BBC - The Genius of Design 1 of 5 (Legendado)

[Music] attention please at 1:30 smart and living showcase is being held in the central feature with all the latest Innovations for saving money and energy for each room in your home at the ideal home exhibition in London people come and go dreaming about new labor saving devices new possibilities new designs for living it's a fantastic product okay and then you lean on it and you get your French fries not everything here is a design classic but everything here has been designed to meet a need ful a desire or simply to raise a cheer at The

Breakfast [Music] Table the people who worry about this kind of stuff are called designers they worry about stuff not in general but in particular the fine detail of stuff the stuff we build our lives from they worry about it so that we don't have to our mission our reason to to be doing what we're doing is to uh make a make a better world for the small things okay they're not scientists they're not engineers they're certainly not writers but they're doing work which is extremely critical to the function of our society andan if design has

got anything to offer us it ought to be that our relationship to objects becomes more thoughtful wiser deeper better considered you can be a plumber you can be a journalist you can be a designer it's exactly the same thing one clear way for me to deserve to exist is to serve you don't think about your toothbrush being designed until you put a badly designed toothbrush in your [Applause] [Music] [Applause] mouth so where does design come from what does it mean to be a designer what is the special nature The Genius of this thing that we

call Design this series sets out to answer those questions and along the way we'll tell the story of the world that the designers have made for [Music] us [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the world can be a hostile Place For Us human beings but frail and fragile as we are we've managed to survive it and even thrive in it thanks to our innate skills as designers starting from the simplest Stone ax we've developed tools of increasing sophistication that offer a handle on the most unpromising [Music] environment in fact our design skills have reached such Heights that

these days we even manufacture fax similes of environments which were once all too real and [Music] threatening as for the modern city the sheer density of design here reaches an almost organic level of complexity the modern city is a new kind of nature man-made nature it reflects back an image of ourselves through the things we have [Music] designed but for the designer The World is Not Enough plans for a new improved version are always on the drawing board I think designers um always imagine that something could be better that uh whatever it is now uh

rethinking um taking advantage of new technologies of production all of that I think drives them on to the idea that they're making a better mouse trap this is a standard measuring cup but the key thing is is that it's made to be um so that you can read it from above and it's resting on the tabletop and it's stable how many of us when you put stuff in a liquid in a measuring cup you have to then hold it up and if it's a liquid then it gets Disturbed and you can't quite tell and it's

this kind of thing by the way that I love about design because some of the problems of the world are so difficult to solve problems of disease of poverty y uh my gosh how are we going to solve those problems and so it's inspirational to see somebody actually solve a problem uh it's not a huge problem in the world but at least it was [Music] solved this is Rams in a 50-year career he can claim to have solved his fair share of problems with products you may well have switched on or washed up at some

time or other if you didn't notice them Rams would be pleased design says Rams should be as discreet as an English butler but I had in my mind too makes the S more quieter [Music] that I always had in my mind Rams is in Tokyo to oversee the opening of an exhibition dedicated to a lifetime's work and as ever to make sure things are just so you see this is more correct now he's also on hand to explain his Ten Commandments as authoritative and compact as the original the first that is good design is [Music]

innovative the second world's good design makes a product useful uh and of course the third is good design is aesthetic design within the design world there's long been a controversy of whether a designer is an artist or the designer is an engineer or the designer is a servant of the corporate world for me the designer is all of those things they've got to worry about the economy on the one hand and art on the other they're the Nexus they're the bridge they're the crossroads good design is honest honest what's the dishonest design lying and 10

everything but good design is as little design as possible that's what I like expressing but Rams is only one voice in the world of design there are other gurus following other Commandments J ma is Ford motor's Global head of design Oklahoma born and London based maiz is ultimately responsible for the look of around 80 million Ford cars on the road today for me design is nothing more than a Communications tool it is a way to bend the sheet metal in such a way that it communicates the values of the brand and pulls the customers in

makes them Reach in their it pull out the money and pay for the car and design is not an analytical process it's a it's an emotional process I always say if you if if you look at the customer go into the customer's home as an example and you will see who they are see that same customer driving around in their car and that's who they want to be the problem with people movers generally is that I always think they look as though they smell like diapers it's essentially a very functional object so the goal with

this vehicle back in um about 2004 when we started designing it was to introduce a new design language into the Ford of Europe products and we call that design language kinetic design now kinetic design is a design language that should visually communicate the idea of the vehicle really moving even when it's standing still a lot of people ask me if kinetic design has a function uh yeah the function of kinetic design is to put a smile on your [Music] face however you define it whether you're from the church of rams or the school of Mae

we are now in the position of being able to take good design more or less for [Music] granted well-designed well-made and affordable products have become the Givens of advanced capitalism along with democracy wireless internet access and skinny l but good design is the product of a complex Rich history in which the definition of design and the role and status of the designer have changed as the tectonic plates of Economics politics and Society have [Music] shifted capitalism industrialization Mass produ miniaturization new materials new technologies consumerism globalization environmentalism War and Peace fads and fashion the design world

has mirrored every move we have made in fact the story of design offers an alternative history of the modern world told through stuff and the players in this version of History aren't politicians or revolutionaries artists or philosophers they're the cups and chairs appliances and vehicles the tools gadgets and and gizmos of everyday life but before all that there was this in the story of Design This is the Garden of Eden before industrialization and mass production divided the designing of things from the making of things before the industrial Revolution this is how Stuff got made by

Craftsmen and women operating out of small workshops turning out a limited range of products in small runs each piece could be made broadly to the same design but each was a little bit different from its siblings the result of its own moment of creation the latest expression of the workshop's collective skill though you may be producing dozens of pieces there's still an individuality to the pieces so uh they don't need to be exactly the same but as long as each one has a bit of life has a flavor I suppose that's the important thing that

each piece speaks part of what the client the customer is looking for is that essential part of the maker and that's that's what the the buying really is not just the object it's everything that's gone into the making of that piece glass can be a little surprising at times so you think it's going to do one thing and it does something slightly differently and people can't really tell you what it is to do you've got to feel it and you've got to be able to do it so you make an awful lot of mistakes before

you get it right I think one of the differences between the handmade pot and the industrial pot is about truth to materials the clay has a life of its own and so you have to be in sympathy with it as you get more practice at doing different designs then you get neater at them and neater at them so the first ones we did were quite scruffy and then they got a bit better but then they went a bit too neat so then we had to go back again and just try and make them look a

little bit more design will evolv both from the concept through the uh investigation and development work but also once we start to make a design once we've decided on a combination of formula the pieces will evolve that one's I think the most pleasing so far is that compared to the first of the series uh this one is is much more generous I mean it's a it's a it's a different pot um it's designed to be far far more open and generous than the first one but I'm pleased it's got some life it's got a bit

of a spring to it it's got a couple of Vari bubles in it but hey ho for industrial designers the hand and eye of the Craftsman is both an inspiration and a standard to Aspire to my grandfather he was the specialist for surfice for pianos and I learned from him to polish by hand and his tum was like his tool like a tool much thicker as mine he was thinking not in Mass products and that is what we have to think today too we have to change Mass products into quality products but controlling a multifaceted

manufacturing process is more challenging than throwing a pot on a wheel designing industry is based on a bold premise that the Craftsman's skills can be replicated by a mechanical system in which machines act like humans and humans like machines what happens in a in a mass production system is that the craftsmanship is actually transferred from the people who are physically assembling the product back up the chain away from the massive workers who are actually doing the assembly and the labor historians actually have a word for it they call it deskilling it says we're going to

take the skill away from the majority of people and we're going to invest it in in a smaller group of people who are either designing the systems or making the Machinery that the mass of the people are using design was one of the more intriguing byproducts of the Industrial Revolution along with consumerism capital ISM global warming and two and a half centuries of social upheaval Design's Godfathers were the 18th century entrepreneurs eager to find new ways of making more for Less the Stafford Potter Josiah Wedgewood led the way exploiting new machine AG production methods some

of which are still in use at the Wedgewood Factory today but keeping the customer satisfied also meant seizing on the latest management thinking about ways to organize train and exploit workers Central to the new thinking was the idea of the division of labor the port vs one of wedgewood's most celebrated technical achievements is still made today using the same system I'm a Prestige figure maker big yeah 27 years yeah straight from school at 15 filled the the plaster mold with clay and now I'm just going to scrape the excess clay off so that you end

up with just the figure in the mold when I finally get the figure out it goes to the or to be ornamented so someone else puts the figure on yeah the ornamented the trickiest part is when I'm actually getting the figure out some people call the tool that I actually use a spat but all the girls who have ever done this job this is a Wadley a Wadley a Wadley because we waddle like a duck there's 18 figures on the Portland vs and these are the same figures I think that from when Josiah started you

those ter of course I've been in this 27 years one of the other specializations created by the division of labor was the individual who had one day become known as the designer but who in wedgewood's day usually went under the label artist but whatever they were called in the new era of industrial production they were the ones responsible for creating the original designs from which all subsequent copies would be made today at the Port Maran Potter in stoon Trent the chief designer is Julian teed he learned much of his craft from the late Susan William

Ellis Port maran's owner designer and enduring inspiration she would spend hours and hours uh drawing she would go to bed with a Sketchbook this is an example of Sketchbook she was a a prolific Sketcher she would sit up all night drawing no need for computers with uh Susan I can tell you and then I'd come in to work the next day and she'd say Julian come and have breakfast with me and we go through and sit out in the garden especially in the summer fantastic I mean it's such an experience for me um and she'd

show me all these drawings that she done at like 3:00 in the morning Julian is working with modeler Mark castry to create a commemorative mug based on one of Susan's original designs from the 1960s the modeler makes a master pattern in plaster which will in turn be used to make the production molds from which the mugs themselves will be made every industrially manufactured product from a paperclip to an Airbus has to go through this tooling up process an act of faith on the part of the manufacturers there's a lot of upfront cost with industrial design

the product designers are carrying in effect this load with them of a of a corporation that's going to make the stuff of factories that are going to produce it of people who are going to finance it of marketers who have a strategy to produce it and unless the designer is a tuned to all of those things it won't happen so it's not a casual activity and I think designers good designers know all that uh and strive to kind of Hit The Sweet Spot that will satisfy all these diverse elements for the industrial product this is

the moment of creation the chance to get everything right before the production line starts to roll what we have here is Mark modeling directly back into the plaster as you can see it's a very skilled detailed fine job and what he's putting into this mug now is his soul that's going in there right now you're watching it as he's scratching it in and it'll stay there forever so when you go into the shop and you you buy a mug for12 that has got a part of Susan a part of Mark part of me it you

know that's the passion of pottery and pottery is about passion there's no doubt about it you know we're making pots out of mud that's what we're doing at the end of the day we're digging mud out of the ground and we're putting it through flames and to do that with real passion you need people you can't do it just with machines mass production complicated ideas about beauty show the average romantic poet a Grecian n or even one of the imitation earns turned out by the Wedgewood Factory and he would tell you that beauty is truth

truth beauty but what about the beauty of a bridge made of iron the Iron Bridge in C Brookdale is an early Testament to the beauty of the machine made and the truth of the mass produced The Modern Age of industrialization was allowed to speak through the Ironbridge with its own distinctive voice [Music] the Iron Bridge had its Origins with another 18th century entrepreneur Abraham Darby unlike Wedgewood he worked with molten iron rather than pable clay in the early 18th centur Cy he invented a new way of casting iron using multiple molds made out of sticky

green sand the simple Brilliance of Darby's method was that once the iron cooled the molds could be broken the product removed and the sand remolded from a master pattern this is all really sort Advanced sand castle building but for an industry and the point being that once you've invested in your pattern you can use that again and again and again and again to make molds doesn't matter then that the molds get destroyed cuz you can reuse the sand it's only sand but the value is in the pattern the top seller from Darby's C Brookdale Ironworks

was this Quaker plain functional and durable the Darby cooking pot came in a variety of sizes and any color you wanted so long as it was [Music] black the significance of all this is that um this is really the sort of one of the first mass produced industrial objects I mean there's a lovely bit in Derby's patent which says this he's got a better method of cast in pots and this will be of great benefit to the poor of the Kingdom in other words there's a lot of the poor of the kingdom and I could

sell a lot of them you could say Derby was the designer I mean it's a classic one where coming up with the process manufacturing process has had a powerful influence on the design and it's just a beautifully simple thing and the only real bit of decoration on it are those two lines there and the fact that they haven't gone straight up with this it's got a lovely curve on it and that's about and it's so [Music] simple in Sheffield another design from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution is still in production Bergen and Ball's number

10 double Bard Drummer Boy sheep shears the design of the drummer boy along with the specialized skills needed to produce it have remained largely unchanged for more than 270 [Music] years for the end user the Elegance of the drummer boy shears is that they can be operated effectively with one hand leaving the other hand free to deal with a reluctant [Music] [Applause] [Music] customer what's beautiful about these and I say beautiful not in terms of form but in in terms of the way the material has been manipulated and fashioned by the machines and the way

the machines have been choreographed the steel has two functions within it one is cutting you know rigidity but suddenly we have flexibility and springiness and it's not a case of adding a handle or adding a spring or it's actually coming from the material it's reach what could be regarded as a kind of an end point so what what could we take away from this well not much we could take away the paint maybe but there's it means that uh uh when it comes to the redesign uh what do you do like Darby's cooking pot Bergen

and ball shears offer an alternative to the Wedgewood design aesthetic call it the roundhead tendency rather than the Cavalier Cavalier design like a Edwood vase offers fashion status conspicuous consumption and a willingness to recycle history round head design stands for functionality a truth to materials and production methods and an allegiance to the present a distinction that still holds true today that argument is used a lot the idea that if something is functional that it's going to be soulless that is not quite right because they do have a soul it's just that the soul is not

in the foreground it's in the background it's much deeper just like a human [Music] being but the appreciation of the Aesthetics of mass production did not come naturally particularly in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian Britain as the Machine Age advance Ed public tastes [Music] retreated the transformation of the country by industrial capitalism would take place behind a Gothic facade barnacled with knights damsels and heraldic [Music] Beasts for William Morris the most celebrated and influential designer of the 19 18 century machines were at best a threat at worst a menace he wasn't against

machines per se cuz he could see that machines could if they were properly regulated they could make life better for people but he couldn't bear the thought of this beauty being achieved at the expense of the people who were producing in these inhumane conditions and that a beautiful object really must be made in beautiful surroundings by people who are living reasonable lives lives with some pleasure in them not the kind of lives that a lot of people in Victorian England were being forced to live and work [Music] in Morris's response to the unacceptable face of

industrialization was to plan a route back to the Garden of Eden by relearning craft skills that the machine was replacing Morris had an almost instinctive need to learn how do you print a textile how do you dye and cloth the color that you absolutely want it how do you weave a tapestry and he set himself the task really of learning of mastering all these um processes believing that that was an important part of a designer's role in a way and this of course is why Morris is so important in relation to the Arts and Crafts

movement he's important as a designer as a reforming designer but at the same time he is this towering Craftsman and he's an inspiration to the Next Generation who equally see you know a different way of Designing and making objects in a smaller Workshop [Music] environment in the national archives in Q it's possible to see today what Morris was taking on when he pitted his handcrafted designs against the best that the machine AG could offer the design registers were set up in 1839 to allow manufacturers to seek copyright protection for their designs that's extraordinary the volumes

covering ceramic or metal work contain sketches or photographs but the textile registers contain actual samples cut from the original bolts of cloth hidden away from the light of day these are the xfiles of Victorian taste this is what was in the market this is everything that came this is what people sent in this is what people W registering so uh it's very representative and what strikes me is it just gives you immediately just the sheer of weight and volume gives you an idea of British output at the Time Manufacturing somewhere buried in this volume which

covers just a few months of the year 1883 are designs by Morris and Company I think William Morris was the greatest patent designer the probably that the world's ever seee and his pattern are really instantly recognizable moris was a genius at simplification and he took patterns from nature and he made them into these wonderful imaginative quite form ized but very simple patterns very unlike anything that was around at that particular period in Victorian design ah now look here we are on something quite different level we have interestingly here on this Morris and Company um textile

in fact we even have uh on the Salvage uh you can see Morrison company just beginning and then just the end the tail end as were of Oxford Street here and there's a couple of things that jump jump out at me one is the pattern it's organized in such a very tight controlled and sophisticated way that you're immediately drawn to it as something different it's quite different from if I can if I may just turn the page over um from the exoticism that we generally see in which certain basic forms are taken and then sort

of repeated added an item the thing that's different is the color because we've seen some very bright colors and some pretty obvious colors um chemical dyes and so on used in their manufacturer but here it's clear that there's something a little more natural so here he is amongst all the huge manufactures of of the Midlands and so on competing and showing his own and extraordinarily he's come up with with something quite different and offering it to the [Music] market but though Morris could hold his own on quality when it came to price his handmade labor

intensive products put him at a disadvantage to the machine-made competition Morris did try to make things in an economical way but he was always up against the problem of wanting the tremendous quality and how do you solve the problem it's the problem that's been besetting design ever since he never really solved the problem and he got into terrible torments and rages about it and said I'm spending my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich [Music] design is a serving to capitalism I think that's something that I accepted many years ago but design can

never be a pure activity because it's always connected with how things are bought how things are sold how things are used how things are thrown away or recycled [Music] all of these different aspects of how consumption operates need to be acknowledged understood and sometimes manipulated so that you can create beautiful Resolute astounding pieces of work while Morris struggled with lever of capitalism an exact contemporary of his found his place as designer in Chief to indust Ral Britain Christopher dresser was recognizably Modern in his approach to design doctor dresser as he prefer to be called can

lay claimed to being the first brand name designer with his signature appearing on many of his [Music] designs directing the work of up to 10 other designers his Studio was responsible for a wide range of products across the whole spectrum of British manufacturing the uh designed Pottery he designed uh porcelain uh he designed the silver uh both Sterling and plate he designed glasswar he designed brass he designed tin virtually every form of object you can imagine um you'll find a dresser design while Morris agonized over the byproducts of the industrial machine dresser seemed to see

only the product dresser was engaging with manufacturing he was engaging with industry and I think when you look at a lot of dresser objects maybe particularly the metal work there is a sort of dynamism and energy to his designs which seem to incapture the dynamism of the [Music] age here is a teapot which he designed in the 1870s it's a spectacular item even with this and even when it's not got any liquid in it you get this wonderful feeling of of weight it just sort of wants to pour and just little Elements which are so

beautiful um the way in which when you lift a lid um even just the way in which the knp just sort of is interrupted from flipping back by the way it meets the handle it's a beautiful piece of Victorian engineering the inspiration for dresser radical designs came from the business trip of a lifetime a 6-month trade and fact finding mission to Japan [Music] the Japan dresser visited was riding its own time machine fast forwarding into modernity after centuries of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world transforming its medieval economy into the industrial and technological

Powerhouse we think of today but amidst all the turmoil of change traditional crafts still flourished and these dresser studied with an appreciation and enthusiasm that would have delighted William Morris Japan had long been an important source of decorative inspiration for Western designers but by studying traditional Craftsman at work dresser absorbed important lessons about the unadorned beauty of the [Music] everyday the Japanese concept of beauty is not the kind of beauty that you can find in artworks or in decorative objects the Japanese see Beauty in the functionality of an item like tools and other everyday items

we place great emphasis on Harmony and being at one with the world this is engraved deeply in the Japanese mentality on the other hand in the world of design achievements have been measured by how Sensational and different a product is those designers are seeking to stimulate the soul but we think differently we want products to melt into the environment and become one with it the goal for us is creating Harmony [Music] the idea that design can have a philosophy attached to it might seem quintessentially Japanese but in the empirical West surprisingly similar ideas emerged as

industrialization gathered Pace capitalism's Primal urge to make more for Less made Simplicity an economic virtue this in turn led to the the development of a distinct design language aesthetically pleasing as well as functional that would eventually be labeled modernism in the prehistory of modernism a special place at the table is reserved for Michael tet's Bentwood chairs starting in 1859 with the model number one and culminating a few years later with the legendary number 14 these were mass-produced products precursors of our modern [Music] world this is the real original number one it's called it was the

first chair um invented and built by Michael tonet in 1859 and it was a a mass-produced item and it's the icon of the whole invention of tonet and today still today the elements we have in this chair are fundamentally exactly the same as as the chair which is manufactured now the extraordinary story about tonet is that it basically comes from an invention of bending wood with steam which completely revolutionized the construction of the chair which before was done with Morts and tenons the extraordinary efficient of taking one element of wood to create the back legs

and the actual back support in one element remains as one of the most efficient pieces of design you can make the beauty of it is um is not about just the image which is very nice and graceful but it's a fact of the lightness yeah uh the sound it makes uh um obviously the you know if you're looking at the the the chair from from a from a side view you can see it has a very very slight dish just allowing you to uh have a bit more comfort in it and you know when you

see objects like this you realize the designer is thinking more than usual thinking not just about me but also about the things that I might do with it yeah so I might take a chair and I might rest it like this so I can clean the floor yeah all these things are manifest inside the product by the closing Decades of the 19th century the techniques of industrial manufacturing had become widely established particularly in America where everything from sewing machines to bicycles were being produced to the same form fora standardized Parts made by special tools assembled

by semi or unskilled workers to a uniform design it became known as the American system and Josiah Wedgewood would surely have approved but mass production in the full modern sense of the phrase had yet to be realized industrialization's promise and capitalism's dream was of identical products by the million whose unit cost fell magically as volumes increased mass production meant the Relentless production of the same thing in sufficient numbers not only to make it universally available but to make it universally affordable as well this dream and This Promise would find their first and their ultimate expression

in a product that has transformed our lives and our world for good and Ill there are three great significant 20th century art forms I think you know one's the movies The Other second one is rock music the third is industrial design of which the automobile is the uh is the [Music] [Music] Paradigm I can't think of anything better than seeing a car that I've worked on drive down the street and I always look to see who's in it and I always look to see if it's the person that I imagined that should be driving that

car and it doesn't matter if it's the smallest or or the most expensive car it doesn't matter if it's a sports car or an SUV it doesn't matter if it's a V8 or an electric car there's a car out there for everyone the idea of a car for everyone came early on but the first time around it was the same car for everyone and like Abraham Darby's cooking pot two centuries earlier it was any color you wanted so long as it was [Applause] black Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile but he invented a way to

get it to the most possible people at a great affordable price Henry Ford said he he never spoke to his customers he said cuz if his customers um if he asked his customers what they wanted they just say Faster Horses uh he had a better idea and how to make make a faster horse the Model T was essentially a wagon that had the horses in in in the form of an engine under the seat and it completely transforms the way people think about moving from point A to point B and that was probably the biggest

thing that Henry Ford brought to society was the idea of freedom the story of the Model T begins here on pette Avenue in Detroit who designed the Model T the Clear Vision for the Model T about what it ought to be was Henry Fords and he wanted a car that was light and simple and inexpensive to manufacture inexpensive to operate but in detail he worked with a number of people who um literally sat down in a room and locked the door and they went inside and they worked the design out together I didn't there was

anybody working on the model T4 who called himself a designer you know when Technologies are new they don't need to be designed the technology in itself was so utterly utterly intoxicatingly Wonder beautiful when Henry Ford looked at a Model T he in in essence saw through the body and he saw this chassis and he knew all the Ingenuity that had been designed into it and he appreciated it to him it was beautiful the body design was a bit of an afterthought um it was necessary obviously you had to have a body and you had to

have seats and and all but um it was it was never very high on Henry Ford's list 100 years on from the birth of the Model T and car design remains a game of two halves the body and the chassis not only are they made separately they are also conceived separately the product of two different mind sets design and Engineering Wedgewood and Darby Venus and Mars it is a given that we want to be best in class in terms of fuel efficiency in terms of quality in terms of safety my role is very different I'm

sort of the Adolescent of the room I'm the guy that says how are we going to create a thrilling product for the customer so that once all of those functional requirements have been met we've actually wrapped that all in this unbelievably attractive package that wants to bring that customer into our showroom for design designers the chassis is the platform which exists to support their designs for engineers design is styling sometimes pronounced [Music] packaging the moment on the production line when chassis and body meet is called the marriage and like many marriages the outward show of

unity often masks tensions that led up to the weding day us us to be maybe in the 60s and 70s that Engineers fancied themselves as the guys that built the cars and the designers would come in and make them kind of look nice at the end so our job was really to come in and make the engineering less ugly I suppose if you if you really dig down in organizations there's always an engineer that thinks that their piece of the automobile is the most important uh as long as they understand at the end of the

day that that's wrong then I'm happy but the modal T is but more than the design of an individual car Ford's turring achievement was to design a means of production that would literally change the world they found that they could sell all they could make Henry Ford's goal however was to make all he could sell and so they essentially basically sort of froze the design of the car and then they went after the production [Applause] process for set out to do for cars what Wedgewood had done with teapots and Turin but he went further than

any industrialist had ever gone before they said instead of having one guy at a bench make a whole transmission what if we have several guys at a bench and each one does a little thing on the transmission and then shoves it down the bench to the next guy and then they said well that worked better let's try the engine let's try the rear axle let's try the front axle they were groping their way towards the assembly line and eventually it became logical to say what about assembling the whole car so that by the end of

1913 they actually had three full-blown assembly lines parallel lines cranking out model teeth when the first ones were built which were built conventionally it took 12 and 1/2 man hours to make a single car by the time mass production was fully implemented it took 93 minutes to make a single [Music] car in today's sort of fragmented car market where you've got all these different choices it's hard for us to understand that at its peak virtually half of the automobiles in the world were Model T [Music] fors [Music] but there was a fatal flaw with the

Ford system it had become too good at what it was designed to do they weren't making cars in any general way they were making this very specific product and machines that they designed were so special realized that they were only good for making parts for model T's and Ford became less an automobile company than a Model T company General Motors and Chrysler realized in the 1920s that that's what you needed to do you needed to restyle and you needed to make significant changes to the appearance of vehicles and occasionally to the functional elements of vehicles

in order to make them continuously attractive otherwise obviously the the end game would be that everybody would own a car and nobody would need to replace it you know you have to make an object not only desirable to buy but desirable to replace as well but what happens in a consumer society as soon as you establish that Baseline somebody says can I have a little more can I have a little more Comfort a little more speed a little more style colors maybe Suddenly at that point is when design was born because we had answered the

functional attributes of moving the customer from point A to point B and now we were offering the customer Custer a choice of how to go from point A to point B and then you could make the car more attractive through colors through different materials and then eventually through different shapes and that started to create the design industry as we know [Music] it falling sales of the Model T forced Ford to Halt production in 1927 and to set about designing this year's model the model A but Ford's reluctance to return to the drawing board cost his

company millions of dollars in Lost production and its place as the dominant player in the car market he had learned the hard way a fundamental truth about the consumer society that was coming into being we the people are not content with iron pots we want Wedgewood vases too my sense is that he thought that this was not only all the car you would ever need need it's all the car you should ever want and so ironically the guy who set this whole 20th century consumer culture did so much to set it in motion found himself

increasingly alienated from it and hanging on to the Model T was sort of his way of saying slow down but it was fruitless he couldn't slow it [Music] [Applause] down today we live in a post forward world a world in which Potters design on computers and print out their pots in 3D a world in which mass production has been replaced by mass customization and the buzz phrase is the market of one a world in which our appetite for stuff has become a problem we'd rather not think about too [Music] much but however our stuff is

designed and made and disposed of it remains a designed world made by us and for us overseen by designers who will continue to worry about the way things are and how to make them just a little bit better I don't want to make a new chair because I believe that there are enough chairs there but uh what is always interesting is to find a solution uh which has some new things on it for example you need a solution for soft floors hard floors and wheels you know three important things but no chair has all this

three I know okay let me sing about that now I'm still [Music] sinking designing a simple life vica Peter Owen Jones has his own plan of action in another new series tonight at 9: but next on BBC 2 we encounter the big black chair it's [Music] Mastermind