IRISH DESIGN 2015 MAKING DESIGN MATTER
Alex Milton (AM): Brian, as CEO of a successful Irish design consultancy that has been operating for over 30 years, can you tell us what being based in Ireland brings to your business, and how this helps you to innovate? Brian Stephens (BS): When David Morgan and I set up Design Partners in 1984, we both had an international outlook based on our previous experience in Continental Europe and in Japan. We both chose Ireland as somewhere to live and didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t work here just as well as anywhere else. I think we were right - it’s impossible to practice industrial design without a broad international perspective. Clients hire you for being relevant, creative and consultative. We got some of our early clients, such as Campingaz in France, through great Irish manufacturing suppliers, where we provided the necessary design expertise. I can’t honestly say access to talent would necessarily be better here than anywhere else, but on the other hand the Irish design colleges, especially NCAD and Carlow, were strongly influenced by the British model and this was essentially very positive. The Irish design graduates of the 90s were pioneers and had a strong sense of needing to make their own mark on the world - we were well able to capitalise on this. Another clear benefit of being based here has been that we have had to evolve our own processes based on what we believed the projects needed and not being too influenced by others in the profession. I am sometimes quite surprised when I see how other designers work - glued to their computers. We were lucky to have designers like Peter Sheehan and Cathal Loughnane to continue to promote and practice a tactile hand to mind conversation as part of our creative methodology. It continues to serve us well and we apply it to every media we work in — experimentation remains at the heart of innovation. On a separate point, we do build a very clear narrative and story into everything we do — it gives our work momentum and context and very clear shared criteria for success. It’s an approach that helps connect our clients’ brands with what really matters to their audience. Hard to say now but we may not have evolved this particular approach if we were founded in California or in London. I should add that in Design Partners there is certainly no lack of ability to talk around the challenges of the projects to hand — perhaps a distinctly Irish trait! I am happy to say our team is now more international than it was in the beginning; we actively seek out practitioners from all over the world and our international people complement perfectly their Irish colleagues — they definitely bring something and learn something from working here. AM: John, the UK Design Council has a track record of supporting design innovation across a range of sectors. Can you talk about what you’ve been up to and tell us where you see design making the next major intervention in the innovation landscape? John Mathers (JM): In 2015, while ID2015 was being delivered, we’ve been busy too. We celebrated our 70th anniversary amongst other things — we were set up seventy years ago by Winston Churchill as the Council for Industrial Design and have been championing the latest in design and, particularly recently, the use of strategic design ever since. One major achievement was the launch of our product accelerator programme, SPARK, which saw the first new ventures come through at the end of
“...experimentation remains at the heart of innovation.”
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