Over the past few months the New Zealand Labour party has been
releasing a slew of policies, something that might be expected given that it's an election year. At first glance, these
announcements appear somewhat fragmentary and devoid of holistic
application but, in the absence of any clearly articulated policies from the
current National party government - other than a general commitment to drilling, mining, irrigating, building motorways and selling state-owned assets for the benefit of a wealthy few - they’re a
welcome indication of what the opposition would do should it succeed to the
Treasury benches following the general election in September. This past month (17 April) saw the launch of Labour's manufacturing policy, which addresses the recent hollowing out of the country’s manufacturing sector, once its
largest source of employment and a generator of research and skills. Underpinning these policy announcements have been a number of speeches by key
members of the Labour caucus identifying the country’s growing inequality and suggesting ways this condition might be addressed.
Taken together, these policies suggest a significant change
in ideological direction by the Labour party, hitherto - at least since 1984 - in thrall to the siren song of the
free market. In some respects these recent announcements appear to mirror the
radicalism of those that saw Labour elected for the first time in New Zealand
in 1935, but they’re not. What they represent are well-informed, more nuanced,
better-targeted responses to a sustained crisis of capitalism, in a country
that, in population terms alone, is not only many times larger than it was eighty years ago but also increasingly
complex in terms of the economic and social challenges it faces. Moreover,
despite the current government’s increasingly colonial relationship with the
People’s Republic of China, New Zealand no longer depends on a single market as
an outlet for its primary products.
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| Unidentified designer, cover of Manufacturing: the new consensus (Wellington: New Zealand Parliamentary Services, 2013) |
Labour's manufacturing policy is a considered response to the
issues raised in the parliamentary opposition’s timely and comprehensive 2013 inquiry
into manufacturing, Manufacturing: the new consensus. The parliamentary inquiry recommended three central
proposals (out of a total of eleven) that suggested ways in which New Zealand’s
manufacturing sector might be revitalised. The first recommendation that: ‘The
government adopt macroeconomic settings that are supportive of manufacturing
and exporting’ is hardly radical but entirely pragmatic given the desired
outcome of greater industrial activity. The second recommendation ‘that New
Zealand businesses are encouraged to innovate’ is consistent with progressive
attitudes to manufacturing that reject the supposedly laissez-faire doctrine of
neo-liberalism and articulate a role for the state in encouraging an economic accruals
that benefit the entire country, not just a particular, investor elite.
Recommendation 3, which argues that ‘The Government [should] adopt a national
procurement policy that favours Kiwi-made and ensures that New Zealand
manufacturers enjoy the same advantages as their international competitors’,
is, again unexceptionable, at least when viewed from the perspective of the
left.
It’s the second recommendation that warrants some unpacking
because its promotion of innovative, research-based research carries the
inquiry’s few and fleeting references to design. The first mention refers to an
OECD report that identifies design as being one of the agglomerate benefits of
manufacturing (p. 15). The second observes that in respect of research and
development in manufacturing industry that many submitters to the inquiry had
cited the ‘Better by Design’ model ‘to meet business needs in a timely,
cost-effective and competent manner’. (p. 23). 'Better by Design' is a
management-focussed programme operated by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, an
SOE working under the aegis of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and
Employment. It emerged from the recommendations of a ‘Design Taskforce’,
established in May 2002 by Jim Anderton, the Alliance party minister of
Economic Development in the first Clark Labour-led administration.
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| Charlie Ward, cover of New Zealand Design Taskforce, Success by design: design makes first world economies (Wellington: Industry New Zealand, 2003) |
Parliamentary inquiries into manufacturing by progressive
political parties are hardly a new thing: the British Liberal party undertook a
similar exercise in 1928, only beaten by the British Labour party which set up
a parliamentary inquiry ‘into the conditions and prospects of British industry
and commerce with special reference to the export trade’ during its brief term
in office in 1924, although its final report wasn’t published until 1929 when
Labour regained office. The aims of the 1924 British inquiry don’t seem too
different from those of the 2013 New Zealand version, which aimed to ‘ascertain the problems confronting manufacturing and policies that political parties can adopt to best deal with those problems'. Indeed, both inquiries had the overriding aim of dealing with the problems and implications of free trade regimes.
An innovation of the 1924 inquiry was that it addressed the impact
of research and development on manufacturing and trade at some length. More
significantly, it also argued for a greater recognition of the role of design
and designers in the manufacturing process and even alluded to the need not
only of educating designers and consumers but also taking into account their
needs and requirements through recognition of the ‘distributive trades’:
There is no doubt that the
tendency of modern industrial and commercial organisations to widen the gap
between the original producer and the ultimate consumer has thrown into the
hands of intermediate buyers and salesmen, both wholesale and retail, an
increasing power of influencing for good or ill, the standard and trend of current
industrial art’ (Great Britain. Committee on Industry and Art, Factors in industrial and commercial
efficiency (London: HMSO, p. 351).
It was a lesson that the New Zealand ‘Design Taskforce’
resolutely ignored throughout its recommendations that design was not only a
producer-led process but also, in what it described as an increasingly global
manufacturing environment, something that transcended international
borders. For the Taskforce, and for the
‘Better by Design’ programme, local manufacturing is something of no great
importance other than an opportunity for designer engagement. In the
neo-liberal doctrines espoused under the ‘Better by Design’ regime production
is best undertaken where production costs are the most competitive.
Design, at least as we understand it today, is a product of industrialisation; modern capitalism.
It developed from the need to plan and shape the form of industrially-produced
commodities in order to meet the demands of a newly invented, democratised, class of consumers. It expanded its scope in order to sell those same productions, by mediating, shaping and educating the desires of consumers; and
it matured as its role was accepted as part of the way we construct our
material world. But according to many practitioners, the current primacy of a
global market-driven economy hasn’t had a negative impact on either the quality
or the availability of design production. The received idea many, mostly
corporate, designers promote is that even though things might be physically
produced elsewhere, they can always be designed by practitioners based anywhere in
response to local market requirements; it all depends on the brief.
This glib reasoning, posits design as operating in a
producer/distributor/designer bubble. A good exemplar of this way of
thinking can be found in a recent addition to the Auckland bus fleet. In
January 2011 New Zealand Bus Ltd, formerly Stagecoach New Zealand Ltd, a
subsidiary of the British Stagecoach Group (sold November 2005), and operator of most of the Auckland isthmus bus network, announced that it was to invest in
a new bus fleet. Its chosen supplier was the Scottish bus and coach manufacturer,
Alexander Dennis Ltd.
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| Unidentified designers, New Zealand Bus branded ADL Enviro 200 midi bus (2012) |
It is perhaps no coincidence that the majority shareholders
in both the Stagecoach Group and Alexander Dennis Ltd are the Scottish transport
operators Sir Brian Souter and his sister Ann Gloag. New Zealand Bus has
subsequently acquired three hundred and fifty ADL Enviro 200 midi buses at a cost of around
NZD150 million. Designed in 2006 and looking very much the product of the automotive and transport design course at Coventry University, the bus has proven inappropriate for New Zealand conditions: among other things, critics have pointed out that it is too small to cope with current passenger numbers; the rear of the bus is
too low for many passengers; and the doors, seats and aisles too narrow for the
New Zealand commuter environment. At a rate of thirty per cent of the adult population, New Zealand does, after all, have the second highest levels of obesity in the Anglophone world.
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| Douglas Scott designer, AEC Routemaster bus (1947) |
Probably the most successful urban bus design of all time was
the London Routemaster, a bus design developed between 1947 and 1956. Notwithstanding its universal popularity, the design of the Routemaster responded to a very London-centric brief: it was economical, lightweight,
agile, highly practical, and equipped - by Douglas Scott (1913-1990) - with comforts, such as heating and moquette-upholstered seats, that were as
good as, if not better, than those available in cars of the time. It’s no
coincidence that the Routemaster was designed within the context of the
post-war command economy and at a time when the state had effectively made
design its own through bodies such as an enviably well-funded design
promotion body, the Council of Industrial Design (1944), programmes such as the
Utility rationing scheme (1941-1951) and design-driven mass-visitor exhibitions such as Britain Can Make It (1946) and The Festival of Britain (1951). The
success of the Routemaster design, still in (limited) service some sixty years
after its introduction, stands in marked contrast to the contrived gimmickry of
the latest London bus design (Heatherwick Studio, 2013), an ungainly, expensive, late
post-modern ‘tribute’ to the erstwhile prototype.
Auckland’s inappropriately accommodated, dysfunctional, midi
bus and London’s self-indulgent parody bus both represent different aspects of
the way neo-liberal entities in both the public and private sectors employ design as a mechanism for maximising profit while
minimising the role of users and consumers. The design of these buses
illustrates the problematic confronted by manufacturers, exporters, progressive politicians and
administrators as they attempt to grapple with New Zealand’s growing manufacturing
hiatus. Like many political announcements made by under-resourced opposition parties, Labour’s
policy statement on manufacturing is big on vision but short on detail; nonetheless it's, at least, a step in the right direction. If design is to be a part of that
vision of a reinvigorated manufacturing sector, it has to be a model of design that allows for a more nuanced understanding of
the process than is found in the approach encapsulated by the 'Better by Design' programme: a corporate fantasy of producer-driven mediated gloss on commodities fabricated elsewhere.
