The London Design Festival shows why the city is the creative capital

In the run-up to the London Design Festival (18-26 September 2010), Ben Evans, the festival’s director, spoke to Phaidon.com about why London is the creative capital, highlights of this year’s programme and why upcoming designers are lucky to be graduating now.

How does the London Design Festival differ from other design fairs around the world? 

We’re pretty young as an event – this is our 8th year.  And even in our short history we’ve seen an explosion of design led events around the world. It seems many cities – including Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Beijing and Barcelona, all of which I’ve recently visited - think it’s important to have a major design event happening in their calendar and we like to think we’ve had some influence on that. Many cities want to have a relationship with us, Beijing in particular are sending a huge delegation over this year and we’re going to be an official guest city in Beijing in 2011.  

What I think is interesting is that there is a kind of hierarchy for cities with design events, with London and Milan at the top.  Others that you might expect, like New York hasn’t really got its act together and Tokyo has slightly faded a bit. But what’s important is that cities are true to themselves and don’t try and be something they’re not.  In South East Asia, one city is yet to emerge as the design hub for the region, they’re all doing something.   

What do you think of London’s status as a design capital? 

One of the reasons that London has this design status, which can been seen from the swinging '60s, is that we’re probably more international than any other city.  Our senior practitioners our star names who came here to live and work – I’m thinking of Ron Arad, an Israeli, Marc Newson an Australian, Zaha Hadid an Iraqi – and they help to feed our design identity.  

British design is an amalgamation of influences from all over the world and that’s are unique selling point.

I know other cities look rather enviously on that, at how we’re able to sustain this powerful creative pull on the best names from other places.  They want to be here because of that buzz and it’s critical that we maintain it.

How do you see your role as director of the festival?

The festival is an umbrella brand so we work with a diverse range of 170 different organizations to reach a wide audience.  I think some of the most interesting projects question the boundaries between art and design and science, and that allows people to interpret projects in different ways. So we’re constantly trying to stretch the boundaries of design and reach new audiences and enable relationships.

What are you particularly looking forward to during this year’s festival?

As well as working with organizations and finding audiences for them, we produce a smaller number of bigger more ambitious projects that we try to put in public places. So in Trafalgar Square this year, we’re working with a team who are utilizing robotic arms from a car assembly plant; they are huge at five metres high and sitting on a two metre base, and they have a sort of human quality to them.  As far as we know eight of them working in sync has never been done before. Placing them in arguably the centre point of the city allows us to push new ideas about design to a much, much wider audience – many of whom will stop and engage with it.

What’s also important about it for us is that it’s participative.

You can send it a message and it will write it in laser and email a film of your message being written back to you.  Our biggest audience is the Great British public who have become much more confident in recent years about their design choices, to the extent that they’re commissioning pieces of work much more.  A rather cautious public who aren’t part of a design groupie have moved on from buying a prescribed taste to making all design decisions themselves.  

Which up-coming designers and creative individuals are you particularly excited by and why?

The commissions we’ve made this year are very deliberate.  There’s a Polish designer called Oskar Zieta and he’s developed this technique where he inflates steel; it comes rolled up like a fire hose and he unrolls it and through this process that he’s developed it sort of pops up, so it has this balloon like quality.  This year we’ve asked him to do an installation at the V&A, which for a young designer is quite an opportunity, but we think he’s got something and we wanted to cultivate that. The work that Zieta's done so far is quite limited - he’s created some chairs and stools using this technique, but that’s it. He comes from a country that doesn’t really have a design heritage, so he’s done this without the benefit of the London scene – he’s done this on his own.  I think Zieta's capable of great things, so we were keen to work with him.  We’re also working with Max Lamb, whose work is more sculptural as design and he’s doing an installation in plaster block in the Cast Court of the V&A.  He works using a hammer and chisel in a contemporary interpretation of that approach and when he starts he doesn’t really know where he’s going to end up and I think that’s interesting as an approach and requires an ambition and a sure hand at the same time.

How has the way in which you view design changed over the years?

I’ve got more interested in materials and it prompted me to do a project where we offered an every day material to a leading architectural designer, so for example David Adjaye did a project using tulip wood which is a very under-rated and under-used wood and he wanted to do an installation celebrating it as a material.  We did a project with Zaha Hadid who used concrete, which as a material has pretty negative associations. And actually in the concrete industry there’s been a revolution in recent years where you can have transparent concrete, lightweight concrete, flexible concrete all slightly mind-altering ideas about what concrete is about.  

I’ve enjoyed exploring how you can express design through material science and innovation in materials.

That has opened up ideas about sustainability and re-use through material.  I think the idea of sustainability has been quite a challenge for designers and I think materials and the idea of re-using materials is a good starting point.

Good design is many things.  Which one aspect of design do you give the highest priority?

I think the best design is where an idea is central to it.  So it becomes about saying something rather than selling something.  I think it’s a characteristic of design in London. There’s a lot of unfinished stories. You’ll see across the festival ideas which are not finished, they’re not sellable but they’re expressions of something.  A good illustration of this is being able to question where the value of something is – it’s in the quality of that idea.  If you look on the back of an iPhone it says designed in California, assembled in China.  It doesn’t even give the Chinese the credit for 'made in China', because made in China implies that you’ve played a greater role in the process.  It may be assembled in another part of the world, but the value lies where the idea originated and in the market place for the exploitation of that idea. 

I’ve also always been very interested in environments where you can create a world, which is dictated by a design idea. A space you can go in to which is all consuming – a different world. When I went to Japan this year for example, I went to see the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto (for which you need special permission from the Imperial family to visit).  Despite it being built around 1610, it is the most perfect experiment in the relationship between the landscape and the building, and the building is like a prototype modernist building.  It’s incredible.  Even though it was built 400 years ago it looks like it’s a contemporary space and it’s serenely beautiful.  It’s perfectly executed so you’ll be walking to a different pavilion or tearoom, which are scattered around the garden, and the texture of the floor your walking on will change to make you look down because you feel a bit unstable on your feet. Suddenly it will smooth out so you look up again and that’s the perfect point to admire the view.  I thought that was very impressive. 

What’s your advice for aspiring designers?

I’m involved in art and design education as governor of the University of the Arts London, so I’m interested in young designers and graduates and where they go and what they go on to do.  One message that people are saying is that it’s rather a good time to be graduating because although there may be fewer jobs out there, if you’ve got the right frame of mind it’s a fantastic time to go out and experiment, rather than be subsumed by products that have to go to the market.

For the energetic and innovative designers, this will be the perfect time in their lives really, and I think we’re starting to see people taking their own initiatives.

In a certain sense recessions are cleansing because the good prevails and it’s the mediocre that disappears.  So I am very optimistic for the younger generation and would advise them not to get hung up about the lack of real employment opportunities but to take their destiny into their own hands.  It becomes about trying harder.

How do you see the future of design?

If we take a macro look, the creative economy has emerged as one of the most important sectors in recent times.  One in six jobs in London is in the creative sector, and that’s important to us in terms of reputation.  People see us in many ways through the output of our creative endeavors and design is one of the flag-waving sectors of the London creative scene. I think we’re very well placed to grow as a sector as we go forward.

Ben Evans, thank you.