Grinyer has potential to be a strong champion

One of the significant aspects of the Design Council’s new directorship – and the main reason given by Clive Grinyer for accepting it – is the link it makes between design and innovation.

Too often you see the two divorced, the one dismissed as mere “styling”, the other as pure invention – as Grinyer has observed, even the Design Council-backed Millennium Products too often smack of innovation without much design. Yet a combination of the two elements is what makes product design great. Take Jonathan Ive’s work with Apple Computer and TKO’s with Trevor Bayliss on the BayGen wind-up radio and on the innovative washing machine created by Martin Myerscough’s company Monotub.

Grinyer is well placed to do the job. He’s worked on the consultancy side – notably at Tangerine, which spawned Ive’s career, Ideo and Fitch. But he’s also got his hands dirty on the client side, at one time heading up the European design studio of Korean home electronics company Samsung and now with hi-fi specialist Tag MacLaren Audio. His experience has given him an international perspective, which should cut some ice with bigger UK and multinational business players.

The key is for the Design Council to get right behind him – and we had a hint in Design Council chairman Christopher Frayling’s “six heresies” speech at the recent opening of Design in Business Week that UK industry was now even higher on the council’s agenda (DW 3 November).

It’s up to Grinyer to build on the resources within the council and elsewhere to push the design cause within big business, not now so much by raising awareness – thanks to previous efforts there’s lots of that – but, as he is briefed to do, by creating “tools” to help clients integrate design into the heart of their operation and measure the results. But he would do well to also look to the design community as a source of both practical help and inspiration.

He says he wants to bridge the gap between the design community and the Design Council. The mechanisms for that already exist on an official level, not least through the Design Unity initiative in which the council has long played a fundamental part. But if he can harness the best creative minds in the business, in the way that British Design & Art Direction did in the 1990s, in the post-Edward Booth-Clibborn era, he could really make a difference.

But it has to be a two-way process. Potentially, the design community has a strong champion in Grinyer. Let’s get in there and support him. The benefits of his efforts can only help design businesses in the long run, and how fantastic it would be to play a part.