George Boyle is an architect, designer, and founder of the Fumbally Exchange, a collaborative co-working organisation with spaces in Dublin (on Dame Lane in the City Centre), Waterford, Balbriggan and Ravenna, Italy. In April this year she became president of the Institute Designers Ireland (IDI), Ireland’s longest established association of design professionals.
The addition of the IDI presidency to her CV means that this year Boyle will be a designer, a design manager, a provider of design spaces and a design advocate. With such a list of intertwined responsibilities, is there an obvious place to start? “First of all, there’s a continuity piece: a couple of things that have to happen every year. Graduate design awards; design awards; a number of talks series; continuing professional development; registration, membership. Those are things that I would hope to build on, and last year’s president was fanatically brilliant at that sort of stuff.”
“I’m zooming up to 30,000 feet, asking ‘what kind of company is this? Is it a voluntary organisation, a charity, company limited by guarantee?’ We’re structuring it at the moment to be more independent: a social enterprise that sustains itself. Once the governance is in place, you can start creating roles, and you can start creating employment roles, and then you can start financing them, and then start building a business plan around that.”
“I’ve been looking to concentrate on policy, how we work with the government and how we build on the latest Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation report, which had a €38 billion figure in for the value of design exports from Ireland three years ago.”
“The ministerial relationship with the IDI has always been through the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, whereas there’s the Department of Arts, Heritage and Culture and the Department of Education … there’s 16 departments [in total]. So if you look at the overall conversation with the ministerial body we need to do a little bit of work there. But mostly, I find that if we start becoming visible and visibly production and progressive, that we actually get [government] coming to us instead. That’s what I’d like to achieve at policy level: instead of us chasing them: for funding, for investment, for the stamp of approval; we’re actually the ones that they say are pioneering the way.”
“What I keep saying to the IDI team is to be careful about where we apply our energy. You don’t really want to talk to the government if the government are no use to you. Certainly with Fumbally Exchange, I threw my hands up after a few efforts, saying, ‘I’ll do this on my own, thanks.’ That’s something that I feel we can address from both levels: we go in talking to government, we come out trying to fix things at a very grass roots level. The grass roots level I’m talking about is the very formal boring technical grass roots, as well as public education and media awareness.”
“The other part of that is finally coming up with a coherent single voice for the community. There’s a lot of divided opinion about who counts and who doesn’t, which hasn’t been helped by the muddling up of craft and design. ID2015 has produced an extraordinary body of work, but now that’s got to go somewhere. Some of it is craft and some of it is design. Both of those things are interesting, and they both matter to each other enormously, and I’d like to see a lot more bridging going on there.”
The IDI is one of a number of local and national (and indeed, international) organisations that advocate on behalf of the design community. Most have a slant or focus, although within Ireland there are several broader representative bodies, like the IDD [Institute for Design and Disability]. With the inevitable crossovers in funding and attention, Boyle would like to see the IDI at the top of the food chain. “There’s always going to be representation at different levels and ‘the more the merrier’, but you do have one go to place, that has a collective view over them all. I don’t think that that needs to be regulatory or authoritative, it just needs to have integrity, and solidarity – a sense that everybody’s in it, everybody wants to be in it, that it is some kind of quality mark.”
In the context of the IDI, that notional quality mark takes form in an annual awards ceremony and by a newly created Register of Designers. “The awards are very well-respected, and they’re evolving rapidly into a good industry benchmark. Where before there was a time when they weren’t exactly representative of the full spectrum, now I think they are.” Boyle puts this down to “the fact that the organisation has survived and has still managed to produce a fairly spectacular show every year”, as well as the growth of new creative businesses during the recession. “People see it as a way to demonstrate their new business. There’s been an absolute rash of new businesses in the last ten years. Being in Fumbally Exchange you witness the power of start-ups to utterly change the atmosphere and the direction and the paradigm – to take you from one way of thinking into a completely different Technicolor universe.”
This network of innovation and creativity is one that Boyle sees (and plans to emulate) in those neighbours that are often thought of as design centres, as well as some more unexpected locations. “In the UK there’s a very strong network. And I’m very much attracted to Norway and Scandinavia — Denmark has a fantastic manifesto that I’m really referring to a lot. And then there’re places like Canada. What I like about Canada is great methodology, everyone likes to write things down, get them right and put them on a framework. So there’s a roadmap that I’m looking at that Ottawa has for a design school there.”
One challenge to overcome is a somewhat strained relationship between the Irish public and design, but this is being helped by the ongoing crossover between design, art and sciences. “For a lot of people [design] is applied to a product as a sort of veneer or cosmetic treatment, after the product has proved itself useful. How it filters into the very essence of how a product behaves or succeeds is something that not everybody gets. Smart technology has been great for that… people are beginning to realise more that [design is] an intrinsic value as opposed to something you layer on.”
“The way I see design is where art and science ‘break even’. Art is very much the inventor-creator space, and science is very much the technical process space. There are inventors and process people on both sides of the spectrum. Design fluidly moves between those. How people identify [in the context of art, science and design] is complicated, because everyone in their discipline feels a certain way about who and what they are and whether they’re a creator or a cog in a wheel.”
In that context, “empowering creativity is really important”, says Boyle. “There’s all this talk about ‘Design Thinking’, and in my opinion ‘Design Thinking’ is a bit of a creative killer. Because it’s about – once you have the idea – how to get the idea to a reality by parsing it through a process of iterations to eventually come out with a product, and then going back to perfect it. But if you keep doing that with a bad idea, you’re going to get a fork with funny prongs. The idea has a lot of the capital in the first place. We need to imbue people with the courage to believe in that, but also not to be prescriptive about excluding people who are all about process.”
One of the places that Boyle wants that kind of empowerment to come to life is on the financial side of the design business. She has identified issues around profitability, humility and a particular Irish shyness that she feels affect the bottom line for many design businesses. “I think [profitability] is a huge thing… to try and get people in the design industry to really examine how they value their input into the world. Irish designers undersell themselves; they have a slightly meek outlook. We need to stand up and be proud and own the industry in this country and know that it’s actually better than many other countries. I really think we are better at the creative piece and we just need to start shaping it.”
“Irish designers need to be found in order to start thinking that they can perform – whether by a multinational, or a sponsor, or a particular patron – and then they start to realise what they’re capable of. We are humble at what we’re good at, we can be totally sleibhin about what we’re not good at. So we need to stop trying to pretend that we’re worth something for what we’re not good at. And start really seeing the wood through the trees and our true talents, and not underplay them anymore.”
For Boyle, now is the time to be creative and for creative designer to exert that influence: “In the ’80s it was sustainability, in the ’90s it was digital, in the noughties it was minimalism, and in the tenties it’s innovation. What’s happening is that it’s just recognition for something that everyone should truly embrace as a cultural essential part of civilisation. I don’t see it as a fad; it’s more an evolution. It’s not a case of ‘oh we’re in that zeitgeist now, let’s live that way’, and then looking back on the frizzy hair and the bat-wing jumpers and saying ‘what were we thinking?’ It’s more that you arm yourself with this new skill set because it’s necessary for survival, and then you move into the next iteration of whatever our civilization is going to be.”
Words: David Wall
