Dyson's resignation has been incorrectly associated
with a recent exhibition at the Design Museum, celebrating the flower
arrangements of Constance Spry. Together with her friend, the interior
designer Sylvie Maugham, Spry had a tremendous influence on interior
decoration from the 1930s to the 1950s and was responsible for the
floral arrangements accompanying Queen Elizabeth II's coronation
in 1953. However, as Dyson made clear in the Richard Dimbleby lecture
he gave on BBC1 in December 2004, he resigned not because of the
Spry exhibition, but because he believed that the Design Museum
was failing in its remit (established when it was founded by Sir
Terence Conran in 1989) to focus primarily on the manufactured object.
He described an interview - conducted with English florists on the
BBC's radio programme, Today - about his resignation. After the
florists had made proclamations about the life-enhancing properties
of lilacs, the interviewer asked them whether or not they thought
that flower design is as important - or even the same - as designing
an aeroplane. They replied in the affirmative and Dyson states that
this convinced him that his decision to resign had been correct.
One of the original reasons for founding the Design Museum was that
the Design Council in London - originally known as the Council of
Industrial Design (CoID) - was no longer a potent force. Established
in 1944, specifically to promote 'by all practical means the improvement
of design in the products of British industry' (initially under
the auspices of the Board of Trade), its progenitors realised that
Britain would be in a seller's market at the end of the Second World
War and that there was a danger that British industry would return
to the bad habits of the 1930s. However, despite the need to export
(in the 1950s, 90% of all cars exported throughout the world were
made in Britain) and the success of early post-war developments
in nuclear power, aircraft, cars, scientific equipment, such as
the electron microscope, and early computers, the Design Council
soon became involved with consumer products. These dominated both
the 'Britain Can Make It' exhibition, held at London's V&A museum
in 1946 and the 'Festival of Britain' in 1951. Their importance
was reinforced by the CoID's index of some 20,000 domestic products
that followed the Festival and the opening of the Design Centre
in London in 1956 and the Design Centre Awards in 1957. Consumer
products also dominated the design centres later opened in Glasgow
and Cardiff.
It was not until 1968 that the CoID introduced awards for engineering
and medical equipment (including awards for a shunting engine, earth
moving equipment and lathes). In 1972, the CoID changed its name
to the Design Council, linking up with the Council of Engineering
Institutions, taking on the kinds of activities that the engineering
institutions should have been doing themselves. These included persuading
engineers to resist concentrating solely on matters of detail, to
look at a product in its entirety and to establish better links
with the rest of the world.
By the time the Design Council came into being in 1989, Britain
had invented the hovercraft, the tilting train, the body scanner
and the jump-jet aircraft (as well as the fighter-reconnaissance
plane, the TSR2, abandoned when Britain joined together with France
to develop Concorde). Britain did not need better engineers, but
training in how to make and market these products around the world,
rather than selling the patents to other countries.
The 1970s saw the collapse of Britain's car industry and, in the
early 1980s, the miners' strike led to the demise of the coal and
steel industries. By this time, the Design Council had left its
Haymarket premises in London and exhibitions featuring hospital
design, British Rail and the QE2, were memories from a distant past.
When the Design Museum opened its doors, it filled an important
gap. As Dyson says, while places such as the Victoria & Albert
Museum in London stage exhibitions on the decorative arts and The
Lighthouse in Glasgow, dedicated to architecture, design and the
city, the Design Museum is almost the only place that continues
to display the manufactured object.
However, this now seems to be changing. Most of the museum's exhibitions
relating to the manufactured object have concentrated on cars and
motorcycles - the Citroën DS in 1991, the British motorcycle
in 1992, car design for the elderly and disabled in 1993, bicycle
design in 1997, the Porsche in 1998, the Mini in 1999 and the E-Type
Jaguar in 2004. The few other 'engineering' exhibitions have included
one featuring Buckminster Fuller and another on Swatch. And while
surveys on Scandinavian design and exhibitions on designers such
Eileen Gray, Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen and Philippe Starck
have taken in furniture, light fittings, textiles and architecture,
there have been many more on graphics (posters, housestyles and
comics), photography, jewellery and silversmithing, the Coca Cola
bottle and erotic design. Dyson's criticism of the museum's exhibition
programme, over which he says he had no control, is that it reflects
a late 20th /early 21st century attitude towards design that puts
styling first. This, Dyson says:
... is a lazy conceit. One that has passed its sell-by date. This world is driven by technology. We have no choice but to shake off our obsession with styling and focus on creating new, more advanced products.Dyson's words apply not only to the Design Museum, but to the rest of Britain. In the Dimbleby lecture, he made it clear that even concentrating on creative innovation and designing products manufactured in China, is a short-term policy. The Chinese have recently bought IBM personal computers, Thomson, RCA televisions, Alcatel mobile telephones and Dornier aircraft (as well as the blueprints for Britain's Rover cars) and make products for Sony and other major companies. It will not be long before China moves from being a source of cheap labour to one of the world's great industrial powers.