The coming niches for UK design

Where could the UK economy go next? Manufacturing accounts for 70 per cent of UK R&D, and large foreign firms take 54 per cent of it. Still, UK R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is well below that of German, Scandinavian, American, Japanese or Korean efforts. Ironically, though, today’s foreign-owned makers of cars, trains and other goods look more innovative than for many years. And three important new niches have emerged, beyond the purely digital arena, where designers and architects might usefully strut their stuff.

NICHE 1: Civilian drones, satellites and structural electronics In the military arena, BAe Systems makes Taranis unmanned combat aircraft demonstrators. They are based on 1.5m hours of work among 250 UK firms, including QinetiQ, GE Aviation and Rolls-Royce. Worrisome; but civilian companies such as Vulcan UAV could also have success, in sectors such as construction and agriculture.

In space satellites, the government hopes to raise Britain’s share of the world market from six to 10 per cent – £40 billion – by 2030. Plenty of work for the designers of ingenious experiments here.

In electronics, look out for the structural sort – systems that, directly integrated into aircraft and the like, can bear loads, save weight, or be made to form clever kinds of skins. Imperial College, for instance, has teamed up with Volvo in the fast-growing field, building a supercapacitor-based battery into the lid of a boot.

NICHE 2: Exploiting carbon and other materials Speak it softly, but the UK is well placed to put carbon to work. Far from being ‘dirty’, this element can be manipulated to offer product designers new capabilities.

Take Cambridge Nanosystems, a UK-based spinout from Cambridge University. Backed by a £500,000 Technology Strategy Board grant, it wants to make five tonnes a year of one-Carbon-atom-thick graphene in an ultra-pure state. It intends to use a patented plasma chemistry system to crack the methane emitted from landfill sites. Then the company hopes to develop applications of its graphene – including, perhaps, 1mm-thick indoor radiators warmed by electric current and painted on to walls.

Carbon isn’t the only material that will change the face of British design. The Conservative-LibDem Coalition put £235m into funding the new Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials Research and Innovation. In time, we can expect designers to realise some dramatic spinoff from the Institute’s enquiries.

NICHE 3: Oil and gas systems The engineering skills built up around Britain’s base in hydrocarbons are not going to go away, even with a spell of low oil prices.

Begin with pumps and valves. Here, Weir Group applies its proprietary models in computational fluid dynamics to improve the products it supplies not just to the world’s oil and gas producers, but also to power stations, refineries, process plants and miners. Will designers of hydraulic engineering systems benefit from the exploitation of shale gas and oil in Britain? That depends on whether the new government allows horizontal drilling to go ahead.

Then there are the manufacturers that are orientated to the UK’s £9bn sector that deals with subsea oil and gas, and Newcastle-based Soil Machine Dynamics makes remote operating vehicles. SMD’s QTrencher 1000, for instance, uses high flow and high-pressure jetting to lay cables and small diameter pipes up to 3m beneath the seabed. We can expect more of Britain’s designers to gather round the interfaces for such Remote Operated Vehicles.

Finally, diesel generators are ripe for attack by designers. Their contribution to the nation’s CO2 and to its particulates is relatively small; their contribution to keeping hospital surgeries and City dealing rooms functioning when the National Grid or local power supplies fail is disproportionately large. The interfaces on these increasingly sophisticated systems? Still a long way from the 21st century.

Some designers may want Britain’s new government to revive UK manufacturing through the programme recommended by Mariana Mazzucato and Will Hutton – through a bold, patient, profitmaking and entrepreneurial state industrial policy, devoted above all to the green technologies pioneered by Germany. But given the travails of German energy policy, I’m not persuaded of the merits of this statist, top-down approach. Nor, on the other hand, would I leave design-led manufacturing innovation simply to market forces.

What to do? Well, at least extend the reach of design to the new niches described above. That will put us in a stronger position to influence policy and practice.