IDI Creative Axis - Institute of Designers in Ireland

16 RICHARD SEYMOURIf you build it, they will comeProduct designer Richard Seymour is one half of the redoubtable London design duo Seymour Powell, anda man at the top of his game. He came to Dublin at the invitation of IDI to talk about ‘optimistic futurism’,a phrase picked up from Steve Jobs, and to encourage product designers towards a kind of tough love.Marion Hancock reports.If there is such a thing as a celebrity productdesigner, Richard Seymour is one – look at thesexy portfolio, the media profile, and thecharismatic man himself, a kind of rock’n’rollhairy biker meets Orson Welles. At the momenthe’s working on Virgin’s ‘unspeakablyaudacious’ privateer spaceship which will hurlpeople into space for 4 minutes at a ticketprice of £100,000 a pop, on trains that will goat 400 mph (and will, quite likely, make a lotof air travel redundant), and on the world’sfirst hydrogen-fuelled motorbikes. This is thestuff boys’ dreams are made of, and SeymourPowell, the consultancy Seymour co-pilots inLondon with Dick Powell, has always had morethan its share of ‘deep futures’ Austin Powersprojects.Then there’s the saucy stuff. He’s designeda new kind of bra – the research requiringclose contact with breasts of every volume.And sex toys for sale in high street chemists:picture the investigations that led to the DurexLittle Gem. And self-cleaning, user-friendlytoilets (‘if you’d seen as much simulatedultraviolet backsplash as I have…’). OK,maybe the last one’s not so glamorous, butstill. As Seymour says, ‘Don’t you wish you hadmy job?’These projects do sound like huge fun, andof course not everyone gets to hobnob withRichard Branson and Steve Jobs (the latter‘like spending two hours too close to avolcano’). But lately, uneasy lies the head thatwears these serious creative laurels. It’s beenbothering Seymour that designers have a kindof carte blanche when it comes to stacking upproblems for the future. ‘I woke up one nightto the horrible truth that because everything Idid took a long time to reach the market –even a kettle takes years – each onerepresented a little corner of the future. In thefuture, there’s nobody there to stop you doingthings. So if I know what a train of 2013 lookslike, or a plane of 2050 – and I do – there’s aresponsibility that comes with that: am I doingsomething terrible?’A case in point – the ‘24/7’ sweet dispenserhe designed. This did well on the market,selling far and wide and becoming a commonsight on petrol forecourts. ‘Then one day I gotan email from somebody in Australia with thesubject line: You bastard. That got myattention. This email basically said, Iunderstand you’re the guy that designed that24/7 machine. I’m a backpacker and whereverI go in the outback, I find your fuckingdispenser in the sand’.This gave Seymour pause, since like mostdesigners he wants to ‘make things better forpeople, either physically or emotionally orboth’. Since then he’s been thinking a lotabout the mindset of the future-facing productdesigner. To make things better, he says,what’s needed is to look back with honesty (‘tofix the sins’) and to look forward with a blendof conscious responsibility and perkyinventiveness, even when the signs aren’tauspicious. ‘I switched on the news recentlyand the head of MI5 in London was sayingthey’re looking into 60 different terror plots,some of which may involve nuclear materials’,he says. ‘Now I can clutch my head and saywhat’s the point in getting out of bed, it’s allterrible...but if I wake up pissed off andapproach my designing table overburdenedwith negativity, then at least a bit of the futureis going to be shit.’Dreaming up a positive future should alsoinvolve seeking the mundane and replacing itwith ‘minor magic,’ such as the sleep light onthe Mac; the way a car’s interior light fadesslowly not abruptly. It’s all about the designerusing his or her own mind and senses toexamine what’s worked and what hasn’t, andto forge a positive way ahead – forget focusgroups. ‘I never do them’, says Seymour. ‘Theamount of crap that comes out of them, andthe money wasted on them, is unbelievable.’What he does instead is ‘video anthropology,’videoing people and then watching the footagewith the sound turned off, the better to see‘what the animal does’. When he wants towatch a physical task being performed, he maythrow in some diversionary questions, thebetter to see the animal in action. ‘It’s not thatpeople lie. It’s that they don’t know what they