project 2045

Kate Schofield

Institute of Education

Kate Schofield is course leader for MA Museums and Galleries in Education in the Department of Art and Design Education, Institute of Education, where she also teaches art and design on the PGCE course. Her research interests are designer objects, their meanings and relationships with museums and galleries. RING 1995

Fifty years ago, the Design Council was founded by Winston Churchill's wartime coalition, and its job was to play a key role in shaping Britain's post-war industrial strategy. Today the Design Council has become a think-tank: a small organisation that can react to change quickly and efficiently. They wanted to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary year by looking forward instead of back - with the themes of renewal and positive change.

The Design Council set up Project 2045 on the basis of a proposition - 'what should the world be like in fifty years time, the year 2045?' All too often the question is asked what will the world be like? This innovative idea set out to give people an opportunity to visualise their hopes and dreams for the future by designing the contents for a time capsule. The project was launched to celebrate the Design Council's fiftieth anniversary year.

The Design Council asked two thousand and forty five individuals, schools, colleges, companies and institutions to contribute to Project 2045 by looking forward to the year 2045, and show in their time capsules their ideas for the future. The Design Council asked everyone to design things; products, environments, communication systems - whatever they liked - for the year 2045. They issued everyone with air and watertight time capsules in which to put a selection of their ideas and to bury or store them for future generations to discover.

It was fun, but it was also very serious, because it suggested that people were designing not so much what they wanted in fifty years time, but what they wanted now.

My involvement with this project was in two ways. First, as the tutor of a participating Art and Design PGCE group at the Institute of Education we were one of the special fifty who were selected for the exhibition of Project 2045 at the Royal Festival Hall, London, 8 December 1995 to 10 February 1996.

Second, I was the research manager for Project 2045 and as such participants were invited to send me copies or details of the contents of their capsules as they were about to seal them in order that I might undertake some educational research. In fact I saw very few examples, perhaps 25 out of a total of 2045 responses- that is about one per cent who sent me details. This was disappointing. Therefore what I discuss here is merely a few snapshots of some of the attempts to put future design ideas into capsules .

I saw no examples from the larger companies who undertook the project, such as Electrolux, Shell or W H Smith although I know they found the project particularly stimulating. The only commercial designer who sent me details of his time capsule was Paul Smith. I'll refer to him later.

Before burial of the time capsules took place, fifty were selected and held back for use as the basis for the Project 2045 Exhibition which was opened by John Sorrell in December 1995. The special fifty were chosen from the spheres of business, education, design, public and the community. Most participants had worked within the Design Council's suggested themes for the time capsules; transport, food and drink, leisure/lifestyle, buildings, clothing and communications.

The exhibition in the Royal Festival Hall foyer was a monumentally striking arrangement of curved yellow and black screens which housed ten Sony Play Stations. Applied to the screens were textual and visual images which had been extracted, copied and enlarged from selected time capsules. But the focus of the exhibition was the information contained within the computers in the Play Stations. These Play Stations were loaded with visual and audible information about participants' work which represented their suggestions for the future. This was a hands-on interactive display and where the 'player' could access any category such as, for example, food and drink, and in any order using a joy stick. The sequence of images were pre-determined within categories. The computer voice-over in the Play Stations gave a rather meagre description of each selected image and left much to the viewer's imagination and interpretation.

The public were invited to participate in the exhibition by either 'surfing through' the visual images on the computer or alternatively to respond by making use of provided paper and pencils to envisage and draw their ideas stimulated by the exhibition. A post box was provided for this. Selected ideas were then displayed to form part of the exhibition.

From my selected viewing some strong environmental green issues and ideas emerged. Although aesthetic and visual consideration were important, the use of environmentally friendly ideas and materials seemed to form the backbone of the exhibition. The Design Council's categories: transport, food and drink, leisure/lifestyle, buildings, clothing and communications promoted an awareness of contemporary issues coupled with the concept of active participation for the future.

Children's ideas for the year 2045 tended to focus on the minutiae of commodity design showing illustrations of, for example, a computerised grocery trolley, an automatic issue counter at a library and clothes made from re-cycled materials. Flying houses and glass houses also held their attention.

Designers focused attention on wider ethical and global issues. In some cases the 'green' issues were implicit but more often than not explicit. Overall there seemed to be a dilemma over governments' 'too little too late' policies and their current emphasis on 'cure rather than prevention'. Gross abuse of the earth's natural and precious resources was a theme which came through strongly. Ideas about car-free cities and more energy efficient buildings were highlighted in the lifestyle category. Skyscrapers to be used as energy collectors and wired houses with regional processing cores were put forward as ideas for future living arrangements. Rover Group who participated in the Project, suggested that a virtual-reality car will outsell a real one in the year 2045; their capsule showed a computerised image of this. On a more personal level, suggested ideas from designers and students visualised digital computer watches, retinal eye scanners, and pollution masks, solar-powered health-giving massage 'trainers' and spray-on shoes which would biodegrade. (As suggested by the author, see figure)

The food and drink category highlighted and promoted ideas to make better use of the earth's support resources. Undersea farms for edible plankton, vineyards along the banks of the Thames, re-cycled paper bottles and cultured food, were possible ideas. Many designers and students explained and visualised their ideas graphically using traditional drawing materials.

Given the suggested themes of the brief, it was not surprising that few participants considered the future arena of, for example, morals, religion, or emotions, although notably Paul Smith had broached the latter category with his idea for spray-on essences.

At the time of writing this review, half way through the exhibition, only two of the Play Stations were able to be used and working. Perhaps this is an indication that although advances in technology will be of great help to future society, it will never be able to depend solely on them .

In the work produced for Project 2045, there seems to be an emerging tension between aesthetics and ethics. On the one hand, aesthetics and design - how to analyse, develop and refine our immediate products by making micro decisions, for example how food is packaged or how cars should look: and the other hand, ethics and design - the environment as a limitless context, making design a social responsibility for designers and consumers.

The French film-maker Jean Luc Goddard expressed this tension this way 'It may be that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics but whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road'.

Similarly two broad categories have been prompted by the examples of work I have seen. The first is the small brushstroke - the particular, the here and now. This seemed to me to be very apparent in the work of schoolchildren, both primary and secondary, and in the work of many students.

Their ideas had been drawn, photographed or written in order to physically fit inside the capsule. What seemed important was the process that was engendered by undertaking the project. Most of the work was in a flat, two-dimensional paper form. Their ideas were embodied in a form of self-expression in which they visualised known objects and situations. To give some examples, there were such things as drawings of underground leisure complexes, wind-powered hover cars, teleportation units, sky tracks for traffic, homework machines and even a robot 'mum' that would do everything a 'mum' does around the home. These examples dealt mainly with new technological ideas and possibilities In these student examples the main concern was with the look of things embodied in projected ideas of technology.

The second area I am calling the larger brushstroke, that of social usefulness through design. This raises an important question. Should design in the future enlarge its consideration to more global issues, such as wider aspects of work, the home, the advent of widespread communication and the pressing issues of environmental design? For example one architectural student had spent a year designing the recreation of a crofting community in the Scottish Highlands. Through new definitions and hierarchy of space, his intention was to recreate a new environment in the far north of Scotland which would stem de-population. His measures would consolidate economic and social activity while at the same time take into account the spiritual importance of first hand experience of nature. All these ideas including photographs of the site, his working ideas and plans were contained within his capsule. Thus, a whole year's work enclosed within his capsule. He was giving future voyeurs of his capsule a broad way of thinking about design Another participant was concerned with our present capitalistic, economically-driven society. His contribution was an angry treatise on the desperate squandering of the earth's resources, and a reflection on the ethics of today.

My last example comes from a well-known British designer, Paul Smith. He gave us for his 2045 capsule, five essences in clear, glass atomisers, each with a simple one word label in Smith's own handwriting; these were: health, wealth, love, happiness and travel. Smith believes that the future will see increased simplification of design, and the packaging of emotion, luxury and well-being.

Beyond these examples lie deeper questions, can we educate future teachers, students, and designers to understand design as a social, economical and political force? How might we teach values through design? Montana the Chief Executive from the Spanish DDI (equivalent to the British DTI) says of current design teaching:

"Project design removes imagery from content"... and he continues... "divorcing design form from content or context is a lesson in passivity " 1

Victor Papanek stated recently at a conference in Glasgow:

"Design should operate within a more general cultural context and offer opportunities for new types of behaviour and lifestyle in keeping with a new notion of social equality." 2

His latest ideas are put forward in his new book 'The Green Imperative' where he talks in length and depth about the need for concern about the much wider issues and effects of design. He adds:

"The study of ethics is even of greater importance to designers at a time when environmental and ecological responsibility are crucial". 3

The social usefulness of design seems a very difficult problem to address within the confines of a tin can but educators need to pay attention to the place of design in the somewhat larger space of future curriculum planning.

References

1) Montana J., (1994) Design Renaissance, Open Eye.

2) Papanek V., (1994) Design Renaissance, Open Eye.

3) Papanek V., (1995) The Green Imperative, Thames and Hudson.

4) Moncrieff A., (1984) Messages to the Future, Futura.