(established 1944)
Originally founded as the Council of Industrial Design (COID) under the British Board of Trade in 1944, this body was perhaps the world's most influential state-funded design promotion organization of the second half of the 20th century. It also influenced the establishment of many similar bodies in Europe, the Far East, and Australia. In its formative years the COID was seen as an important propagandist in Britain's post-Second World War efforts to penetrate overseas markets with well-designed goods. On founding its chief aims were to promote ‘Good Design’ in British industry and to disseminate design advice and information to manufacturers, government departments, and others. It was also charged with the organization of design exhibitions, advice on design education and training, and the schooling of the public in the social and aesthetic benefits of well-designed goods.
The COID's first major project was the mounting in central London of the 1946 Britain Can Make It (BCMI) exhibition, designed by James Gardner and architect Basil Spence. In addition to its propagandist role in relation to manufacturers and consumers BCMI was also planned as a shop window for British industrial design in the market places of the world. It was visited by 1,432,369 visitors and sought to educate the public through such displays as Misha Black's ‘What Industrial Design Means’ and the holding of a Design Quiz which gave visitors the chance to involve themselves with the precepts of ‘Good Design’. There were also all kinds of room settings to interest the public in the possibilities of a well-designed post-war world, an outlook reinforced in succeeding years by the furnishing of show houses around Britain. In the following year the COID mounted an Enterprise Scotland exhibition in Edinburgh. Other activities initiated by the COID in the 1940s included a series of ‘Design Weeks’ around Britain, consisting of exhibitions, lectures, conferences, and discussions and also put together educational packages with wall charts and other visual material for distribution in schools. Training courses were mounted for retailers, buyers, and others involved in the distribution of design and, in 1949, the COID's major propagandist magazine, Design, was launched. Another major exhibition initiative in which the COID played a chief role was the Festival of Britain of 1951. Originally conceived as an international exhibition, the Festival was downgraded to a national exhibition with major design displays on the South Bank, London, as well as the Exhibition of Industrial Power in Glasgow and the Ulster Farm and Factory Exhibition in Belfast. A Land Travelling Exhibition, with an emphasis on industrial design and production techniques, toured many major industrial cities whilst a Sea Travelling Exhibition toured ten major British ports. On the South Bank, the COID was responsible for selecting all of the industrially produced goods on site. The public could see many aspects of design relating to the home in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion, where many interior settings were on display. At the Live Architecture exhibition in East London they could also view a show house, a primary school, and shopping centre. For much of the period the Festival Pattern Group was coordinated by the COID's Industrial Officer, Mark Hartland Thomas. It sought to use crystallographic diagrams as the basis for contemporary surface patterns for a wide range of design media including textiles, ceramics, tableware, glass, paper, and furniture. Twenty-six manufacturers participated in the scheme including Josiah Wedgwood, Chance Brothers, Goodearl Brothers, Spicers, and Warerite. Central to the COID's strategy of the 1950s was the establishment of the Design Centre in the Haymarket, London, in 1956. A Scottish Design Centre was set up in the following year.
The Design Centre in London was a permanent venue where manufacturers, retailers, buyers, and consumers could view exhibitions of contemporary design, an aspiration of most British design organizations since the First World War. Also housed in the Design Centre was the COID Design Review, where selected British designed goods could be seen in photographic form with details of manufacturers and designers. These designs were generally Modernist in spirit and diametrically opposed to the heavily styled, ephemeral products often seen in American films and glossy magazines. Such values of the COID were closely associated with the ideas of ‘Good Design’, an aesthetic outlook also favoured by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in its design collecting and exhibiting policy of the period. In 1957 the Design Centre Award Scheme was established: twelve domestic designs were selected as exemplars of Good Design, an idea parallel in many ways to the Compasso d'Oro scheme initiated by La Rinascente department store in Italy three years earlier (see also
During the 1960s the Good Design policies promulgated by the COID came under increasing pressure from growing consumer interest in the ephemeral values of Pop, a reality acknowledged by the COID's director Paul Reilly in an article in Design magazine in 1967 entitled ‘The Challenge of Pop’. In the same years the Council broadened its approach to embrace engineering and capital goods within the remit of industrial design. This position was strengthened by the findings of the Fielden Reports on Engineering Design (1963) and Industrial and Engineering Design (1965) and the Conway Report on A National Design Council (1968). Although a head of steam had been gathering for the establishment of a separate Council of Engineering Design it was agreed to establish a new, single Council that wedded the ideology and outlook of the COID with the needs of engineering design. As a consequence, the newly-named Design Council was established in 1972. In the following year, having been purchased by the new Council, Engineering magazine was launched under Design Council auspices and a Design Advisory Service established. Furthermore, in the wake of the Design Council's (Moulton) Report on Engineering Design Education (1976) engineering design staff were employed to develop design teaching, an activity that had an increasing industrial focus in terms of policy, even if with limited impact. The 1977 Carter Report on Industrial Design Education in the United Kingdom, the 1983 Hayes Report on The Industrial Design Requirements of Industry, and the 1983 Mellor Report on Standards of Consumer Goods in Britain all gave rise to concerns about the direction of the Design Council. It was also accused in a 1983 survey of leading consultants of having become overly concerned with souvenirs and retailing. In the same year a Funded Consultancy Scheme was set up whereby Design Council representatives offered companies technical and design expertise and slogans such as ‘Design for Profit’, closely attuned to the thinking of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, soon became the order of the day. Current thinking was embraced by the Design Council/Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) Report on Policies and Priorities for Design (1984), the Design Council Strategy Report (1988), and the Government White Paper on competitiveness, Forging Ahead. However, during the 1980s the Council experienced a series of economic cuts, a position that came to a head in 1994 when a full-scale review of the Council's work entitled The Future Design Council: A Blueprint for the Council's Future Purpose, Objectives, Structure and Strategy (the Sorrell Report) was published. After presentation to Ministers at the Department of Trade and Industry it resulted in the closure of the London Design Centre and all of the Council's regional offices and the halting of the publication of Design magazine, hand in glove with a large-scale redundancy programme. In 1996 the Design Council worked closely with the British Council and the Royal Society of Arts in a programme entitled Excellence by Design that sought to promote contemporary British culture and industry abroad. A number of other reports with a similar outlook were commissioned and published, including the 1997 Design Council Report on Britain™: Renewing our Identity that argued for the projection of a Britain characterized by inventiveness, creativity and progressive thinking. This was reinforced by a discussion paper entitled New Brand for New Britain: The Countdown to the Millennium (1997) and ideas pursued in the launch of a scheme for the promotion of Millennium Products, selected for their sense of imagination, inventiveness, and fresh thinking. Selected by representative panels such products were widely promoted, including a display at the Millennium Dome site in London in 2000 and a series of Millennium Products shows touring around the world in the succeeding period.
