Rachaels lecture was a refreshing take on the world of design and how to explore it. Through talking about her journey, she shared with us the ways she managed to stay curious & well-informed when it came to design & technology. For 10 years, Rachael worked writing reports (similar to articles) for Stylus, a subscription services for large companies which tracked trends in fields such as fashion, architecture, and food & beverage. She employed a 4-stage approach when tackling these reports: research, synthesise, deliver, and track. This allowed her the chance to keep on top of and become familiar with the emerging technologies which were informing major trends around her. Its the perfect time in a designers life to be given a free pass to look for their niche. Whilst doing this on the side, Rachael was being given retail briefs by the likes of Habitat and John Lewis, but was always happiest when given time and money to explore. She now works for herself in more ways than one, making her own bespoke leather goods while living in rural Scotland, something that sounds like a dream to most. She adores the meditative aspect of making, and swears by Alfie Douglas’ theory that it greatly reduces stress and anxiety.

In a world of gargantuan companies and global brands, craftspeople like Rachael are an important reminder to kick the disposable mindset. Spending several hundred pounds on a bespoke handbag may sound like a luxurious fantasy, but it’s really not when you consider its quality and lifetime, not to mention Rachael’s continued involvement should a repair need to be made or an extra pocket added. Sure, you could buy 10 handbags from Primark for the same amount of money, but the earth cannot afford to sustain behaviour like this. Rachael showed us something she was about to start renovating for a customer – a wallet passed down from the persons great grandfather. The wallet was certainly on its last legs before she got her hands on it, but the fact it had lasted several generations can teach us a lot about how and what we buy. Instead of focusing on biodegradable this and recyclable that, maybe the answer lies in investing in lasting products.

Needless to say, this has implications for the designer. If Rachael’s bag designs followed trends the way high street brands do, then there would be no desire to keep it when it was no longer in fashion, never mind pass it on to the next generation. Obviously, for it to physically last it needs to be well-made from good quality materials. However, to remain desirable, such objects must be free from the influence of passing styles. In other words, they need to be timeless.

Nicholas Oddy’s Design & Technology lecture posed a multitude of answers to the question: What Makes Great Design? Instead of trying to define great design, he explored the different reasons for which the term ’great design’ could be attributed to something. He pondered if people in history who are regarded as great designers today, such as George Stevenson, can in fact be called great designers, or whether everything they did can be considered great design simply because one or two of their products went down in the history books. In the case of George Stephenson, a man who’s chosen rail specifications became the standard for almost every railway in the world today, and who’s Geordie Safety Lamp became so widely used that it gave the miners (and subsequently people) of North England their name, my opinion is yes. Everything he achieved was done with no prior scientific knowledge; and no latter scientific knowledge: Stephenson’s lamp design was created exclusively through trial and error.

Even despite the circumstances, the lamp is famed for the amount of lives it has saved. Inarguably, this makes it great design. Factors we usually consider when discussing great design, such as aesthetics and usability, tend to take a back seat when something is heralded for this reason. But what about when something is so intriguingly beautiful that it captures the eyes of many, when in fact it is completely useless? Can we say that the most beautiful juicer in the world is great design, purely on its (stunning) looks? The answer is already yes. Philippe Starck’s eye-catching, yet substance-less designs have cemented him a place in the hall of fame of great designers, when perhaps he should be amongst artists. The Juicy Salif was described by Terrence Conran as ‘completely hopeless,’ but hastened to add that ‘god it looks good,’ and I don’t have a problem with that. Certainly, nobody should be stopped from creating something beautiful on the grounds that it doesn’t ‘work’, but a juicer that can’t juice is an art piece. Nicholas made a good point in saying that anyone who owns a Juicy Salif, almost certainly has a more functional fruit squeezer tucked away out of sight, which speaks for itself.

For me, designing around definite ‘tasks’ such as this involves advancing how effectively the task is carried out, or making the experience more enjoyable to the point where it transcends being a task and becomes entertainment. As the human race progresses, more efficient design means less time and/or money needs to be delegated to certain tasks, and who doesn’t like the sound of more free time?

But where do we funnel this new found time? As computers now have the processing capabilities to organise vast amounts of information that our economy runs on, we give more value to imaginative qualities than we ever have before as we progress into a creative economy. Humans have time to work on things which are exclusively ‘human,’ and we are celebrating that. A computer may be able to tabulate gargantuan amounts of information in a fraction of a second, but it could never look beyond that information to innovate the way that Stephenson did during his experiments. Looking at the world through ‘what if?’ lenses is what led him to create the lifesaving Geordie lamp. When Starck first doodled the Juicy Salif on the menu of a pizzeria, he didn’t think about what was standard, or normal, or even functional, he just drew. Great design is progress, and progress is within the human ability to imagine.

Almost ten years ago, filmmaker Frank Pasecki Poulsen attempted to raise awareness of the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo funded by the illegal mining of rare minerals that were being sold to mobile phone manufacturers. Poulsen was appalled by the notion that electronics he was purchasing were funding murder and mutilation and thus made several attempts to confront Nokia about their alleged use of “blood minerals.” His pleas fell on deaf ears, however, and blame was passed from one spokesperson to the next until he decided to journey to the source of the materials which were being mined at gunpoint in Bisie. His film ‘Blood In The Mobile’ shared gruesome images and stories with the world in an effort to stop the biggest conflict since the Second World War. Nearly a decade later, has anything changed?

The tech industry today is certainly more aware of the problem and many big-name brands (http://www.responsiblemineralsinitiative.org/about/members-and-collaborations/) now participate in the Conflict-Free Smelter Programme (CFSP) which monitors the global metals supply chain and provides a list of smelters and refiners which they have deemed to be socially, environmentally, and economically friendly. As well as this, Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank act requested that companies listed on the US stock exchange prove that the mining, sale, or taxing of minerals used in their products does not fund armed groups.

This may sound like incredible progress for people of the DR Congo, but it isn’t. Hundreds of thousands of miners have been left with no source of income after Section 1502 meant a de-facto ban on mining in Congo using hand-tools. The militias that the legislation aimed to take down have begun making money by other means such as timber, cannabis, and palm oil. While the CFSP has certainly made a worthy attempt at creating conditions for responsible material acquisition and preventing blood minerals from being present in our electronic products, it still has not addressed the real problem – the conflict. By closely centring their efforts on the metals supply chain they have only shifted the conflict elsewhere.

As consumers, is there really much of a difference we can make to the bigger picture? Are designers and companies to be held more accountable? The issue is far more complex than I first imagined before properly researching after I watched Blood On The Mobile. I felt abhorrently guilty watching the film, but I find solace in that there must be a tradeoff between designers using our personal electronics to design something that say, reduces plastic usage or provides clean drinking water to a remote part of the world. The lesson learned is that thoughtful design is a necessity we cant afford to ignore.

At the scale large companies operate at today, it’s easy to see why the art of craftsmanship has been replaced by robotic assembly lines. There was a day when an automobile was an amalgamation and celebration of numerous different professions: hand-sculpted bodies filled with beautifully upholstered furniture and hand-wired electronics. Today, people spend unholy amounts of money buying and maintaining these beautiful relics of a bygone era because “they don’t make ‘em like the used to!”

But what does that really mean? Have these skilled workers simply gone extinct? Or are we destroying their delicate habitat by investing our money into companies whose idea of success is to scale up to astronomical levels? Consider Apple: when you’re selling over 210 million iPhones in a single year the it’s impossible for the process to be anything but automated. These products aren’t made to last. Whether we like it or not, they’re disposable. I’ll never forget taking my laptop – which was a little under seven years old – to Apple to get fixed, only to be told they didn’t repair ‘vintage machines.’

Or maybe it’s the wages? Shoemakers hone their skillset as an apprentice for years earning a wage usually lower than half that of a barman just to pass their knowledge on to the next generation of apprentices. Even if the income doesn’t bother you, apprenticeships don’t cover everything. They seem a little old-fashioned, especially if boundary-pushing is your kind of thing. There can’t be someone teaching you techniques if you are the one pioneering those techniques in the first place.

Look to Discommon: They are a design firm who created their own sister brand, Discommon Goods, to allow themselves to trial, tinker, and tweak innovative techniques in the form of small, simple products. The techniques, once perfected, are applied to larger projects by the same people who had fun exploring a new method of manufacture in a stress-and risk-free headspace.

Take their product ‘The Bottle Opener 2’ as an example. Discommon were in the developmental stages of a project they had been asked to tackle by a large luggage firm when they realised one of the manufacturing methods they were planning on using was going to be “a pain in the ass.” The challenge was stitching leather through metal with especially tight tolerances, but instead of just advancing the technique for the luggage firm project, they decided to do something completely different and develop a simple product around it.

The learning process they have now gone through has taught them a new skill (or skills), with the added bonus of an extra product on their shelf. Mind you, they are not cheap—you can expect to be parting with no less than $100 to get your hands on one of their bottle openers, or almost $300 for a whisky tumbler. You might think an extortionate price tag such as this would drive away customers, but almost every single product on their website is sold out, and for good reason: the commodities they produce are extremely high quality, utterly unique, and make fantastic talking points.

There’s no reason for skilled craftsmen and women to die out. If you are a consumer, you can look further than the brands with the largest advertising budgets and find something made by humans. If you are a company, make sure your interpretation of success does not contradict how you choose to run your business.

Today Charles and Ray Eames are heralded as the most influential couple in the architecture and design world. Professionally speaking, they were a perfect pairing: Charles took the lead when it came to form and functionality, and Ray was the virtuoso who was in charge of character and colour, although it is difficult to define exactly who was responsible for what. Time magazine praised their LCW chair as chair of the century, and the Washington post said their work ‘changed the way the 20^th century sat down.’ They weren’t always heralded as the biggest powerhouse couple of the design world, in fact, many even mistakenly labelled Ray as Charles’ brother at the time.

Ray and her work fell victim to the casual sexism mindset of the time. She was once introduced on national television as the ‘able-woman’ behind the successful man, despite Charles best efforts to politely explain that she was just as responsible for the world-changing designs as he was. He said that ‘she has a very good sense of what gives a piece of sculpture it’s character, of how it’s relationships are formed’ and much else besides, never belittling her contribution the way many onlookers did. Pat Kirkham interviewed Ray five years before her death in 1983 (five years after Charles death), an interview which disclosed that Ray ‘…(partly) enjoyed playing the wife behind the great genius, while another part of (her) craved recognition in her own right.’ During the conversation she is painted as atypically humble regarding her input to the Eames office and someone who would never have taken the spotlight from Charles, simply out of adoration for her husband. It’s brilliant that today Charles is seldom mentioned without also mentioning Ray, and that they are commended as a couple. Nevertheless, it doesn’t always work out so nicely. Closer to home, parallels can be drawn to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s collaborative career.

Like Charles Eames, C. R. Mackintosh was embarrassed by the way his wife Margaret was represented within their design partnership. Her work, like Ray’s, was similarly disparaged by critics who may have had less respect due to the fact it was decorative, and so too portrayed her as the wife behind the successful man. C. R. Mackintosh was all too aware of this and, like Charles Eames, repeatedly and politely acknowledged that any work that was wrongly attributed mainly to him was in fact a collaboration, noting that ‘Margaret has genius, I have mere talent.’

The Eames duo undoubtedly earned their place in history. Ray’s input at the Eames office is arguably how their collective output developed the recognisable characteristics that have taken the world by storm since, and a fine example of why there is no place for sexism in design.