Plenary

We now have a few minutes before we invite another panel to the rostrum. You’ve already met Dr Sheila Ronis, President of the University Group, a Michigan management consultant firm that works very widely in the motor industry and in other industries. Also Professor Sir Peter Hall will be joining us. He is Professor of Planning of the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning at University College London, he is a prolific author and editor of a number of books dealing with cities, transport, travel and he has been a special advisor on strategic planning to the Environments Secretary with particular reference to London and the south east and also he is a member of the Committee on the Future of the Automobile which was convened by the American Academy of Sciences, reporting on that question, is there a future for the automobile? He is also a member of the Board of Advisers of the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre.

Also joining us is Peter Stevens. Peter is visiting Professor of Vehicle Design at the Royal College of Art, I don’t think he will mind my saying that he is distinguished for his work in vehicle design particularly with high performance cars, Lotus, McClaren, special Jaguars, some outstanding designs, he is a former tutor in Vehicle Design at the RCA and he studied there under Misha Black. He has also been a motor racer and Peter received the Prince Philip Prize for Designer of the Year in 1991.

Jane Priestman will join us as well. Jane has a distinguished career in design and design management. For 11 years she was General Manager in Architecture and Design for the British Airport Authorities and then with the British Railways Board she was Director of Architecture, Design and Environment for 5 years. She was Chairman of the RIBA Awards and the Trustees Medal and is an active patron of New designers in Business. She is now a consultant to the Design Council working with 4 government department on design and she is also a member of the panel that is going to be advising on the new building for the London Mayor and Assembly which will be an interesting task. Jane was awarded and OBE for her work in design. So I have a very distinguished group here who have been attending and listening to the interventions so far today and I would be interesting in hearing your comments on what your have heard - Peter, can we start with you and get and idea what your reactions are to the direction we have been taking in this seminar.

A number of things have occurred to me during this morning. Principally it seemed to me that we are ready to tinker with the systems we have. There seems to be almost an eagerness to take on economic controls, social controls, political controls of how we get in and out of the city.

I was quite surprised with that because people are not very good at being good at being controlled. Probably the only thing I didn’t hear from Sheila was her prediction of the date for the first commuter riots because I don’t believe that it will work like that. Already we make decisions about how we come into the city to work, we make decisions based on what we think is the best way to come in. It may be a bus, car, train, bicycle or anything else. All those methods of coming into the city are grim and awful. There aren’t attractive ones and yet we do that because we make a valued judgement that despite that inconvenience it’s worth coming to work in the city.

It seems to me that there is a political will to try and reorganise that for us. We’ve kind of accepted it, we would probably like to see some subtle improvements in the way that works, mainly in the simple business where we move from one method of transport to the other. That seems to be a loophole, not that we destroy the whole infrastructure and start again, not that we try and make the public transport attractive. You can go on the underground and you can get on one line and they put yellow poles and grey seats which is a designerly thing to do, it doesn’t make the business of travel any more comfortable on them. It probably makes you cynical because you think that you are being patronised with an element of design that might possibly improve what’s basically an awful journey.

I am more concerned probably now than when we started in that I don’t see any broader solutions. I think the possibility with what the Helen Hamlyn post graduates could do is to look infinitely more broadly. We can’t stuff more people in the underground, it’s full of them already. If we take them out of their cars, therefore they will go on the bus, which is full already as well. We must think infinitely broader about what we really want to do. Sheila had a good point about a vision of the future. We don’t actually have a vision of the future, nobody says to me how we would like our lives to be in 30 years time. Politics won’t tell you that because they will be re elected in 3 years time. So we can’t trust any political decision, a lot of it is up to designers to present what they believe are new ideas, new techniques for living our lives generally, much broader than whether we make long cars, short cars, wide cars, thin cars and I hope that through the Helen Hamlyn strategy that we will be able to find post graduates who can think broadly and boldly and challenge the opinions which at the moment seem to be just this tinkering and the tinkering I think is the potential for disaster.

I’d like to stress one thing which is the question - do you think you get better design by doing design or do you get better design by encouraging it through the political process? I think the answer is some of both and it’s a fact that technological advances very often have depended on bit political pushes and that’s certainly true of the whole of the space programme in the United States for instance over the last 50 years. The United States would never have got where it did and we would never have seen some of the possibilities in Sheila’s presentation last night if it had not been for NASA. I must say I was sorely tempted last night to get up at the end and ask the question - what do you think would have been the scenario if the whole of your space programme had been under the control of London Underground Ltd. Maybe that would have been purely facetious. However, I do think we are at a big junction here now in London. A really vital juncture sometimes, very often, nothing very much matters and on a very few occasions something matters. We have a real possibility on 4 May to elect, in effect, to introduce an incredibly bold programme which is congestion charging. It’s never been done in a city of this size, it’s been done in small and Norwegian cities, small by our standards, it’s been done in Singapore, which is a city of 2 and a half million, but it’s never been done in a city of the size and importance of London. If we can get this happening I think it’s a clue to a lot else. It’s a clue to the kind of vision that we have already seen this morning with pedestrianisation and traffic calming over a large area of central London, it’s a clue to a lot more investment in both buses and rail, including the kinds of schemes that Nicky Gavron was talking about. It’s a clue to fundamentally encouraging new technologies which could be taxed differently such as fuel cell cars or particularly electric vehicles. These vehicles, as we have been reminded already are around - go to La Rochelle in France if you want to see them, they are all there on the streets and you can rent them or borrow them and they’re wonderful - we could do it in London. We could have electric taxis, we could have electric tour buses to replace these horrible smelly vehicles that pollute the air for 18 hours a day and it could all be done through a system of differential pricing.

So it really matters who we elect for that Mayor on 4 May and I have to say that Frank Dobson last week announced that he didn't want to do congestion charging during his first term of office, if he gets a first term of office, and all I can say on that one is Frank, you amaze me and we have to think very, very carefully about the policy that we are going to have the Mayor implement and a little less about personalities however colourful these may be. Thank you.

May I interject very briefly. The concept of congestion taxes, I don’t think that economic exclusion, which is what congestion taxes are, is a democratic idea.

I had a feeling Sir Peter that you were going to head a little bit into the direction of whose the better transport design customer, a public body or a private body, there must be some history on whether private or public bodies are better customers of transport design for intelligent and advanced transport design. I’d really like to ask Jane Priestman to make an intervention now and perhaps that’s a topic that might be relevant.

I’d like to put some questions back to the audience because I don’t believe anything happens without leadership and vision and strong powerful backup and I think this is really what we ought to be asking of the students, and it refers also to what is going to have to happen as far as the Mayor is concerned and how the leadership is going to happen there. I would be very happy of course if Nicky Gavron could be part of the Assembly because I believe the Mayor will be dependent entirely on his Assembly and therefore colourful personalities may not matter that much.

Put that aside, I’d like to keep my finger of the pulse of vision and leadership because I think the Colleges have to answer that question - where is this powerful force going to come from in design terms and I think we need to look at not only the design aspects, we need to look at the leadership aspect because a collection of strong design personalities could change this world immediately. As far as the urgency is linked to vision, this theory into practice aspect of what we have been talking about today and so many people have touched on it, is where do we go next? How can we move this forward? Are our students ready to do this yet, I think probably not, are out politically advisors ready, certainly not, and so where do we go, what is our future? It’s breaking the mould, this particular really turgid mould that we really have to address, I think Sheila will have a lot more to say than I on this.

I want to say that it has been my observation that visions of the future are reflective of our value systems and so what we really have to say is what kind of a society do we expect to live in. In the last century a car has been a vehicle for democracy, it has not only in the United States but it has also represented individual and what that represents in terms of a humans right to choose, where they go, when they go and how they go and that right, and it is perceived as a right is going to influence greatly how we design our future societies to preserve what at least in the free world, which is becoming now most of the world, is perceived as something that is fundamental and of fundamental value.

It is very difficult to pull apart the political issues from the economic viability issues from the issues of democracy. They are interwoven in a web and if you cut one of those links your likely to have a whole infrastructure completely collapse, so when we do talk about tampering with the current system we’re in trouble in many ways by saying we’re going to edict this, in democracies you edict very little. Singapore can get away with a lot because of the nature of the governmental structure there and it’s lovely to have visions of the future but to make them become reality you need, we need collectively as free people on this global planet to find mechanisms, processes to develop joint and shared visions of the future that are based on our values, our human values and that is really going to be the task of the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre and the students and as they think about the future they can’t think about the societal elements that make up what the transport system ultimately reflects.

Just on what Sir Peter said at the beginning, I think he hit the nail on the head. The end of this conference is a very useful starting point, this is where we move on because some of the discussions have been clouded by a confusion with the use of words and the word vision has cropped up several times in the discussion but several different versions of what vision is. One that I understand is a vision where you have an aspirational goal, a positive vision of the future of where you want to be and strive to get there. What seems to be a vision of some of the contributors is that you have a negative vision of the future or you have a recognition that we start from a very fragmented abyss and we work within it, so you have a constrained vision of what’s achievable today.

We should try and get back to the old understanding of an aspiration, as Peter said, for the benefit of democracy, for the benefit of individual choice, we should be seeing the car as an exemplar of that process. So while there maybe and inevitably there are problems with roads and infrastructure and car use within this country - although a lot of them are overplayed - we should be striving to see how we can best position the free mobility of individuals in society and their free choices to govern the political process rather than see it as a fundamental authority of government to edict how we behave and fragment society even further. For me the notion of an integrated transport policy which denies the adequacy of one mode of transport i.e. the car, which is what is happening at the moment, the policy that the love affair with the car has to be broken in order to encourage and force us to take up other means of transport. It is a very insidious process of denying free choice of ordinary human beings in society.

Further on this point, although the speakers has said that the freedom of choice of a car is modern, one of our luxuries or a necessity almost, I do think we might possibly go back to our wartime slogan - is your journey really necessary? - I also would like to point out that I think the necessity for using the car can also be today, because we tend to use our cars for not only transporting ourselves but our shopping, our groceries, our purchases for the home, and I can put the blame for all this on the introduction of fish fingers, because before the introduction of fish fingers one had to go shopping every day for fresh food and you could carry home your food supplies quite easily. Because of fish fingers we have freezers, fridges and we then bought food once a week and we need a car to carry it all home.

Marion Bieber, University of the Third Age, DesignAge group. I’d like to follow on what Dr Sheila Ronis said with three points. One is we have never established any relationship between the rate of technical change and technological change which has come upon us and the rate of acceptance of change by an ever growing ageing population. We are not against technology, we are not against progress but we have a different rate of accepting change from those who create the technology for change. The second aspect of this is choice, and heaven knows I’m a democrat in every way, but choice also requires a responsibility towards communal needs and we can not allow choice to overtake communal needs and that relationship has very largely been ignored in a lot of the research that has gone forward in the last year or two. Finally I would like to suggest that the smart care we heard about this morning should add to its qualities to inform the driver when he is parking illegally, dangerously, or selfishly and should prevent him from turning off his engine and locking his car.

Can I just comment on that? Yes, I agree with you entirely. One comment that I think we should go away with, we should remember that on the roads in the United Kingdom three and a half thousand people a year are killed and we are one of the safest road networks in the world. Nearly everywhere else is worse, three and a half thousand people are killed every year, we really do need to address this. Intelligent transport systems can help - I would say that wouldn’t I - OK, I’m paid to say that but it is true. But it comes with a price and that price is restriction on freedom, restriction of freedom in the sense of you are not allowed to speed, that cars should be restricted to 20 miles per hour or less in residential areas, things like this. A lot of work has been done on vehicle design which Peter Stevens would no doubt be able to talk at length about in terms of making vehicles much safer, things like enhanced night vision, systems involved with collision avoidance. But unless we have the will ourselves to get out there and say to people you’ve got to have this, we are going to still have three and a half thousand people a year dead, when I believe many of the systems that we have been talking about this morning could be put in very quickly and cut that toll almost immediately.

May I now have this opportunity to thank our panel at the plenary session for their contributions? I would also like, personally, on my behalf express my appreciation to the Royal College of Art and to the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre for the wonderful array of talent that they managed to bring to us by video, by international airline, by other modes of transportation - car, truck, boat, coach etc. - to come to this conference today. Thank you. Also thanks to our organisation sponsors OMRON who contributed to making this possible and I would just like to ask Mike Bradford of OMRON to make a comment or two on that.

I won’t take much of your time, I just wanted to put a face to a business card, my name is Mike Bradford and my business card is in the folders. I’m General Manager of one of OMRON’s latest investments which is a dedicated factory to automotive products and services in the UK and Europe. What I hope is perhaps I can act as a conduit if you do have questions in the future for OMRON, I may not be able to answer them but I may know the man who can, so I will try and do that for you.

On behalf of OMRON I would like to thank first of all Karl Ludvigsen for his skilful chairmanship of this event today. I know from experience that when you make it look easy it actually means you are very professional, you’ve done a lot of hard work and that the team behind is also working extremely hard behind you to cover up all the things that are changing as you go along. Karl has made it look very easy today so I thank him for that. I would like to thank Helen Hamlyn Research Centre and the Royal College of Art for the forethought and creativity to make the event what it has been today and certainly to all the speakers for sharing their enthusiasm and their motivation with everybody today. We have seen a lot of diverse views today and a very lively debate. OMRON hopes this debate will act as a seed for the future and something that will grow in the future and if we can be of assistance in the future then we obviously we would like to do that and as previously said we are committed to working for a better life and a better world for all. Finally to those who are leaving us now I’d like to wish you a safe journey home by whatever route you choose to negotiate and thank you for joining this debate with OMRON.

Mike and OMRON, many thanks.

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© The authors and Royal College of Art, 2000
This is an unedited transcription of proceedings: a fully edited publication will be available later in the year.
Last Updated: 14 April 2000
Corrections and comments to: David Whittle