The surface engineering industry occupies a unique position in manufacturing. It exists on the borderline between the certainties of mechanical and chemical engineering and the more nebulous field of product design. It is a hybrid profession, populated by skilled machine operators and those strange creative people, dreaming up ever new product designs and finishes that serve the needs for both product visibility and durability.
The Creative Industries in the UK represent 7.3% of GDP, generate over £60 billion for the economy and employ more than 2 million people. It is a sector in which Great Britain excels, outperforming the USA, Germany and Japan.
It also compares favourably with Financial Services (8.9%) and Manufacturing (11.5%). And in contrast to these two sectors, it hasn’t had to receive a massive bailout and the government doesn’t need to set up Enterprise Zones or award grants to encourage it to flourish.
The UK leads the world in advertising, digital marketing, fashion, computer games, product design and many other activities that loosely fall under the creative umbrella. We export our services and our talent around the world, with the emerging countries doing their best to keep up.
There has been a lot of debate recently about the need for our universities to produce more scientists and engineers, and there is no doubt that we are behind the game in those areas. However, this is not to downgrade the importance of our Art & Design Colleges. Creativity is an elusive concept that is hard to define. Students need to appreciate the finer points of high art in order to hone their skills, even if they are to be used for commercial design.
If you doubt the importance of our Art & Design Colleges, then take a look at China. They are in the process of building no fewer than 1250 of them over the next 5 years. They are conscious of the fact that they cannot persist with a low-value, low-tech economy. Future prosperity will depend as much on the generation of ideas as it will on technological innovation.
In many ways, it is the search for the X Factor without the odious Simon Cowell, and staged for all the right reasons. The Creative Industries do not exist simply in a bubble; they infiltrate and enhance all kinds of industries, providing marketing services, web design, product design, phone apps and many other innovations.
In UK manufacturing, our talented product designers are giving us the cutting edge in all kinds of ways. The iphone and ipad were both designed by a British product designer who had served his time in Art College. Other examples include the Dyson vacuum cleaner, distinctive as much for its quirky appearance as it is for its bagless operation, the Mini and the angle poise lamp.
In the surface finishing industry, talented British designers are colluding with engineers and chemists to make the UK a world leader in this particular field. This applies to special organic colour finishes, decorative finishes and the use of polymers and ceramics for unusual and durable finishes in cars, white goods and thousands of everyday products. In many cases, goods that are manufactured in low-cost countries are shipped here to complete the kind of innovative and high quality finishes that we are famous for.
The Creative Industries are one of the UK’s great success stories. For every Terence Conran or Damien Hirst, there are thousands of excellent and practical designers working in unsung fashion throughout British industry, and we ignore their importance at our peril.
