Latest thinking

"You know more than you think you do"

Blog

24 Jul 2009

Last night at the RSA, the RSA's Design & Society project launched its new project on resourcefulness, self-reliance and design with a essay by Emily Campbell: The challenge posed to design by today’s social and political agenda of inclusiveness is to ease the distinction between the professional skill of designers and the insights of users; to make these complementary and integral to the solving of problems.  But the popular narrative of design history stands in marked contrast to the agenda of inclusive process. The Designer – in fiction and often in reality – is famed for his or her passionately pursued, authentic and unique visual language. The designer is known by his or her mediated icons. The designer is famously unbending in his or her choices and only ever wears black. Despite its own rhetoric, design often disempowers us. How can it be made to do the opposite? The RSA's Design & Society team suggests that instead of designing for us, design should start from the assumption that we are not just consumers of design, we are all potential designers too.  Read about this project. [PDF 95KB]

Milburn's report means schools should look outwards

Blog

20 Jul 2009

Matthew Taylor

I’m picking up on a couple of recent themes today.  

An open letter to Michael Gove

Blog

16 Jul 2009

Matthew Taylor

Dear Michael

The renewal of St Martin in the Fields: a case study in social space making

Blog

15 Jul 2009

Here’s another exciting event next week to tell you about. Architect Eric Parry is coming to the RSA on Thursday 30 July at 1pm to talk about the renewal of St Martins in Fields. The project has created a sequence of interconnected public spaces both above and below ground as well as a wide range of amenities for a diverse range of users, including the homeless, St Martin's core congregation, the local Chinese community and state of the art facilities for professional musicians.

Is he or isn't he (the world's first industrial designer)?

Blog

10 Jul 2009

Yesterday afternoon, at the awards ceremony for Shine at the V&A Sackler Centre, David Kester, Chief Executive of the Design Council, began a little 3-question quiz by asking "Who was the world's first industrial designer?" While my brain auto-prompted "Christopher Dresser", discursive noise-interference stopped my mouth. It depends what you mean by an industrial designer, obviously. Didn't Alice Rawsthorn in Gary Hurstwit's new film Objectified date the birth of industrial design to the rationalisation of armaments by mediaeval Chinese knights? Christopher Dresser, however, was the "right" answer.

George Orwell: "all art is propaganda"

Blog

10 Jul 2009

There are several curators who have been making the running in laying out the territory of arts' response to environmental issues, from Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna of the excellent Latitudes to Maja and Reuben Fowkes of translocal.org.  There's a good wide-ranging interview with Maja and Ruben Fowkes in Antennae Magazine in which they discuss altermodernism, the macho nature of Land Art, and how in sustainable art, form becomes a matter of ethics. All great stuff. One thing in the interview pulled me up short though:

BJ Fogg in the RSA's Journal

Blog

06 Jul 2009

I think that one of the good ways to begin to get a handle on what the RSA is and what it does is by having a look at the Journal. This summer's edition has just been published, and included an article by BJ Fogg (creator and coiner of the term "persuasive technology") and a shorter piece by me on how the RSA is looking at putting the ideas of design for behaviour change to use.

It's the ethos, stupid

Blog

06 Jul 2009

What is it to win the centre ground in politics? It is in part to incorporate policies that appeal to the centre-left and centre-right. But that is quite a shallow definition. I want to suggest a slightly deeper one based on Jonathan Haidt’s five (apparently universal) moral senses: a sense of fairness, a sense of caring about harm, a sense for in-group loyalty, a sense of spiritual purity and a respect for authority. It seems to me that winning the centre-ground convincingly requires embodying all these senses to some degree in an ethos that people can understand and identify with.

Gustav Metzger: artists "taking moral standpoints"

Blog

03 Jul 2009

Forty-eight years ago today, Gustav Metzger took a bottle of hydrochloric acid to the South Bank and set about destroying suspended sheets of nylon in an act of what he called Auto-Destructive painting. For Metzger, whose personal world view was formed in the shadow of World War II, this was an act of protest against war, capitalism and the commodification of the art world. Half a century on he is still making corrosive art. The Manchester International Festival opened yesterday, with Gustav Metzger's Flailing Trees, 21 literally up-rooted willow trees , as one of its centrepieces. "This project," he says, "is about brutality, the brutality with which we human beings mistreat nature."