25% of Britain’s Economy is powered by the design sector….while Nigeria battles with mundane issues like erratic electricity supply and an unbelievable level of apathy towards good design.
Yet, despite opportunities that abound abroad for bright, energetic, young minds, especially a designer of his caliber who recently got critical acclaim as the first International Young Design Entrepreneur of the Year (IYDEY) in an international competition organized by the British Council in collaboration with 100% Design, UK; Lanre Lawal insists on plying his trade from these shores for the foreseeable future.
Why? Perhaps because the socio-political and economic dysfunction presented by this country (Lagos in particular) serve as cerebral stimulant for this intense young man.
In this session with Ayodele Arigbabu, Lanre (who now waxes his offerings in 3D Modelling, Animation, Multimedia, Web Design, 3D Architectural Visualisations, Video Compositing, and Branding & Graphic Design under the trade name of Design Jockey Sessions) opens up on design issues that pulsate daily through his very arteries.
Lanre's visualization of Mbari Project
AA: From your recent experience in London, to what extent would you say the design industry there affects the daily life of the average Londoner?
LL: Tasteful design is the norm, not the exception. From an advertising standpoint, mature creativity is everywhere on every route. The commerce is tied very strongly to graphic presentation. Certain streets in Glasgow and London were a negotiation between a graphics coffee-table book, and a trend-setting exhibition.
Design and commerce exist in a mutually beneficial relationship. The instinct is to package whatever you do across pleasing font, color, lighting and material before you present a product for sale or use.On a public level, The Design Council on Bow Street, founded by Churchill in 46, was looking at ways of re-aligning the National Health Service through ingeniously designed question cards, which patients have to sort everyday according to their diagnosed ailments.
AA: Talking about design as a tool for national development, what are the possibilities you see in this country?
LL: I’ll give a few examples:Architecture: Learning from The Bilbao Effect as its so termed. So let’s rework the National Museum into a state-of-art multimedia center with unique architecture.The results for identity orientation and commerce will teach its lessons.Design Fairs: 100% design in England, Design Indaba South Africa…a design event showcasing our services and products in all design related fields. Cuisine: Packaging local fruits, herbs, beverages in sophisticated modules – Print labels + TV ads + e-commerce equals wider acceptance within the country, incredible sales outside the country.It will help to have a Design Council co-coordinating product and packaging design from the 36states and facilitating its marketing within and outside the country.There’s innumerable ways design can boost the economy so both image and revenue issues have a great chance at improvement. Quality Design/ aesthetic charm has a way of warming people / buyers to your products. The investment possibilities are huge.In business, it’s a good thing to get your products noticed. That’s why powerful firms like Nike, Apple, Habitat and others hire designers to invent or re-invent their communications. They see the need for designers to work creative MESSAGES to be delivered to their target market with maximized impact. As proved by the IPOD, firms that respect and utilize design make tremendous profit.Design positions your campaign, company, culture or country in the sequence of:Positive impressions – Higher perceived value – Increased sales / preference.Its major impediment here, is manufacturing and in some cases production.Furthermore, design thrives in a situation where a market is ravenous for exotic things of good quality. For quite a large chunk of the populace, the issue is survival, not design. And that’s where it can be made relevant – good yet affordable design for the masses. I encourage its development as a lingua that’s distinctively ours yet assuredly urban - particularly within the field of new-age design - mainly product packaging, electronic visage, and design paper-centric print. We need design schools.
AA: Is there any benchmark for progress in the design sector…in quantifiable terms?
LL: Design is quite wide in Nigeria. Architecture to Products to Video to Fashion. On the whole it’s quite staggeringly substantive. But design could even exceed that description with a more vibrant economy, which it ‘s helping to bring about anyway…
I don’t quite know how to put the question to shame. I am particular about the economics of it all, and video seems to have made the most quantifiable progress toward a benchmark. Fashion is on the upswing as well. Graphic Design is taking no prisoners in different nodes of genre-specific renaissance. Suffice to say, for those sectors that need a benchmark, their development has no way to go but up. Rock-bottom, with regard to identity, can’t be gone beyond these days…
AA: Your award was won not just for your abilities as a designer, but also as an entrepreneur – first with Home Made Cookies and now with Design Jockey Sessions. You have worked closely with architects in the past, what level of involvement have you had in environmental design – architecture, interior design, and urban design and in what ways do you feel you can impact still on this vital arm of the design sector?
LL: There was a lot of 2D CAD to 3D conversion work in the early days. Improvisations in Model / Environment-Representation and Virtual Reality Architecture Coding + multimedia at HMC. Of the few urban design projects I have worked on, I was proudest of the MBARI intervention project; a series of post-afro centrist performing venues & artist residence prototypes aimed at reviving the movement via an arts village.
Urban Design-wise, I am interested in making intelligent buildings; electronically wired up so they ‘interact’ with the inhabitant among other stuff.Each room, a computer of sorts interfaced by presence or presence + manual play. I hope NEPA permits it.
More Lanre's visualization of Mbari Project
AA: I understand your presentation in London was largely based on your multimedia creation for Glendora’s impressive book – ‘Lagos: A City at Work’, you appear to have keen interest in the urban conurbation called Lagos…after working on the project, what is your own angle to Lagos at work?
LL: Lagos works on a survival principle, at a ‘makes-you-have-to-stick-with-the-hustle’ level. Across 5 urban blocks of tension, choke, release, small hope, big hope, a survival dynamo perpetuates its existential kinesis, relevance and consequence.
Functions, because the folks living in Lagos make do with what they got. And they extend the music. Like Fela might work a 7-scale transliteration into fifty contortions before horn section cascade.As the music / desire physics causes the dance / survival, the dance rouses the ire of the tempo.It featured largely video Interviews with the proletariat and authority within experimental graphics. The interactive section is a compilation of point-location audio recordings, stock footage and photography.
AA: How does it feel sharing credits for the book with great thinkers like David Aradeon, Rem Koolhaas and Odia Ofeimun? You must have been the youngest of the lot!
LL: That happens often. Even among the IYDEY finalists in Nigeria, I was second youngest.In the UK, I was the youngest finalist. I turned 27 in Glasgow.To be sharing credits with these people? I feel honored of course.
AA: You have in the past articulated your determination to continue working in Nigeria despite all the drawbacks – incessant power outages and depressed economy to name a few. What informs this missionary zeal of yours not to contribute to the nation’s brain drain?
LL: Zeal dies. Sober hangs around. I’d like to work with other like-minded people to improve the design/presentation culture particularly within public interfaces, if it won’t get us in corners… I’ll give it a good shot; then we’ll see. I have never been unaware of the difficulties of working here.Its not me…its us. It’s a large image/perception problem. Little or zero new media refinement where local content is concerned in. …Graphic Design, Packaging, Film/ Cartoons, Motion Graphics for Television, Animation, Special Effects for Film...It affects the internal and external assessment…and the kids see that and progressively calcify all sorts of false assumptions as identity…
AA: But as a designer, how do you hope to advance your work through conception and prototyping to finish with the dearth of cutting edge technology and skilled labour in the industry…or is the said lack purely illusory?
LL: At some levels there is a lack. At some others…it’s illusory. It’s a question of sponsorship and to a high extent, entrepreneurship. I met the guy from India, Neil Foley…from Bangalore. It was not so much that they had all the equipment in the world; but that there was a will to make money and expansive futures out of what they had. The problems are advisory, equipment+infrastructure, training and marketing.
The solution, I foresee as being largely a private initiative; holding talks and possibly getting government participation. Its open and the challenges are for anyone willing to create. That’s what I figure for now. Mutations can be very busy here.
AA: So what does it take to ‘make it’ as a design entrepreneur in Nigeria? What would it take to build the design industry to critical mass in this country?
LL: Providence.I could say guts, good thinking, compassionate billing, brother-and-sister pro bono, being on time, alertness but in my personal experience, Lagos slaughters all those things with ridiculous ease from time to time. Though that’s not to downplay these victims as totally useless.Honesty is particularly important. If you are honest, you are reliable. Everybody needs the reliable person.
Beyond that, it’s useful to have a will to see through what you started, no matter the skewering financial repercussions. Education and Exposure are particularly vital.My background had about 5 distinct periods of education and output -Water coloring, sketching, mathematics, designing with the computer and finally Filming. Luck with no limit background really.
But that is just one trajectory to my specific design competence. You’ve got jewelry, fabrication, craft, fashion etc.So there needs to be a school, with a syllabi, which while also teaching antecedent theory and practice, is also carefully synchronized with current trends; in electronic, fabrication and print techniques. At any given time, its syllabi must be at par with what is taught in foreign design schools and more.
I must really stress ‘current trends.’ There seems to be a constant stagnation in a lot of these sectors. You get the usual maverick that’s at par with no training whatsoever now and then, but there are so few of them.
2nd question: Entrepreneurs. Pockets of them, across the years, networking with government & private industry can attain critical mass and offset the seeming jinx. It’s the good hunch I have, from my distance of 27.
AA: Where do you see Lanre Lawal and Design Jockey Sessions in the next 20 years?
LL: You force me to be immodest again.Well, Alive and Younger.
Also, if exciting ideas, patience, good intention are still so relevant like today, I will like to have a lot of it. If they are not, I will prefer having a lot of it still.
(Published in The Guardian Life Magazine, Nov. 13 - 19, 2005)
related link:
www.thedesignjockeysessions.com
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