"Design" was a magazine that had been produced since the nineteen-forties by the Design Council, a body originally set up in 1944 under the title "Council of Industrial Design", with the aim of improving the quality of British product design as industry was brought back to civilian production after the end of the war.
This article was submitted in late 1993, when rail privatisation was being progressed the the Major government. Derided as a "Poll Tax on wheels", the scheme was widely considered unworkable even then, but the government persisted, in the face of threats by the Labour opposition to re-nationalise if it got re-elected. The rest is history.
The editor of the magazine was told not to publish the article and resigned. The magazine was then closed down. Here is the text of the unpublished article.
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DESIGNING FOR THE RAIL FRANCHISE
Trains haven't the glamour of cars. Normally, boarding a train is not a prestigious thing to be seen doing. The car has replaced the train as an emblem of progress. (1,2) It is the epitome of the consumer product.
Since the consumer revolution of the 1960s, typified by the Carnaby Street phenomenon, people have come to believe in markets, since they deliver the goods. Attitudes have changed fundamentally; the idea has grown up that people could actually define their individuality through their tastes and preferences, exposed in their patterns of consumption, which take as representing their social position. This is why “lifestyle marketing” is possible. The railways have playing this game for several years now; their current television promotion for example, refers to other advertising and invites the viewer to recognise the rail service as just another consumer product.
Faith in the market drove the privatisation programme of the 1980's, but the more arthritic and bureaucratic bodies such as the railways have been left till now. The hope is that consumerising the service will save money and restore a sense of glamour.
This is being achieved by breaking up British Rail into components, corresponding to spheres of functionality: train operating companies will run the trains and market the services, using rolling stock hired from leasing companies, and paying Railtrack for the use of the track, stations, and signalling; other companies will carry out repairs and maintenance. The operating companies will be transferred from public to private ownership by setting up 25 operating organisations, which will move into an intermediate “shadow franchise mode” before being offered as franchises for periods of seven to ten years. The rolling stock leasing companies will follow a similar path to join the former British Rail Engineering Ltd in the private sector.
The transformation of Inter City gives an indication of the way that things are likely to go; it is being reconstructed as a brand label, and under the auspices of marketing managers Keith Handy and Martyn Cornwall, a new range of liveries for the different long-distance routes has been prepared, to be unveiled in April. A similar branding process will be applied throughout; Keith Handy is enthusiastic about the sophisticated Inter-City liveries which will mark the flagship routes, but he warned that we should also brace ourselves for some pretty awful, poorly conceived, naive solutions. This is a textbook example of niche marketing, and the variety of rolling stock which the new regime will inherit is perfectly adapted to the task; there is a range of vehicle types which are the counterparts of everything from a Porsche – the Inter-City 225, perhaps – to a Trabant – the ramshackle four-wheeled Pacer which haunts the more run-down areas of Britain's northern conurbations.
The branding process will ensure that horses are matched to courses, market driven, with resources deployed to best advantage. At some point, for example, someone will question the technology-led development which has resulted in a modern inter city coach (3) costing over ten times more, in real terms, than its 1950s counterpart (4); the extra cost is partly attributable to complex ancillaries such as air conditioning and the running gear intended to operate at modern speeds. How much new rolling stock there will actually be, however, is questionable because of the shortness of the proposed franchise periods and their financial structure.
Like it or not, the role of designer in this exercise is reduced to that of cosmetician, since design is allowed to be no more than an adjunct to marketing. Any designers attempting to tackle their commission at a more fundamental level will come up against the brick wall set by the assumption that the market is sufficient to answer the social issues raised. What is more, they will be stymied by the totally fragmented new structure. The problem is not that the new arrangement is anarchic; co-ordination is to be imposed by the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising, headed by Roger Salmon. But he is not a debating forum where public concerns come to the surface and market forces cannot map such concerns – for example, at the interfaces between the different franchises, or when mishaps occur, demanding prompt action.
The idea that public services might be integrated and co-ordinated is, unfortunately, is an insight that has been lost in recent years. But just after the war, it was in the forefront of people's minds; it motivated the establishment of the Design Council and was a guiding influence in the Festival of Britain. After their involvement with the 1951 Festival, Design Research Unit (DRU) was charged with the largest and most complex design programme ever initiated in Great Britain. Its aim was to rationalise British Railways, making it a major component of a national transport system. Consequently, the design of all the elements – rolling stock, signage, graphics – was undertaken in the context of, and in relation to, the system of national life of which the rail services formed a part (5). It spelled out one unambiguous message: here is a transport system serving the nation. Design was to establish the role of the transport system by giving form to the social values and institutions to which all assented.
Here was design stepping out of the system of differences that styling and marketing have created, to embody national concerns and interests above and beyond individual wants and needs. DRU developed a style signifying “disengaged public concerns”; the public transport system is not, on these terms, a consumer product. Design here was functioning at a deeper level, not as an adjunct to marketing, but transcending social differences to take a broader view, bringing together opposing interest groups. It is the purpose of design to achieve this by expressing, in a subtle way, those hidden and unstated values, which cannot be put into words, but hold society together.
Thus, the niche marketing entailed in the railway privatisation raises fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of design. In the present context, design become “good” to the extent that it meets the expectations of a particular consumer group. There is no possibility that something might appeal to all (6). If society is regarded only as a constellation of discrete consumer groups, there can be no such thing as “good” design.
Could the current reorganisation achieve coherence? The authors attempted to piece together a flow diagram to show how the different elements of the privatised railway structure would fit together, firstly with themselves, and secondly, into an integrated transport network. They were unable to do the former because at the time of writing, too much was still undecided. And there is no opportunity for the latter, given the nature of the scheme. Leaving things to the market will merely expose the problems: passengers will get angry when told their tickets are not valid on half the trains plying the route, and the lack of integration will be revealed dramatically, for example, as passengers from the continent and all parts of Britain start to converge on King's Cross some time around 2005.
This limitation of the market has an economic dimension, too. The burgesses of Reading clamour for Crossrail, but are unwilling to put their hands in their pockets to finance it. The market cannot inform them of the social processes that actually shape the nation's economy. If you baulk at being called a “customer” and not a passenger, if you think of railways as a public service, and, as such, above the marketplace, then you must feel uneasy about what is going on.
Henry Law and David Sawyers 2 March 1994
SUGGESTED ILLUSTRATIONS TO RAIL FRANCHISE ARTICLE
1 “Rail, Steam and Speed” by J M W Turner.
2 “Her's is a lush situation” by Richard Hamilton.
3 The mark IV, the equivalent vehicle of the late 1980s, with air conditioning and aircraft-type plug doors, designed for 140 mph running, this carriage cost over ten times more in real terms than the mark I. Whether the modern carriage is ten times better than it predecessor is, however, arguable.
4 The mark I passenger coach, 1951. Mechanically simple, designed to run at speeds of up to 90 mph.
5 The corporate identity unveiled in 1965. (Design 189 ?date /Design 193 January 1965) Design Research Unit/Professor Mischa Black, commissioned by the British Transport Design Panel: signing/liveries/ class 52 diesel locomotive.
6 SNCF Corail coach interior, or interior of Paris Metro train: by making concessions to no group's taste, everyone can feel included.
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The authors were asked to revise and the above article is the revision. The revised version was accompanied by the following
NOTE
I hope this is now all right. We have attempted to incorporate as much factual information as possible but we belong to a generation that was brought up with the notion that design is about ideas. To have written a piece that implied otherwise is something that we could not honestly have put our names too.
If the article is still not suitable, please accept my apologies; also, please let me know as soon as possible, as we would like the opportunity to try to place it elsewhere.
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