DESIGN IN SOUTH AFRICA

1.Background

South Africa does not yet have a creative design culture. It has not been necessary to have one. The earnings from the Gold mines meant that the country could buy everything it wanted and waste as much money as it wanted.

Support was given to the idea that things should be made locally under license since this would help with an obvious need for creating jobs for the millions who would otherwise be unemployed. It was also seen as a useful policy of import replacement and in some costly cases even assumed to be of strategic necessity, in case of isolation imposed from overseas.

Earning foreign exchange was never a consideration and if the exercise should prove to be uneconomical because of high capital investment fo small production quantities, tariff protection was used to oblige the local consumer to pay more than the product should really cost. It was a policy mistake which South Africa wasn’t alone in making. Many other emerging industrial nations in Africa as well as South America made the same mistake.

South Africa is once again a part of the world and is now trying to globalise the economy.

However, now the country is broke. The gold mines are no longer the wealth generators they were in the past and it is unlikely that the country can ever again rely on them to enable it to pay it’s way. Now it is generally agreed that the main hope for the future is the growth of the manufacturing sector so that money can be earned and jobs provided, through exports.

This brings us to the real crunch. Locally made products are not generally competitive on global markets. They were never intended to be. Local manufacturers bought other country’s obsolescent designs to produce in their factories. Nobody encouraged the design and development of competitive products, it was always thought that we weren’t really clever enough for that. It was even said that we couldn’t afford it – as if we weren’t already squandering vast sums of money on grossly uneconomic schemes.

Local decision makers have failed to understand the role played by design in building a nation’s prosperity. Taiwan and Korea have discovered this fact and have turned their countries into the world’s industrial giants – and other small countries have taken note, but South Africa has kept it’s colonial mentality, relying on the hopes that overseas ‘friends’ would come and help us.

This is why the word ‘design’ is missing from our vocabulary. Few South Africans, especially the top decision makers, know what it means. Few recognize the bald fact that every single man-made product has to have designed by someone or other before it can be made. Even fewer acknowledge that the quality of the product and the ease with which it can be made (productivity) are directly dependent on the design.

2.Design and Competitiveness

There is still today a general belief in South Africa that local manufacturers can become competitive with the help of overseas companies with whom they can tie up license agreements. Yet this approach cannot possibly create globally competitive industries.

Even in the unlikely event that the local labour force could compete economically with the other emerging industrialised nations (where productivity performances are high and labour costs low by SA standards) the trade limitations imposed by the overseas source companies would seriously restrict the export potential of locally produced products.

Manufacturing a product whose design belongs to someone else can never be a very profitable business. It is a ‘sweat shop’ situation where one competes with other sweat shops to get the price, the earnings and the labour strikes down to the absolute minimum. By contrast, when the design is owned the price can be what the market will stand. Earnings of as much as ten, or even one hundred, times the cost of manufacture are possible for some products.

The successful industrialised nations of the world have all learnt that the key to export performance is the ownership of the brand names (ie the designs) of the products and the speed at which new designs can be brought to the market. Only local design ownership will confer the right to market them in any country in the world and to earn the income generated by the added value conferred by the design and the brand name. Manufacture under license does not confer these rights. It is therefore the local ownership and control of product designs which is the key to commercial success and the growth of the economy. This will not be achieved without a strong local creative design culture.

3.The Need for a Design Culture

South Africa cannot develop a competitive manufacturing sector as long as we have the attitude that ‘we mustn’t try to re-invent the wheel’. We have to change our educational approach and our personal and industrial motivation so that we know that we must continually strive to re-invent the wheel. That is to say that we must develop lateral thinking and creative thinking skills, from the classroom onward, so that we become an innovative nation capable of designing and exporting products which other countries will want to buy. We must develop our human resources in the right direction in order to do this. This is not the same as saying that South Africa needs more engineers and scientists, however true this may also be.

Marketable products do not have to be high technology product (as some people believe), they can be of any type, just as long as they sell. We must avoid products where we have no chance of competing. There are clearly many things which will always have to be imported. To pay for these we must have a good range of our own products which we can export.

At the same time we must develop creative design skills specifically aimed at improving the quality of life on our less prosperous communities away from the main centres of industry.

The time is now right for it. New technology introduced into the design process has made it much more affordable for small countries and small companies. It now takes much less skilled manpower and time than in the days before affordable computers came along. We have all the technology we need. We just need the will to apply it.

To do this we must develop a design culture, right from the classroom to the boardroom.