session on EDF Energy contrived a “higher purpose” in the French utility supplier partnering with people to produce energy (see below).

Since day two’s Innovation Master Class promised to “leave you with new means to innovate using design”, the principal speakers were asked for a final word; a practical tip, as it were. Richard Seymour urged “More anthropology; less technology”; David Kester said “Find new spaces to collaborate” and Bonnie Dean of Quantum Property Partnership’s less alluring advice was “Bring design-thinking in early”. Paul Bennett had spoken repeatedly of ”giving us things to do on Monday” but in the conversion of insight into “tools”, “means” and “things to do”, I think we’ve a long way to go.

Using my workshop session as an example, guided by the incisive Andrea Koestenbaum of IDEO, we discussed EDF’s Assets and Capabiltiies under the headline Now; the opportunities ahead under Now What?; the higher purpose that answered these opportunities under Higher Purpose; and, well, we didn’t really get around to the final section, How? See that’s the thing: I work for a think tank so there’s no shortage of higher purpose, but it doesn’t make the “how?” any easier. And anyway, a healthy skeptic in my group kept reminding us that energy was “just a commodity” and had no higher purpose.

The prevailing wind of participation, user engagement, co-production etc. – and not just in design – has saddled us with a great how? How exactly do you turn what “people” do and say and desire into ideas that have life; how do you make “people” have the ideas themselves? Since we published the thought that design can make everone more resourceful and self-reliant, we’re as implicated as anyone in calibrating the answer, and it’s not obvious.

I also attended the launch of the Crafts Council campaign Craft Matters. I do think craft matters a lot; certainly the haptic sense of schoolchildren should be nurtured as much as their visual and aural concentration skills, as Rosie Greenlees put it. But I’m always disappointed by the arguments, which all seem to be about supporting potters and weavers. I find myself wanting to elevate craft to a great spectrum of everything from handwriting to plumbing, with potting and weaving somewhere in the recherché middle, in the mode of Richard Sennett but perhaps in more accessible language. I fully concede that anyone making a living  from craft needs to be exemplary in flexibility and resourcefulness (although if they’re flexible and resourceful I wonder why they need so much support). If you linked the haptic sense of potters and weavers with the haptic sense of heating engineers and carpenters and sign-writers, you’d have a utility argument as well. Flexible, resourceful and occasionally useful – what’s not to like?

Three events last week made me feel better about not making sense. And I’m afraid this post won’t make much unless you read the last.

The 29th Design Leadership Forum, tirelessly convened by Alan Topalian since 2002, listened attentively to my reflections on leadership in our times, and, while acknowledging the challenge we have set ourselves with the aforementioned Design & Rehabilitation project, wrestled valiantly with what it could possibly mean in practical terms and gave me some good ideas. Seizing the opportunity to straw-poll, I asked the 30-or so assembled designers and design managers if they thought they, as designers, could be construed as resourceful. While all nodded vigourously, as I suppose they would, one offered a useful refinement of my conceit: “I think we’re comfortable with uncertainty”. Thank you, whoever you were.

I emerged less lucid, however, from the Central St Martins Textile Futures Research Group presentation on Metabolicity, a research project funded by Audi Design Foundation. To understand this sustainable-urban-food-growing-in-vertical-farms-of-high-tech-lace enterprise, it is first of all necessary to understand the concept of metadesign. First principle (of 10): “Metadesign can intervene creatively at the level of languaging”. Languaging? We have someone called Giaccardi, 2005, to thank for metadesign, which ”can be described as a shared design endeavour aimed at sustaining emergence, evolution and adaptation”. Humph.

Metabolicity, may I suggest you try that with the Spinal Injuries Association online community? A propos, I’m very happy to report that as of Monday my most witheringly scornful online interlocutor, codename Raybonda, has written me a thoughtful and conciliatory message and wished me luck with the project.

I’m torn between excitement at design’s newly palpable ability to mean more than cars and frocks and chairs, and the struggle to describe what, in its expanded state, it still is.  We are challenged to sustain definition for design today amidst the growing multidisciplinary compôte of service design, co-production, design-thinking and buzzing policy concepts like “nudge”. While the concept of design for industry would seem to limit the scope for designers to apply what they know to everything from synthetic biology to data processing and public services, to a de-materialised world with mysterious new terms and conditions, it is easy to lose a grip on what we mean by design.

I said last week that design as a verb was probably quite a challenging concept people who aren’t designers. I think the verb “to language“ is really pushing it.

According to the online community of the Spinal Injuries Association, not in the least. I posted a message on the SIA board asking for feedback on a proposal to trial design training for people with spinal-cord injuries. An attachment included the following text: 

“Design can help alleviate the dramatic loss of confidence and diminished motivation that often results from a sudden physical impairment. As a structured way of approaching problems, design can help to re-build confidence. The RSA is developing a new model of design-training for spinal-cord-injured people focused on the goals of self-reliance and creative resourcefulness. The project includes inspirational introductory design presentations at the specialist spinal units in the UK and Republic of Ireland and a residential design workshop for spinal-cord-injured people and carers”.

My post quickly provoked a number of quite scornful responses, from “I have no idea what you are proposing or going on about” to “can we have simple English please?” to a complaint that my attachment was “full of jargon”. This baffled me for a bit. I went through all my phrases – “loss of confidence”, “goal of self-reliance”, “creative resourcefulness”, “a structured way of approaching problems”, “inspirational introductory design presentation” – and although I concede that the total effect might be a bit blousy, none of them constituted jargon in itself.

I began to wonder if the problem was the very word “design”, so next I asked “What do you all think design is?” The first evasive reply was revealing: ”I know what my dictionary says”. Aha! And when another person said she found the language of my proposal frustrating “in particular the phrase ‘design-training’” (my emphasis) I knew I had rumbled a big part of the problem. If there is a simpler, jargon-free way of saying design training, I can’t find it. Training in design? Design lessons?

 I wonder, is it that once you get a certain distance from the soi-disant creative industries, most people just don’t have a clue what you mean by design? I’m sure, for example, it’s usually a consumable noun rather than a do-able verb. Maybe there’s a distant relative studying fashion design at art school, a meretricious new “designer” restaurant on the high street (ok so it’s an adjective), some trendy kitchen tools in sherbet colours, but design training? What can she possibly mean?

I’m the first to concede that everyone benefits from editing. “Shoot from the hip in plain English”, one of them advised me. I’m trying.

For every million people plying any trade, there’ll be one who defines it anew. In design they’re the ones whose craft is so deep and imaginings are so starkly their own that they make everything else look like retail. A century or so into the story, we healthily abound in awards and honours for design, but let us call to mind its metaphysicians, the Real Thing, the kinship you can count on the fingers of one hand.

I have a favourite pair of trousers. Festive cropped breeches they are; tartan wool on the bias with a centre back seam in each leg and saucy darts to shape the bum. Who ever imagined their mysterious, aerodynamic calf-kick? Alexander McQueen. Who else?

Asked to contribute a piece on improvisation to a new magazine about sustainable design, I leapt at the chance because the notion of improvisation has been buzzing in my head for a couple of years. I remember claiming in some piece of writing that the best design combined a Vitruvian firmness of production with the freshness of improvisation. Now I wonder what on earth I meant, and I’m stuck, frankly.

For is design not in fact the opposite of improvisation? Design is planned, holistic and slow. Improvisation is intuitive, immediate and swift. Tellingly, Wikipedia lists 10 “domains” for improvisation in the arts (poetry, comedy, music, etc.), something called “corporate improvisation training”, unclassified “role playing games”, and finally one short category adjacent to design: engineering (largely occupied by the sub-category of improvised weapons). All this suggests that you’d better off shipwrecked with a troupe of luvvies than with a studio of designers.

Yet isn’t design classicly defined as problem solving? Dieter Rams says at the end of Gary Hurstwit’s film Objectified that from here on out “the value of design will be measured in how it can help us survive”. Wow.  Here am I arguing that design IS resourcefulness and self reliance and all, but when the chips are down, is it a survival skill? Or is it a body of technical knoweldge fit only for civilised, refined, strategic, upper domains of social and commercial strife? 

Put it this way: would you want to be lost at sea/up a mountain at night/in the jungle with any of the following: Jonathan Ive? Chris Wise? Hilary Cottam? Dieter Rams? Tim Brown? Hella Jongherius? Ben Fry? Peter Saville? I take comfort in the fact that my husband, a graphic designer, is also an Eagle Scout.

So I enjoyed the Design: ego or conscience? talk with the RCA Design Products students, organised by Sebastian Bergne for Gareth Williams’ s critical platform. Michael Marriott, my interlocutor in this Monday afternoon event and a leading protagonist of beautiful but modest utility in design, presented the contrasting attitudes of Alec Issigionis and Karim Rashid; the latter very much more prominent in persona than in the fashionably-styled and rather forgettable objects he designs, the former probably no less of a show-off but way, way much more of a designer when you consider what the Mini had to be, and was.

The students did seem to crave a moral compass. While on the one hand, these pluralistic times declare that you can be any kind of designer you want; on the other hand, climate change, massive consumerism and critical self-respect all make it unacceptable to be the handmaidens of consumerism and neophilia that designers were 25 years ago.

I talked about how the holy principles that I learned at design school were overturned by the elevated importance of storytelling in our times.  I heard recently about 17-year old trying to get into an Ivy League university being told that what he needed was a personal “narrative arc”. Look at how branding has become imperative – a big story, a big effort to create narrative coherence and shape. At my “schools” Pentagram and Yale (less so, because things were already changing), designers strove for coherence but it wasn’t literary, or narrative, unless you were an illustrator. In fact a literary idea wasn’t an idea at all, for the strict formalist. When I worked for the graphic designer John McConnell at Pentagram he explicitly rejected ideas that he described as “literary” rather than formal. I had come late to design, via literary criticism in fact, and was quite puzzled by this. When I later met Paul Rand (father of all graphic designers) in the early 90s I asked him what the difference was. He pointed to a vase of daffodils on the table and said a literary idea would be that they represent Spring. The true designer just sees them as yellow and having a certain shape.

My, how times have changed. The buoyant art market of the last ten years has encouraged designers to express psychological drama in mechanically-reproducible objects, to exploit design as a language packed with reference and symbolism, to cleave the conventional unions of form and function for semiotic thrill. Gareth Williams’s V&A exhibition Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design was a fine document – and perhaps, in view of the now deflated market – epitaph of the “design-art” decade. It was full of talking products, limited editions of furniture and luxurious interior appointings, rich in hand-craft, surface decoration and visual reference, in three brazenly romantic settings: the Forest Glade, the Enchanted Castle and Heaven and Hell. I admired the show and many of its exhibits, but the subjective immodesty was the opposite of what I had been taught as a designer; ego and conscience all re-mixed for a culture that prizes storytelling above all.

I left the students with two pleas. One: to consider how, rather than taking problems away, design could help people to solve problems for themselves.  This might range from designing a product whose inner functioning is legible and repairable to applying what they know about form and function to any number of social enterprises. I would not rule out some storytelling as a device. Secondly, to think about teaching in school. D&T teachers are frequently isolated from the proliferating and exciting uses of design in our world; while design tutors tell me teaching is simply not considered an aspiration by undergraduates today. Still, three students raised their hands when I asked if anyone had considered teaching as a career. Out of about forty, not bad.