This Is Where I Have Resisted The Temptation To Make A Pun On Philip Starck's Name

The one person you wouldn't expect to be fronting an Apprentice-style reality show is Philip Starck.

Actually, that's quite possibly not true; in many ways, you'd struggle to think of a designer better-suited to the task. Starck is possibly the most famous designer on earth who's not in fashion; or, to put it another way, even some people who don't work in design have heard of him. This is because he's one of the few people in the profession to successfully set himself up as a brand, while at the same time applying himself to vastly differing products. Starck's most famous items are his bog brush and his lemon squeezer, but he's also designed interiors and pasta. Get a Starck product, you'll get a tasteful picture of him in black and white, probably holding a ruler. Starck designs products good and bad, but he always manages to sell himself. Innovative yet fun, quirky yet functional. In fact, Starck has produced plenty of products that are conventional (his bathroom furniture is pretty standard stuff) and don't really work (like that fucking lemon squeezer, unless your purpose in juicing a lemon is to evenly distribute lemon juice over your entire kitchen countertop).

It's counter-fashionable* to dismiss Starck as a charlatan who's played the market - actually, I say "fashionable", but I really mean "fun". Starck's statements are generally common-sense with a liberal coating of bullshit, making him the sort of figure you're just aching to take down. But the fact remains; Starck is an interesting guy. His attitude towards design is refreshing, and his insistence on pricing things relatively low** was brave enough when he started doing it. Oh, and it's worth re-iterating - while there's a kitsch, Star Trekky quality to a lot of what he does, some of his designs are really great.

And on telly? Starck is, as it turns out, the most French man in the world. Seriously. If you wrote a French character like this in a film, it would be called racist. 'E describes 'imself as a professionalle dremeur, which is exactly the sort of shite that makes you want to smack him. He also says that there are far too many products in existence and most of them have no reason to exist, and you're glad that someone on television is finally saying it.

Whether the programme (it's on BBC 2, called School of Design) will work is... questionable. It's basically The Apprentice with product designers, and without the gratuitous cruelty. Starck tries too hard to be quirky sometimes, but it's clearly because he doesn't like confrontation and it's the easiest way out. The fact that he's trying to maintain a persona isn't surprising, but nor is the fact that he's deceptively insightful.

So this week; his dozen hopefuls get sent to buy two products in a supermarket, on opposite sides of a theme. One of them brings back a kid's water bottle as something useless (which it is), and microwaveable baby-food as something useful. "You can make this food yourself, so it's useless," says Philippe. Quite. When presented with iPod covers; "why do you need a cover for your iPod? This has no reason to exist." It's not exactly earth-shattering stuff, but let's not forget; this is a program made for people who may well buy iPod covers, presented by a bloke whose job is designing new stuff for us to buy. To hear him decry a consumer product as pointless is genuinely refreshing.

And so, even in this opener, there were some proper ideas being flung about. Presented with a bike as an ecological product (his students are a terribly literal bunch, but they are English), Starck made the point that if it cost €90, it was being made with slave labour. Disposable nappies as an unecological product didn't interest him, but celebrity-endorsed product ranges did.

There's a broader point to all this. "Sustainability" is the new buzzword in design, but much of the sustainable design we see is relentlessly performance-based. In buildings, the attitude towards sustainability is increasingly becoming a case of Stuff As Much Insulation In Your House As You Can, And Buy Solar Panels. It makes sense, on the surface, but it's a desperately limited viewpoint. The paradox of low-energy housing is that it makes the user less aware of their outside environment; it alters the house from being a Machine for Living In to A Computer for Living In, and the difference is important. If all the lovely new insulation in a house saves a family €1500 a year, and they go out and spend the money on shit they don't really want, then it's saved the environment fuck-all.

To summarise, in my characteristically broad and sweeping way; sustainability is a social issue, but scientists have been allowed to get their hands on it, and reduce it to a level of pure maths. George Monbiot, the Guardian's preacher-in-chief*** and sometimes a smart bloke, is the perfect example - his solution to the question of Climate Change is to superin isulate all the buildings and erect windmills instead of power stations. Do we need this sort of scientific attitude? Well, yes, obviously. But we also need to look at how our society works, how we've come to consider the accumulation of stuff as a badge of social progress, how consumerism inevitably leads to massive overproduction. Many people now grow up entirely protected from their wider environment, working in temperature-controlled offices, exercising in air-conditioned gyms, and spending their spare time fucking a PlayStation. You can't expect someone with that pattern of behaviour to have any instinctive understanding of how their environment works****. The things we see around us change the way we think, which is why design is important. It's why Philip Starck can say that a piece of design can change the world.

That's pretentious arse, obviously. Still, Starck was more succinct when confronted with a slew of supposedly unecological products; batteries, nappies, packaging. Yeah, sure, but that's obvious. It's boring. It's lazy.

Finally, for the next few weeks, we have someone who sees consumer products as shaping society, who sees design as a tool for broader change, and who can think of ecology without twatting on about CO2 emissions. There's an outside chance that, for the first time in a long time, we might actually have some British TV that's worth an hour of your time.

Or, as Lawrence Miles put it: "Always talk to strangers. They know things you don't." Actually, that's not even vaguely related, but it's the best sentence I've read in the last month and I just wanted to quote it really.

*As in, fashionable amongst a counter-culture. I made that up. I like it.
** 'Low' in this context means 'less expensive than a car, but still way more expensive than anyone would consider sensible'.
*** The Guardian's recent 10:10 campaign means that it is now approximately 74% more smug than previously. It's now at Grade 6 smugness, or - as it's more commonly known - "Dawkins-Level Smug".
**** I am not a hippy. I am not a hippy. I am not a hippy. I am not a hi-