A Multigenerational World - Design To Meet The Challenge

Ground-breaking innovation means more than a clever idea; it means an idea that will make consumers happy. Good design is profitable - if you make things that work better and appeal to more people, they will pay for it.

This is what multigenerational design is... The opportunity to make life easier or happier for more people, creating something that is truly accessible, inspiring more people to try it out or use it.

It takes great skill, thought and hard work to create a design like this, so the last thing a designer wants is for their product to be copied.

As part of our sixth annual event at London Design Festival, we recorded this fantastic podcast, speaking to real design experts about how they approach design to make it better for all. Hear from Martin Darbyshire (tangerine), Johnny Grey (leading kitchen designer), Adam Thomas (disability campaigner and designer of the London 2012 Athlete's village kitchens), and Matt Dyson (founder of Rockit).

To listen to the Podcast please click here

Transcript

John Coldham: Welcome to our sixth annual London Design Festival event and podcast. My name is John Coldham and I am a Partner in the Intellectual Property Team at Gowling WLG. My particular focus is on brands and designs so I am very proud to be chairing our unique London Design Festival event and this associated podcast.

In our designs practice at Gowling WLG, we are lucky to work with some fantastic designers, big and small, who have created some wonderful things. Sometimes they are big change the world designs and sometimes they are low-key simple designs that are perhaps just as likely to have a positive effect on consumers' lives. This is the power of design; it can be subtle but one of the key purposes of good design is to make people happier.

We are honoured to organise our annual event with incredible design consultancy tangerine. Martin Darbyshire, its founder and CEO, is one of the most sought after speakers in design. tangerine's mission statement is ground-breaking innovation and design that makes consumers happy and businesses profitable. It also sums up what we are trying to achieve today.

Ground-breaking innovation means more than a clever idea; it means an idea that will make consumers happy, but what does that mean? Something that will work for more people, more accessible either in terms of disability or age or something else, something that will inspire more people to try it out or use it, something that will make people's lives easier or happier, perhaps a devise that replaces a repetitive task in an easy and cost effective way or a different way of approaching something that just makes it more intuitive and joyful. Good design makes people happy and with an appreciation of the difference people are more loyal to the brand and more likely to understand the need to charge more to support the design work involved.

The purpose of this session is to speak to some real experts in design about how they approach it and how they have made their practices or products a success. Good design is profitable; make things that appeal to more people or just work better and people will pay for it, and this is where Gowling WLG comes in. I hate to break it to you but there are people out there who are not willing to put in the hard yards and will take advantage of other people's good design. So it is important to protect your ideas and designs early. There is a plethora of ways to do that. The design protection elements are set out in some detail in our free booklet, the Designs for Life guide, which is downloadable from our website at gowlingwlg.com/designsforlife or give us a call; we love to hear from designers and do not charge to get to know you and work out if and how you might need some assistance.

So the purpose of today's event and podcast is to explore particular areas of design. This session focusses on design challenges in the modern world. One aspect of our discussion will explore how great design can improve the lives of different generations. An ageing population and a lack of affordable housing for young people means that it is now not uncommon to find two or three generations living under the same roof or rubbing shoulders in the workplace. The government has acknowledged the importance of solving the issues of an ageing society in its industrial strategy, whilst brands and designers alike are having to adapt to the shifting consumer habits of a multi-generational world in order to create innovative solutions that meet the needs of different age groups. According to research carried out by insurance company Aviva the number of young adults living with parents has increased 32% between 2005 and 2015. The number of young adults living with parents by 2025 is expected to stand at 3.8 million. But where does this leave designers? Design that focusses on the multi-generational world is one thing, but design also needs to keep the different potential users and consumers in mind when it is created. The broader of the appeal of your product the more you will sell.

With no further ado, I would like to introduce my panel of speakers on this podcast. First up we have got Johnny Grey, a legendary kitchen designer who will introduce himself in a moment. We also have Adam Thomas who has been listed as one of Britain's most influential disabled people in the Power 100 list of 2015 and is also a kitchen designer. Matt Dyson is the inventor of a product that I certainly wish existed a few years ago called the Rockit and I will let him explain what that is. And finally Martin, who I have already mentioned, who is the founder of the design consultancy tangerine.

Johnny, why don't you go first and explain a little bit more about yourself.

Johnny Grey: I came to kitchens from a completely different direction, it was more I was mentored actually by an aunt of mine who is a food writer and she opened my eyes to how restricted and limited people's kitchens were in the '60s and '70s. You've got all these advertising companies who do wonderful things but it turns out they are really telling us that kitchens have got to be cleaned up, de-hygenised and I think what they call fitted - a rebel was born. I object to that because it's got a very limited view of design, of culture and the thing you referred to at the beginning which is an emotional connection of where you are and how that space supports you. I trained as an architect and eventually started exploring the parameters of kitchen making rather than design and then I came up with this idea that you could make kitchens out of something like free-standing furniture but with hidden and very good ergonomics, and from there I sort of continued my soft rebellion.

John: Excellent, we'll hear more about your rebellion in a minute. Adam over to you.

Adam Thomas: My name's Adam Thomas. I am a spinally injured full time wheelchair user. I was injured in a road traffic accident and I say that from the point of view for the first 17 and a half years of my life I didn't really think about accessible design at all, I didn't think about society or the way society was built ... built environments, and then overnight I became a full time wheelchair user and all of a sudden found out that because of the way society was designed I couldn't access it and I was being left out. In 1981, I had no basic human rights, I had no right to education, I had no right to transport, I had no right to a social life in the fact that I physically wasn't allowed to go and see a film because I was a fire hazard, I wasn't allowed to go to a rock concert because I was a fire hazard, if someone asked me to leave a restaurant I had no rights, so if a restauranteur asked me to leave they could call the Police and get me arrested, and it's only since 1995 that disabled people started having equality through the Discrimination Act. I was a kitchen designer before and had just trained as a kitchen designer from when I was 17 and then afterwards I was very, very lucky that I had one of the few employers that would even consider employing a disabled person. I went back to work with him, he spent a fortune of his own money remodelling his showroom and making it accessible and sort of through that loyalty I've stuck with him sort of ever since, and although I've changed the way I work now I still do all of his design work for him.

John: Great. Matt.

Matt Dyson: Hi, I'm Matt Dyson. In a previous life, I worked in advertising as an art director and then retrained to become a teacher and taught product design in schools and colleges for 20 years before three years ago giving it all up to start up Rockit which is our start up business and is based around the product ... our launch product, if you excuse the pun, which is a rocket shaped baby rocker that attaches to any pushchair or pram and gently rocks it so mums and dads don't have to.

We spent the last two and a half/three years developing the product with the help of the Design Council Spark programme who gave us some fantastic mentoring and also some cash to develop our IP to create the tooling for the product and to get it to market, and we launched it in October last year and we're now selling in over 30 countries worldwide and have produced over 30,000 Rockits to date so that's my background.

John: Wow what a success story already. Martin.

Martin Darbyshire: Well John thank you for the introduction, I guess this is the fifth year ...

John: Sixth.

Martin: Sixth year and I'm one of the two founders of tangerine and have been working in the business for 30 years or so on very different kinds of projects and different kinds of clients. Largely they are very commercially driven and so multi-generational design is quite a tricky subject, it's, you know it's not necessarily very commercially compelling in many ways and design is about context and often drilling in to determine who the end customer is and creating something which is right for that end...