"We're human beings." "And human beings are not machines." "Our first response to anything is emotional." "Not intellectual, not functional, it's emotional." "It's incumbent upon designers to make the through-flow of work and communication as pleasurable as possible, and as emotionally rich as possible." "Over the last 30 years, the world around us has changed." "The crystals speak even more." "There is a message." "In an age of abundant consumer choice, design has shifted focus - from serving the collective good to indulging individual desire." "As designers have devised ever new and more sophisticated ways to fulfil our personal aspirations." "And sell us more stuff." "It's not enough that it looks well and works well, it has to be flat and go into a brown box." "To let the bird sing when the water boils, makes for the personality of this kettle." "We live in the ultimate designer age." "But is this democracy, or decadence?" "Can we have too much of a good thing?" "And are we really ready for design that's so personal, it's practically human?" "The thing is alive, it's interacting with you, it's yakking, it's demanding things." "It really wants to work itself into the texture of your day." "And finally, with the raw materials that have fuelled 200 years of industrial production running out... ..where next for design?" "The exciting thing about Cradle to Cradle is that things are designed to either go back to soil safely or back to industry forever." "And so we can celebrate consumption, instead of as something that destroys the world, it's something that enhances the world." "I started off designing things and building them, you know, and I'd tend to build one or two or three because that's all I could afford to do." "But I always wanted to address mass production." "That kind of is the ultimate goal for a designer, I think." "Shaping everything from aeroplanes to coat hangers," "Marc Newson is one of the hippest designers on the planet." "An artist reaping the rewards of an age in which the profile of design has never been higher." "And today, seated on Philippe Starck "designer" chairs, sipping "designer" water, wealthy aficionados are about to do battle to own one of his first works." "Now we come to Lot 72." "Marc Newson, the rare and important Lockheed Lounge." "And we will begin this at ¡ê300,000." "300,000 to start this." "I have 320." "I was... ..23 I think, or 24, when I did that, when I built that, when I designed it and when I made it." "480, seated on my right, at 480." "500,000..." "I didn't have the money to go and get it a manufacturer to do it." "750 against you, madam, 750, 780..." "Manufacturers didn't exist in Australia in that sense, so you know, even if I did, it wouldn't have been possible." "900,000 I have." "At 900,000." "That's against you, madam." "It was simply building something in my back yard." "At ¡ê950,000 then." "Sold." "Thank you so much." "APPLAUSE" "Do not adjust your sets." "That's just shy of a million pounds, for a chair." "Making this probably the most desirable piece of furniture in the world." "But don't panic." "Marc Newson makes high street dish drainers as well as exclusive furniture." "He's the latest in a line of high profile, influential designers to confront a curious dilemma." "In the age of the individual, how can a mass-produced object feel like a desirable one-off?" "Theirs is the story of how design got personal." "And it begins with a generation fed up with the dull and dismal world of the 1970s." "# Radio" "# Live transmission... #" "No-one seemed to really care how..." "mass-produced products looked." "And I was interested in having interesting and, in a way, aspirational possessions." "And even though this was a ¡ê4 or ¡ê5 album," "I didn't see why it had to be in any way lesser to a luxury item." "# Dance, dance, dance to the radio" "# Dance, dance, dance" "# Dance, dance to the radio... #" "When he began designing record covers, at the end of the '70s," "Peter Saville wasn't alone in bemoaning the state of design in Britain." "I had gone to a "British Week"" "in Sweden, some years previously, and I was really appalled at the poor design quality of British goods." "# Dance, dance, dance to the radio... #" "Britain's newly elected leader and the entrepreneurs of the post-punk generation had more in common than either may care to admit." "Both championed consumer choice, individuality, and a do-it-yourself, deregulatory spirit that would turn the '80s into the "designer decade"." "For Peter Saville, that meant plundering a range of enigmatic and eclectic images to design record sleeves every bit as desirable as the music they concealed." "I picked this, well, a postcard of this Fantin-Latour painting called "Roses"." "And I picked it up because I like the chintz-like quality of it." "And my friend was with me, and she saw me holding the Fantin-Latour postcard and said," ""You're not thinking of that, are you?"" "And I said, "No, of course not."" "MUSIC: "Blue Monday" by New Order" "I was interested in producing things that I would own, and that my audience would own." "So not pictures of what other people had, but actually things." "So in my home, in the early '80s, I didn't have a Fantin-Latour." "I had a vase with some flowers in it each week, and I quite liked the idea of having a Fantin-Latour." "And I saw these in a way kind of "pop" products as a way of having that." "And it IS about acquisition." "It's driven by aspiration and a personal desire to have some things." "And following on from centuries of people NOT having things," "I mean, it's a wonder of the post-war period that people now have the opportunity to have things." "It's brilliant." "And if those things make them feel better about themselves, and without a doubt the kind of design object brings with it this sense of self-enhancement, and the sense of knowing more than you did before, these are all positive things." "Peter Saville's record covers invested design with the same cultural status as pop music, art, or fashion." "But while popular culture was, characteristically, ahead of the game," "Britain's best industrial designers were scrabbling about on scrap heaps." "I yanked two Rover car seats from a scrap yard." "And I put them on a frame." "And the mechanism is great, because... you use your back." "In modern car seats you have to turn something and here you just pull the handle back, and you decide with your back where to stop and you lock it." "And it's great." "I mean it's like, it is..." "I'm not selling it to you now, but it is an amazing seat." "It's all completely ready-made." "I mean there's not much design there." "It had more to do with" "Picasso's Toro, which is a leather bicycle seat and handlebar, making the horns, and the whole idea behind the ready-made." "In the early '80s, in Britain at least, there was, as yet, no mass-market for designers inspired as much by avant-garde art as industrial production." "But in the spiritual home of post-war design, change was in the air." "Since the end of the Second World War, nobody has indulged designers as adoringly as the Italians." "And nowhere in Italy more so than here, in Milan." "We always try to bring a concept, proposal, like the sofa to work, like the sofa to have sex, like, er, I don't know what." "Here, design is an important industrial and philosophical affair." "Its status upheld by intellectual heavyweights like this guy." "Always, always from the beginning, the idea of design was the debated as an intellectual action, and not just as a service to the industry." "And so that's why design, probably in Milano, had always the sort of, was very much related with life." "A legend in his lifetime, Ettore Sottsass was heavily influenced by the free-thinking of the '60s counter-culture." "But by the end of the '70s, in an age of increasingly conspicuous consumption, he argued that it was design's job to offer consumer choice, variety, and abundance." "And at the opening of an exhibition of furniture in Milan in 1981, he delivered, in shocking style." "Life is fashion." "Every day you are changing your dress." "I think that also you have to change your house." "You're young, you have one certain house, then you are growing older, then you marry, then you have children, then you leave your wife or you have a lover, or whatever it is." "Why should the house be a temple that never move?" "Welcome to Memphis." "A collective of young designers, brought together by Sottsass, to bring some personality to the production line." "When I saw the drawing of that, of this bookcase, was really like to, to open a totally new world." "If you put the books, the books never stand, and the books in any case, they will lie against the walls." "To create a piece of furniture to hold books, without taking care of, say, rational composition, the function to have books, I think, was really the starting point for something." "Something, that at the time we didn't know what it was." "But it's something that still is touching me today, almost 30 year after." "MUSIC: "Memphis Blues Again" by Bob Dylan" "Named after a Bob Dylan song, but also invoking the ancient capital of Egypt, and the home of Elvis Presley," "Memphis struck an "anything goes" attitude that poured scorn on the traditions of industrial design." "We started just breaking every rules." "We wanted to be more exciting, more provocative with colours, decoration, unbelievable shape, unexpected furniture, unexpected idea of environment." "Something that could create a positive, happy, friendly relation with furniture, environment, technology without any convention, without any possible..." "..rule coming from the past." "But the ringleader of the Memphis rebellion understood that to break the rules, it's best to master them first." "Sottsass really was a very capable, traditional industrial designer." "I mean he made all kinds of objects, tape recorders, typewriters." "Sophisticated, complicated, industrial design tasks." "Memphis really was a reform from within industrial design, to break functionality and to sort of liberate design to go into spaces that it had forbidden itself." "For Memphis, the principles that had underpinned good design throughout the 20th century - rational, functional, long-lasting - were a thing of the past." "In the fashion driven, free-market, consumer society, the customer was king." "And if he or she wanted multi-coloured, wonky shelves in plastic laminate this season, then they were going to get them." "Sottsass' furniture, for good or for bad, was perhaps the signal disruption of the continuous stream of modernist idealism which had begun with the Bauhaus." "Memphis certainly meant the end of the hegemony of modernism." "Modernism sought to make the world a better place for all." "Memphis prefigured a new idea, where the collective good made way for individual desire." "And that meant the rise of a new kind of designed object." "Now the flap is the same shape as the bedside table, isn't it?" "It is." "It's elliptical." "It has a handle built in to the end of it as well." "Yeah, that would make more sense of that too." "Michael Graves is one of the world's most successful industrial designers, shaping everything from salad spoons to hospital wards." "And I need a place to put it down." "He made his name first in architecture and then in design, with objects like this." "It is a little bit like a little temple, but then it isn't, it's a teapot." "In 1980, Italian steel company Alessi commissioned 11 architects to each produce a sterling silver tea and coffee set." "They were intended as exhibition pieces only." "But when Graves sold 30 or so of his set, at around 25,000 a time, this "limited edition" inspired a defining moment in the history of mass-produced design." "Alessi came to us and asked us to make what he called an American pot." "First of all he wanted a kettle that would boil water faster than any other kettle on the market." "To boil faster than others, it's a matter of the slope of the side, the coverage over the heating element." "The cone shape of the kettle." "He wanted a kettle that wouldn't burn your hand, obviously." "So the handle was going to be here, so that it's very, very comfortable, and it's also blue." "Whether one attributes red to hot, and blue to cool," "I'm not quite sure, but you're supposed to." "And the black knob here was neutral." "At this point they've sold about 1,700,000." "That's a lot." "That's a lot of tea kettles." "This is probably the best selling kettle of all time." "A design classic that has spawned countless variations and versions." "In part, its form follows function, just as the modernists insisted." "But that's just half the story." "Because this simple kettle pulled off a remarkable trick." "Here was a mass-produced object that felt unique." "A kettle with charisma, that represented a contradiction in terms." "A mass icon." "We didn't want our design objects to be so slick and abstract and born only out of the industrial revolution." "But we wanted to bring US back into it." "Long ago, in a flea market, I found a kettle that had a kind of rooster here." "It was very badly done, it was done by somebody at home, yet I thought the idea was clever." "To let the bird sing when the water boils, and it makes for the personality of this kettle." "It has created a sense of desire to own it." "Imbued with a sense of aspiration," "Graves' kettle defined much of the design of the decade, and beyond." "People really wanted to define their own sort of cultural expectations and ambitions with these objects." "And people would want you to come into their home and say, "Look at your kettle!"" "People didn't come into each other's home and say," ""Wow, I think your kettle's fantastic!"" "Years ago, if people had been very grand, and had loads of money, they'd buy great master paintings to hang in their country houses, and they'd say," ""Come and see my Turner or my Gainsborough."" "Now, the equivalent people with aspiration and ambition in a different sense, in the modern world, can say, "Come and see my kettle," ""my designer kettle, my designer lemon squeezer, my designer vacuum cleaner."" "For some, this cultural upgrade was distancing design from its unique ability to connect form and function." "Degrading it into a tool for selling us stuff." "Stuff we may want, but may or may not need." "For others it was redefining the very notion of function itself." "Here is an object that doesn't actually perform very well, that's been used across the world to proclaim design modernity in a thousand, a million new homes." "Produced by the most self-publicising, self-branded designer in the history of the universe." "When I make millions of pieces which give the right service at the right price, in the right place for people," "I have the right also to just make poetry." "The crystal speak even more." "There is a message." "I have no style." "The thing which fits the most with me is freedom." "For over 30 years Philippe Starck has been delighting an adoring audience who couldn't care less about the old-fashioned notion of "form follows function"." "It's a lot of palaver, it's not pointy enough, and the collection system is very imperfect." "You should have something that collects and filters out the pips." "That's what matters." "At some point pips will come out and where do you put them?" "They go straight in the glass." "But it's lovely fun to watch the lemon juice trickling down at those reedy, pointy bits." "I am a strict functionalist, in the way that functionalism was in the '20s, in Germany." "In the '20s in Germany, the functionalism was purely materialistic." "There was, I don't know exactly, we can say five or six parameter - the weight, how you bent the tube, how that fold and thing like that." "But since this time there is Sigmund Freud." "There is the French philosopher Lacan, and we know that there is not only materialistic parameters, there is immaterial parameters, like poetry, humour, sex and things like that." "We can say I am a post-Freudian functionalist." "But these functions now are more rich than before, because we know more about us." "That's the difference." "I am very happy because some people come to me and say, "Thank you." ""Thank you for what you do for us."" ""Oh yes, thank you, I'm very proud of that and what you do?"" ""Oh you know, I met my wife in one of your hotels" ""and we had so good sex in your hotel guest room!"" "Perfect, thank you very much." "Thank you." "Really that touched me because, finally, it's a maximum I can do with my job." "We can try to inject so many things - political, sexual, la-la-la-la, but at the end, you just bring a little pleasure." "Starck's brand of pleasure-seeking raised the profile of design." "But many couldn't afford it." "And in Britain, where old habits die hard, many didn't want it." "Particularly in the home, where it took a bunch of subversive Swedes, and a biting recession, to make over the British attitude to design." "# Chuck out that chintz, come on, do it today" "# Prise off that pelmet and throw it away" "# Those sofas are girlie, too silly, too twirly" "# That flowery bed, it just does you no credit... #" "Despite pop modernism, what people were actually buying for their houses was more archaic ornaments... and all that stuff was backward looking." "# Our homes could be playful, and happy, and light... #" "So they issued these very, very funny challenges." ""Look at your ridiculous English pretensions, look at your suburban Sloanisms, and throw them out." ""Get rid of it." "Chuck out the chintz."" "CHUCK OUT THAT CHINTZ!" "YES." "CHUCK OUT THAT CHINTZ!" "ALL:" "Yes,chuck out that chintz today." "On October 19th 1987, a stock collapse of unprecedented scale pitched Britain towards recession." "The same month, on an industrial estate near Warrington, a new furniture store opened, perfectly timed to introduce the British to a revolutionary new retail experience." "Whose motto was "democratic design"." "We have always hated air, to transport air." "To be a designer at IKEA it's not enough that it looks well and works well, it has to be flat and go into a brown box." "A giant automated distribution warehouse sits at the heart of IKEA headquarters in rural Sweden." "This is the centre of the most successful global furniture company of all time." "It has single-handedly transformed the way we consume design." "And it all began 60 years ago, in 1955, with this " "IKEA's first range of furniture." "Followed a year later by this ground-breaking table." "It's a table called Lovet." "Actually our first designer, who was employed here, his name was Gillis Lundgren." "He was employed in 1954 and his work was to set up for the catalogue and the photo shooting." "And he was, have a lot of things around him, and then he had to make a photo with Lovet and not only one Lovet, there should be a number of Lovet standing there." "And then suddenly realised, well, when he was finished up, where should I place it?" "He has just a very small area." "And then he looked at it and thought, "Well why don't I just screw off the legs?"" "And that's how it started." "And from there we have been obsessed in finding ways in doing our furniture flat." "In the early '50s IKEA's founder, Ingvar Kamprad, visited the Milan furniture fair." "He loved the furniture." "He hated the prices, and vowed to democratise design by cutting the cost." "Many of our competitors, they actually use design to charge more." "Our view is exactly the opposite." "We use the design to really come to the lowest price, so people can afford to buy things." "So we have a completely other view of how to use design." "During the 1980s, design had come to mean prestige, something you paid extra for." "IKEA proposed the opposite." "You could charge less by building a whole process of industrial design around the economies that flat-pack, self-assembly furniture made possible." "It is a lot about considering all these different aspects." "Low price, long-lasting, sustainable, flat-pack." "You have to somehow solve to have a good product." "For example, how can you break down things into pieces or segments or making puzzles of things?" "Could this be repeated?" "Yes it could." "But you don't know exactly how, what kind of joint or what kind of material." "If you manage to solve all the parameters around the problem, then you have a good design and it will be, most likely, competitive among other products." "So..." "Was that clear?" "Yeah?" "Sounds simple." "But there's a twist." "They give you functional design, with just enough colour, pattern and humour to satisfy the individual in you." "Standardized but personal, mass-produced but homely, modernism meets Memphis, for the price of peanuts." "160 clicks." "Nice." "But you have to scour the in-store warehouse." "Find, fetch, carry and even build it yourself." "Not everybody's idea of retail therapy!" "It's quite difficult for me to want to, you know, condemn a business which claims to have" "560 million customers worldwide." "Can 560 million people be wrong, and can I be right?" "Well, possibly." "But I just think the sense to which the whole experience of being an IKEA customer is so diminished, to visit an IKEA store is to experience sort of humiliation and degradation and which is only normally available in a psychiatric hospital, or an airport." "It's, you know, it's a horrible, horrible experience." "But loathe it, or love it, it's curious that in the age of the individual such a depersonalised consumer experience should become so successful," "particularly when another field of design was heading in entirely the opposite direction, shrinking the ultimate industrial machine into an essential consumer product." "40 years ago, computers were vast, expensive, intimidating machines, owned by governments, corporations and military institutions, the stuff of science fiction." "But in 1984, a new machine was unveiled as the world of computing got personal." "It was launched with a huge amount of hoopla in 1984 when the famous Ridley Scott, I think, commercial based on the idea of 1984 and how we were all subject to the tyranny of the IBM computer and its dullness" "and the command line of CPM as it then was." "It said, "Hello" on it in large friendly letters, to quote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, those large friendly letters were not insignificant." "There was a keyboard and this mouse, this extraordinary mouse!" "It was just so revolutionary." "It was amazing." "Boasting a revolutionary user interface, the Apple Mac would set the bar for a new kind of digital design." "This was the dawn of a new age in which the words "personal"" "and "computer" were no longer anathema." "When we're presented with an object that is complex, it can be intimidating." "It certainly can give you the sense that we don't understand it and we are often intimidated, aren't we, by objects and products that we don't understand." "And so clarity and simplicity are, I think, critically important for us to be able to understand a product and enjoy using it." "Making design "user-friendly"" "has become essential to making once unimaginably complex technology part of the fabric of everyday life." "But Apple wasn't the first outfit to preach the benefits of this revolutionary new approach to design." "Almost 20 years before the launch of the Mac, in December 1968 a research team, funded by the American Military and headed by a young electrical engineer called Doug Engelbart, staged a startling presentation." "I hope you'll go along with this rather unusual setting and the fact that I remain seated when I get introduced and the fact that I'm going to come to you mostly through this medium here for the rest of the show." "The research programme that I'm going to describe to you is quickly characterisable by saying," ""If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display," ""backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, how much value could you derive from that?"" "Computers were big... and expensive and only very special people got to use them." "The demo showed people that computers could be useful for everyday activities for everyday people." "Let me go to a file that I prepared just after my wife called me and said, "On the way home would you do a little shopping for me?"" "So as soon as she said that I..." "got my system... ..organised." "And made a shopping list." "Doug's real interest was in designing some sort of a computer system at that point that would allow us to manipulate text, to store our documents and manipulate our documents." "I say after bananas it's more likely that I'll..." "take the carrots there and so carrots move right up behind bananas and aspirin doesn't really belong there." "People that we could get to the lab to see it could understand it, but people that didn't see it and experience it, just couldn't imagine what it was because computers were for computing." "You put cards or paper tape in and you got numbers out and that's what you did with them and the idea of using them to write documents and write programmes and dynamically communicate with one another, it just wasn't..." "They just couldn't understand it." "I mean it was just outside the frame of reference." "In an analogue age of black and white television and vinyl records," "Engelbart's boffins prophesised a digital future of personal computers, controlled simply through what the user saw on the screen." "And they built their vision around a new wooden device, as revolutionary then as it is commonplace today." "It has two wheels here... and the idea is that you hold it on a table and the wheels have a little device inside that can then tell the computer how fast they're rotating and the computer figured out how to then have a spot move across the screen." "It had a wire coming out of it, from the wrong end, actually today they come out the other end and the wire became known as the "tail"" "and the devicethen became known as the "mouse."HE CHUCKLES" "This is the one that I built in 1963." "Actually, the first mouse that was ever built." "Doug had a sketch in his, one of his pocket notebooks about something like this with two wheels and he gave it to me and I thought, that, that looks good, and that was really the first one." "The mouse and the interface it controlled, quite simply changed everything." "And Engelbart's demo represented nothing short of a design revolution, the democratisation of computing, a liberating, and lucrative prospect for the entrepreneurial young designers of Silicon Valley." "In other disciplines designers have always considered the people who are going to be using the products." "In the computer industry, the designers always consider the people who will using the products, it's just that they were all computer people until this point in time and then they were, you know, just like regular people off the street who would be using the product." "This shift changed the rules of design." "If computers were going to be used by ordinary people, it suggested, "Why not ask them what they wanted?"" "And when asked to design a computer editing system for a publishing company, that's exactly what this guy did." "So we had just hired a secretary and the day after she started" "I put her in front of a blank screen and I said," ""Imagine there's a page on the screen and here's a page of mark-ups," ""little proof readers' marks of what needs to be changed." ""Imagine that you had a way to point at the screen and a keyboard and tell me what you would do?"" "And she said, "Well, I have to delete that." ""I would point at it and cross it out." ""I have to insert some text, so I would point at the place I want it to go and then I would type it."" "So she just made it up as she went along, what was intuitive to her." "The result was an intuitive, user-friendly system, based around the graphic layout and editing features that still dominate personal computing today," "all held together by another iconic piece of design." "I'm sitting in a bar and I'm waiting for a friend of mine to show up and I'm doodling on this napkin." "And what I came up with was a desk." "And it was on the desk that the typewriter was and the editing happened, and the in/out trays for handling the mail." "Separate from that, there was an icon that represented a printer and another one that represented a file cabinet and one that represented a trash can." "And what I saw in this was the ability for people to... basically manipulate objects in a, you know, almost in a physical way." "The majority of things we control, we control physically." "You know, you drive a car, you pick up a pen, and so what we were looking for was an analogue to the way we controlled a lot of other tools and a lot of other devices in our lives." "The user interface developed at Xerox PARC brought together the mouse and the desktop and directly inspired the team behind the Apple Mac as its designers became obsessed with how to make a personal computer not just functional, but friendly." "We'd been struggling with having menus on the top of a window so I ended up, I said," ""If we put the menu at the top of the whole screen," ""then we always have the full width, we always have the full height," ""and every menu will feel like it has a kinaesthetic place on the screen." ""The file menu's always over here, and you can actually reach for the edit menu and be half way down it" ""before you even thought about that it was "cut" you were going for." "As you passed the names of the menus, each menu would pop down one at a time and going back and forth and it would flutter like that and the menus would come down." "You go up and down and they would highlight each item and there was just something completely different from anything you'd ever seen before." "By having these things flutter along, it feels like they're all there, but they're not really, they're overlapping quite a bit, but it feels like they're all there at any time..." "These guys could go on all night, that's what designers do." "Obsess about the details, so that you don't have to." "So, to cut a long story short, the principles of user-centred design have made some of the most complex consumer products man has ever made an essential part of our everyday world, through design that aims to be all but invisible." "I mean we're trying to define products that in a sense seem so inevitable and so natural, that in an odd way you don't almost think of them as being designed." "You know, that they, they just solve a problem, but in solving that problem they're not reminding you of the complexity of this terrible challenge that you faced as a designer." "And as a user, I don't want to be reminded about, well, you know, this was a tough problem to solve, because, you know, that's your job." "I want this product to be about what this product is supposed to do for me." "I think those sorts of preoccupations I think lead to, or can lead to, a product like the iPod." "Digital devices have become so commonplace, it's difficult to imagine how we lived without them." "But they have also prompted a profound shift in our relationship with the world around us and that may or may not be for the good." "So direct is our connection between this device we have in our pocket, and our sense of our self become, that we almost stop thinking about other people around us and that, love these things as I do, seems to me to be positively dangerous" "or malignant as an influence on society." "So, a genie has been let out of the bottle and we have to decide whether or not we understand that genie or we understand our behaviour." "Can we can compare it to when the motor car changed the world or the telephone or print?" "I don't know exactly." "If you buy an old Bell telephone system like the standard Henry Dreyfuss classic, there is a bell inside it, it rang, you picked up the headset, the headset fit on to your head, you conveyed the message, and you put it down." "Now, it really wants to work itself into the texture of your day." "The thing is alive, it's interacting with you, it's yakking, it's demanding things." ""Can I tell all your friends where you are?" ""Would you like to locate with the GPS system here?" ""Would you like to tell your friends to come and meet you, have coffee, there's a Starbucks?"" "This is a form of behaviour that we did not expect from machines." "Perhaps design has got so carried away with what it could do for us, it's forgotten to ask whether it should?" "Surely it's design's job to shield us from, as well as connect us to, technology that is changing what it means to be human?" "These are issues yet to be fully explored." "Lucky then, that designers may find themselves with time on their hands because digital devices are also shrinking the world of industrial design." "If an object has all this in-bred interactivity in it, what are industrial designers supposed to do with objects?" "Suffer." "MP3s do not require racks." "All this ingenuity that was invented, and CD racks, telephone answering machines, fax machines, music players of all kinds, pocket calendars, tape players, cassette players, video players, cameras, video cameras, it's as if they were designing magic lantern slides." "It's just plain gone." "There are some who see the future of design entirely in these immaterial terms, physical objects becoming largely a thing of the past." "It sounds far fetched, but it's certainly worth thinking about, because otherwise we're headed for a crisis." "The history of industrial design is the story of how capitalism's primal urge to make more for less, transformed the natural into a designed world, full of stuff." "But with landfill sites bulging... ..and oil slowly but surely running out, it seems that the age of conspicuous consumption may have come to an end." "Or maybe not." "APPLAUSE" "These are astonishing times and I'd like to talk this morning on theme of Greener By Design, as a celebration of abundance and I'd like to use the concept of abundance rather than limits as the framework for our thinking." "This looks like an ordinary office, with ordinary desks and ordinary chairs, but what you're looking at is a radical design response to a global crisis." "Well, this looks like it's just an office chair, but it's not." "A typical chair is not designed for future generations of materials." "Often it creates what we call hybrids of materials, so the plastics are attached to metals, different plastics are fused and glued together." "They can't come apart." "All the elements of this chair, the plastics, the metals, the wires, the fabrics, are all designed to be safe for human and ecological systems" "and it can go back in its part to industrial materials that can go back to becoming new industrial products." "Voila!" "Often times when things are, quote, "recycled"" "they're actually down-cycled, they're actually losing quality on the way." "So you might take milk jug or a piece of clear plastic and then recycle it into something that's dark plastic that is an amalgam, a sort of melange of materials and it's what we call down-cycling." "In the case of this chair, we're looking at true recycling, that everything here is designed to stay at its level of quality as it goes through the recycling and not get mixed up into a park bench" "or a speed bump or a flower pot, but to actually be available to industry at the highest level of quality." "So it's what we call you know, "cradle to cradle" design." "The Think Chair is the world's first, fully certified Cradle to Cradle product." "Its components and materials, all of which are entirely non-toxic, are designed to be infinitely reused." "If all products were made this way, our whole world could be produced and reproduced over and over without the need for any new raw materials from mass-produced objects to the ground beneath our feet." "Well this is something as simple as a piece of carpet, but the materials it's made out of are designed to be infinitely reusable." "So this carpet has been fully defined as a "technical nutrient carpet" in our language." "So this is a polymer that makes the face fibre and this is the backing." "So the tops are designed to be separated from the backs when it comes back for reuse and then the top becomes caprolactam once again and becomes the face fibre and the bottom becomes this thermoplastic polyolefin and it gets remade into a new carpet and out it goes." "There's about two billion kilos of carpet waste in the United States every year and so you can imagine if these carpets could become carpets again forever, we could take this into a giant polymer bank of two billion kilos" "and turn it into our carpet for the United States ad infinitum." "Made from new materials so green you could safely eat them this carpet turns the prevailing idea that we need to consume less on its head." "With Cradle to Cradle design you get to be ecological AND keep shopping." "I think with environmentalism, a lot of people think we have to cut back - the exciting thing about Cradle to Cradle is that things are designed to either go back to soil safely or back to industry forever and so we can celebrate consumption instead as something that destroys the world," "as something that enhances the world." "Edible carpets and reusable chairs may, or may not, be the answer to the crisis facing industrial design." "But it is a characteristically creative response to a human problem, another bold attempt to reshape, improve and make sense of our world." "That's what design does and that's why we need it now, perhaps, more than ever." "This ability to sort of back away from the material world and think about it in methods which are wiser, deeper, better considered, that's what differentiates design from all the craftwork that's been going on ever since we were pre-human." "It's deep." "It's not a superficial practice." "It's not about glamour or branding or typography, it really is about mankind and what mankind has created and that's...that's a big issue." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "Email subtitling@bbc.co.uk"