Who is Richard Seymour?
Professor Richard Seymour is one of Europe’s best known product designers and a Visiting Professor of Design to the Coventry School of Art and Design. Seymour, a trained graphic designer and illustrator, has moved from book and record-sleeve design through advertising and film production design, to occupying a commanding position on today’s international design stage.
In 1984 he set up Seymourpowell with partner Dick Powell, which is now regarded as one of the world’s leading product design consultancies.
This year’s Coventry University Bugatti Lecture.
If the eagerness of the assembled audience was anything to go by, then this was going to be a humdinger of a talk. In all the years that I have spent attending University lectures, I have never seen a storm of students once the doors to the auditorium opened, and the rush was for the front seats. A full fifteen minutes before the talk started, the lecture theatre was almost full and by the time Professor Seymour took the stage, the venue was bursting at the seems. There was even an overflow room in which more students were seated and who watched the proceedings via a video link. This man had presence, and clearly his audience recognised this designer as an icon in his domain.
Seymour’s lecture was set against the backdrop of today’s confusion of information surrounding global warming, carbon footprints, city congestion and the physical and psychological needs of tomorrow’s travellers. His challenge to the assembled mass of students, other lecturers and fellow-designers, was the question, ‘What should responsible designers be doing about this?’
In his talk, Seymour, clearly a man who has ‘been there, done that’ in the world of advertising and product design, laid down a clear challenge to the designers of tomorrow to take their world of product design by the scruff of the neck and to move it to the next level. He outlined the three design generations that had gone before them, identifying the age of space travel, the age of electronics and the current age – that of limitless access to markets and instant communications.
Speaking from experience, Seymour illustrated how the fantasy world of comic books in the 1950/60s with their graphically illustrated space craft, ever-happy travellers and ‘go anywhere’ attitude, served to fuel a whole generation of product designers. For him, this was a world of marvel, optimism and boundless creativity. He was not wrong, as this writer also grew up in the same era and was fascinated by the possibilities ‘out there’.
However, mounting regulations and restrictions which developed during the secretive years of the Cold War tended to put a lid on that type of thinking as governments tried to keep all such ‘fantastical’ experimentation under wraps. This was an age in which products became more functional and to be blunt, quite plain. Motor car design in the 1980s and even the early 1990s was decidedly boxy and modular, as were many electronic goods and household items.
However, a new wave of design opportunities awaits the current students as Seymour pointed out, in the shape of market accessibility and customer reach. Never before has the field been more wide open for anybody to present a product to the market than it is today. The internet is one of the most powerful tools with which to research, test and distribute a product in a variety of forms, making it possible for designers to almost interact personally with their market, and to develop their product much quicker than ever before, to the precise specs to suit the customer’s personal desires and tastes.
The only problem he could see with today’s new wave of designers, is that they might possibly suffer from a degree of apathy in that they do not look around sufficiently in their own environments for recognisable and appropriate inspiration. There is no shortage of ability, or indeed, brain power, as we only have to look at the Virgin Galactica to see an example of this. Who would have thought a decade ago that personal space travel was possible at the beginning of this century?
The way in which this dream became a reality is in itself an interesting story. When the X Prize offered inventors and designers the chance of putting normal travellers in space, the rush was on to develop the first craft that could safely and reliably do the job. This clearly worried NASA because it might entice the sale of such technology to the wrong kind of buyers, but the FAA in the USA persuaded the authorities to keep their hands off this experiment and to let the designers have free reign and to dream big once again. All of a sudden space travel was possible again after many years of stagnation.
Incrementalism – every forest fire starts with just a single spark, and if left unchecked, it will grow into a vast all-consuming fire. In the same way, young designers should develop their dreams gradually and not look for the revolutionary ‘big one’, the one that will take the world by storm, because that could take a lifetime. Seymour explained that the concept of the emergence of behaviour is where young designers would find the small differences in the market place that could lead them forward in their respective fields. Technology does not control advances in product design, but it is imagination that controls the pace and extent of new product development.
Responding to a question on where inspiration can be found, he replied that story telling is what gets the imagination fired up, not a super-analysis of theoretical possibilities. Charting the changes in social behaviour shows how every little boy in the 1950s wanted to be a train driver, as it was the result of a romantically elevated perception of power and achievement. Through the 1970s and beyond, the position of train driver took on an altogether different slant which was no longer attractive, and this was all down to a change in perceptions. Today, train travel is once again taking on a fresh appeal because new technology has been developed that makes the train a sexy thing once again. In short, the advent of super-fast intercontinental trains has developed in tandem with the resurgence of space travel possibilities, itself the product of some big dreaming by adventurous people.
“Put the adventure back into products”, Seymour urged his young audience. He continued by pointing out that today’s market is a ‘guerrilla world’ where any tactic goes. Many of the large multinational corporations are powerless to stop the young computer-wise generation from messing with their products and changing the way people think about the original uses of those products, citing the Coca-Cola/Mentos experiment as an example.
Taking Seymour’s invitation to put the adventure back into products, one just had to visit the University cloakrooms after the talk to sample the difference that the Dyson Airblade hand dryers made to the task of hand washing. The Airblade is a revolutionary looking device into which you thrust both hands, drying your wet hands in a fraction of the time without scorching your skin. The difference between the Airblade and the dumb old blowers that we have in all the motorway service station cloakrooms, is that the Dyson puts the excitement back into the task. Can a hand dryer look sexy – the Airblade does.
Design today is about grabbing the freedom that young minds are blessed with. According to Seymour, most new products are designed by people in their twenties and thirties. As discussed above, Seymour is of the opinion that the current era of young designers need to take the time to check their environmental surroundings as a source of inspiration. It is their responsibility to the take the baton of optimistic futurism forward for the next team – or the next generation of designers in this case.
Designing motor cars follows the same criteria as an other product, only the auto industry has its own set of resource limitations, regulations and technology restrictions. However, the next major step forward in vehicle design will be reliant on a new form of propulsion and this requires the buy-in of not only the motor manufacturers, but also the oil companies and many other motor allied industries. That is not about to happen anytime soon.
In the author’s opinion, the designers of tomorrow were not present at Professor Seymour’s talk, because they are still in primary school. Those students and young designers present at the talk will not be the generation to influence overall vehicle design, and to take it to the next level. The big obstacle in this development is due to the limitations of the internal combustion engine. Only once a new form of propulsion has been invented can designers significantly influence and alter the course of vehicle design to any meaningful degree.
The challenge for them therefore is, can the next generation put enough pressure on the big corporations and governments to make them rethink how future generations want to experience personal mobility. The ball is in their court now.
words and pictures by Glen Smale
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