Richard Seymour, Co-founder SeymourPowell UK
Behind the expansive, original thinking and creative ingenuity of Richard Seymour is a profound design common sensibility.
Richard Seymour speaks to Design Victoria about understanding business and design.
Richard Seymour speaks to Design Victoria about design practice.
Richard Seymour, founding partner of visionary design firm SeymourPowell (UK), has a design philosophy firmly embedded in the latter. Concerned as he is, with questions of how we should live, this erudite and engaging fellow is uniquely placed to design some intriguing solutions to modern day problems.
One of the world’s foremost design consultancies, the multi-award-winning company started in 1984 by Seymour and Dick Powell, SeymourPowell is the name behind many of the world’s iconic brands. Together, they and their London-based team have advanced ideas over nearly 25 years that have become part of the popular culture from the Cordless Kettle for Tefal to the Baby G watch for Casio, telephony for Nokia, and now, interiors conducive to the most long haul of flights for Richard Branson’s spacecraft.
A multimedia multi-disciplinarian, Richard believes his background in books, record sleeve and film production design, advertising, graphics, illustration and early English music has embedded a broader ‘bandwidth’ to understand and speak to the challenges of the millennial era.
Forthright and informed, an outspoken proponent of many schools of thought, at the vanguard of inclusive thinking, this ‘Renaissance’ man is also tech-savvy and cyber-worldly wise acutely aware of the ‘metabolic’ shock of the new on business reluctant to change.
Speaking the language of commerciality in a sanguine way, he spends much of his professional life helping companies creatively rethink and redesign product and processes.
Design is yes, about making people’s lives better, business better and by extension the world much improved, but it is also about making money – conceiving a product that is more attractive than any other to the various market forces that shape the way we live now and will exist in the next decade. Although he posits a philosophy of “Optimistic Futurism”, theorising futurism in product design is something of a furphy given that firms like SeymourPowell have been working on the planes, trains, automobiles and smaller scale modern accessories we will use then, for some time now.
His lectures come with a wake-up call to complacent businesses: a warning to get with programme, in terms of communication channels, product relevance, integrity. The new ways of doing business are not the old, “you lie, you die”. Designers too must learn the language of business, not just business itself.
Speak to the issues. “Emotional ergonomics”, “anthropologically accurate” design solutions in which designers match human interfaces with technologies. We have, he says, been confused to date, by the farrago of technologies currently available to realise conceptual developments. As a designer, he believes in the “removal of obfuscation”, the irrelevant, “and the amplification of the relevant both in emotional terms and in technical terms, and that is actually what design should be about.”
More concerned with inner spaces than outer spaces places - his work on Richard Branson’s space age interiors for the Virgin Galactic project notwithstanding - for Seymour, design’s final frontiers are less about outward travels than inward explorations. And, not in any navel-gazing sense. These are the universes that nano-technology, bio-medical research, new science applications can open up. The future is a thinking person’s designosphere in which the vast enabling powers of unprecedented technology have given us a moral responsibility unlike any other time. Not what we can, he says, but what we should, do.
“You will not recognise your life in the next ten years,” he claims. He believes the changes we are about to witness in the way we live and work, sustainability, and environmental issues, will come about less by regulation, than invention. Building a better… well, everything.
The inventor of the best practice vibrator for Durex, a self-cleaning and disinfecting lavatory, a Bioform Bra whose forethought of the female form made women literally stand-up and cheer, and a butane-powered bicycle already has a head start.
The role of the designer, he says, is crucial in navigating the future. Design Victoria spoke with Richard Seymour after his appearance at the AGIdeas ‘Advantage’ Business Breakfast about original design thinking.
Related Links
SeymourPowell — www.seymourpowell.com
Lani Steinberg for Design Victoria
8 May 2008