Design and Creativity

Policy, Management and Practice

Guy Julier, Liz Moor, Guy Julier, Liz Moor

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781847883063
• eBook ISBN: 9781847887092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Product Design

Design and other creative industries not only shape our lives in numerous ways, providing 'cultural' goods such as films, music and magazines, but also shape the look and feel of everyday objects and spaces. The creative industries are also important economically; governments and businesses now make considerable efforts to manage creativity for a range of political and economic ends. Does the management of design conflict with traditional ideas of creative freedom and autonomy? How do government policies and business priorities influence the day-to-day practices of designers? And how far have the processes and purpose of creative work been changed by its new centrality to business and government? Bringing together case studies and material from a range of industries and contexts, as well as a series of interviews with practitioners, Design and Creativity provides a cutting-edge account of key trends in the creative industries at the start of the twenty-first century.

Part I

DESIGN AND POLICY

CHAPTER 1

Designing the State

Liz Moor

When we think of the relationship between design and the state we tend to think of big, dramatic building projects or high-profile pieces of public art and architecture. We think of historic buildings and we may know a little about the contexts in which these were commissioned – often for explicitly political ends, perhaps for symbolizing national success, for the purposes of social and economic regeneration, or for reinvigorating a sense of national or regional identity. The public debate surrounding projects like the Millennium Dome in Britain, or François Mitterand’s grands projets in France suggests most people are aware that national governments or regional authorities tend, from time to time, to commission pieces of design work with such goals in mind, and this in turn can lead to controversy about the use of public funds. Indeed, as other parts of this book suggest, the perception that such projects are funded directly by citizens is one of the reasons why creative design work in the public sector is subject to such complex accounting and legitimization processes.

We are less inclined to notice the imprint of the state in smaller or more mundane aspects of our material culture and environment, such as the design of tax forms, the posters in doctors’ waiting rooms or the leaflets that come through our doors. Indeed, in some cases it may be that the point of such objects is to be relatively unobtrusive or to slip by unnoticed. Yet such objects make up a significant part of our material world, and as Michael Billig (1995) has pointed out in his analysis of ‘banal nationalism’, even small objects such as emblems and coins can be part of the construction of a ‘national habitus’, part of the way in which the state is folded into our everyday activities. More recently, the literature on place branding has drawn attention to the ways in which such projects have included as one of their aims the effort to shift the habitus of local citizens, not only through large ‘statement’ pieces of art or architecture, but also through smaller interventions (such as new street furnishings, for example) that aim to provide designed ‘cues’ to alter perceptions of the built environment and the identity of a town, city or region (see e.g. Julier 2000; 2005). Designed objects, in other words, are very often part of the making up of national subjects (Moor 2007).

In this chapter I want to focus on a further example of the relationship between design and the state, to do with the ways in which designers have been used by the state and government agencies in Britain in the delivery of public services and policy initiatives. The British state’s interest in design, so I want to argue, has not been limited to its role in creating potent national symbols, nor simply to encouraging the development of creative industries because of their potential contribution to national economic competitiveness or local regeneration, but has in recent years expanded to include the possibility that designers may have a significant role to play in redesigning public services, communicating government policy and – indirectly – shaping political subjectivities and forms of citizenship. As we shall see, these policy developments underpin many of the issues addressed in this volume – about the pressures on designers to account for their practices, to explain and measure the value of their work, and to review their own processes in the light of such concerns – but they also, in this instance, raise normative questions about who should be involved in the design and delivery of public services and under what kinds of terms, and how the use of design fits in with particular philosophies of government. In this chapter, therefore, I seek to describe two areas of government activity – awareness-raising campaigns and public service delivery – in which designers are newly prominent, and, drawing on a wider social science literature on neo-liberal governance, to sketch out a preliminary account of the political role of designers in neo-liberal societies. My aim, however, is neither to focus on specific policies nor to provide a detailed account of how these efforts work out in practice (both of which are addressed elsewhere in the chapters that follow) but rather to examine the broader political context driving new uses of design and designers by the state. ¹

The Political Context: Marketization

To put the social and public role of design into context, it is necessary to understand the transformations that have occurred within British public sector organization and management from the 1980s onwards. Public service reforms during this period have been driven by a number of themes, including the presumed superiority of the market over bureaucratic and state mechanisms of coordination, and a new centrality of managerialist language and practice to conceptions of governance (Clarke and Newman 2007). There has been a much greater emphasis on the creation of markets and ‘choice’ in the provision of public services, with public, private and voluntary organizations all being invited to compete for contracts to provide particular services. At the same time, the figure of ‘the consumer’ or ‘user’ has become more central to government discourse, indeed the figure in whose name such market reforms are undertaken. As Tony Blair put it in 2001: ‘We are proposing to put an entirely different dynamic in place to drive our public services; one where the service will be driven not by the government or by the manager but by the user – the patient, the parent, the pupil and the law-abiding citizen’ (cited in Clarke and Newman 2007: 740). This ‘user’ is imagined in terms that mirror the image of consumers in commercial transactions; in place of the supposedly ‘passive’ and ‘dependent’ consumers of the past (and previous models of public services), the new consumers are ‘self-directing and self-possessing individuals … exercising choice in pursuit of self-realizing lift projects’ (Clarke 2007: 160–61). Yet at the same time – as some commentators have pointed out – such consumers are not simply pre-existing; they are to be ‘remade’ through new types of state-led initiatives. Through education and information they are to be ‘empowered’ to make decisions; through the exercise of choice they are to be made responsible for their own direction and life chances, a process which, according to the market logic of many such initiatives, should in turn force service providers to become more sensitized and responsive to their needs (Malpass et al. 2006).

Although such developments may seem removed from the practices of commercial design agencies, they have influenced their work in several ways. Firstly, there is simply more work available to be undertaken for public sector clients. A survey in 2008 estimated that the amount of work being outsourced to private and voluntary organizations had doubled over the previous decade (Timmins 2008). This includes ‘everything from National Health Service treatments to bin emptying, IT, back-office functions and RAF pilot training’ (Timmins 2008), but also, of course, various types of design work. The Design Council’s (2005) Business of Design survey showed that ‘public administration, health and education’ make up 22 per cent of the total clients for design businesses, while the British Design Industry Valuation Survey shows a steady rise in the number of design businesses doing work for public sector or non-profit clients over the past few years: in 2000–01 (the first year of the survey), 25 per cent of agencies did this kind of work; by 2004–05 it was 49 per cent. (BDI 2003; BDI 2006).

Secondly, these developments have led to growth in particular types of design work. The emphasis on user-centred approaches in the delivery of public services has benefited design agencies specializing in service design, particularly where they are able to demonstrate strengths in the area of ‘user insight’. Indeed, as we noted in the introduction, areas such as ‘service and proposition creation’ and strategic design consultancy have grown in recent years (BDI 2006), and while this is not solely attributable to public sector demand, it has played a significant role. Similarly, the emphasis on information, education and ‘empowerment’ has created new volumes of work in communications design and graphics. Statistics on the design industry do not break down type of work by type of client, but it is worth noting that communications design (including ‘graphics, brand, print, information design, corporate identity’) is the largest single category of all design work done in Britain, and that the number of agencies doing such work has risen from 48 per cent in 2000–01 to 65 per cent in 2003–04 (British Design Innovation 2003; 2004). These figures can, of course, be set alongside the statistics above showing a greater volume of work done by all design agencies for public sector and non-profit clients.

Finally, as developments within the public sector have created more work for private design companies, they have also been an important influence in the use of new techniques of measurement and accounting within those organizations. Although sophisticated measurement and auditing techniques are usually associated with private sector institutions seeking reassurance about return on investment and ‘value added’, the spending of public money on design solutions increasingly demands even greater levels of accountability and proof of ‘effectiveness’, and design agencies have had to respond to this. Indeed the shift to a more pervasive ‘audit society’ (Power 1997) is typified by the widespread adoption of such techniques by non-commercial public sector institutions; Michael Power, the arch theorist of this shift, notes that ‘The audit explosion has its conditions of emergence in transformations in conceptions of administration and organization which…dismantle the public–private divide’ (1997: 10). As we shall see, public sector demands for accountability have forced some (private) design consultancies to improve their methods for demonstrating ‘effectiveness’ and, in some cases, to develop new techniques for measuring non-financial aspects of such effectiveness.

In looking at the relationship between design and the state in Britain, then, we can see that a particular form of governance characterized by marketization, ‘choice’, outsourcing and the promotion of active citizenship has recon-figured government’s relationship to the design industry, with greater volumes of work being made available in the first place, a particular emphasis on design work that involves the transformation of services or the promotion of particular ways of thinking and acting by citizens, and a new incentive for design agencies to find ways of measuring the ‘value’ of their work and its effects. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to concentrate on the last two of these: the role of design in trying to forge a political subjectivity among citizens that is consonant with broadly neo-liberal philosophies of government, and the forms of measurement and accounting that have been developed to support this kind of work.

Design for Governance: Awareness-raising Campaigns

Changes in the organization of governance in Britain have not only altered the volume of work available to independent design agencies, but also what design is called upon to do. I have already noted that more work is available for designers specializing in strategy, services and ‘user insights’, but there has also been a growing role for communications design. Of course governments have always used designers to produce printed materials (booklets, posters and so on) advertising their services and initiatives, but there has, so I want to argue, been a shift in the ‘tone’, as well as the volume, of such materials, which are now expected to work on citizens in new kinds of ways. Increasingly, design for government is expected to promote not just the availability of a given service or facility, but also particular types of relationships between government and its citizens, as part of ‘a determined effort to recast the balance of responsibility between the state and its citizens’ (Malpass et al. 2006: 3).

The effort to ‘responsibilize’ citizens is, in turn, part of what Nikolas Rose (cited in Malpass et al. 2006: 6) describes as a trend to ‘de-socialize’ modes of governance, where the goal is to act on individuals and their self-regulating behaviour as consumers, rather than to institute broader-based policy measures or incentives. This is linked to the idea of ‘stakeholder citizenship’, in which ‘everyone is responsible’ and in which citizens are seen as the bearers of responsibilities as well as rights (Rose 1999; Harvey 2005). Such ‘de-socialization’ can be seen in a number of areas. These include, for example, what Hajer and Versteeg (cited in Malpass et al. 2006) describe as the individualization of food risks that has developed through the move towards product labelling and web-based information services. Here, rather than prohibiting certain potentially dangerous or unhealthy ingredients – a move that would involve direct state intervention in public choice, and potentially bring the government into conflict with powerful business interests – the government increasingly sees its role as one of encouraging citizens to educate themselves and become personally responsible.

Given this emphasis on individual responsibility through education and ‘empowerment’, there has, unsurprisingly, been a corresponding emphasis on the role of communications design in informing and encouraging would-be consumers and users. Many policy statements and think-tank reports have drawn attention to the importance of ‘positive and inspirational messages’ and ‘high-profile national communications’ in ‘developing a new inspirational goal and a branded statement’ to harness the activities of diverse groups of stake-holders (Def...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Design and Creativity Liz Moor and Guy Julier
• Part I Design and Policy
• Part II Managing Design in Context
• Part III Interviews with Practitioners
• List of Contributors
• eCopyright