Cutting edge

Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams admires manufacturing's answer to the Naked Chef

Whatever you do, don't call it a makeover programme. Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, product designers returning to Channel 4 for a second series of showing how it's done, want us to understand that developing products is as much about unwritten rules and regulations, venal clients and technological marvels that cannot be delivered for a price the market will stand, as it is about grand visions coming to life off the drawing board - in short, that it is a very unDarwinian process of evolution in which the best ideas are often strangled at birth.

Just because Seymour and Powell are designers, it does not mean that they have to be like Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. The "high-octane duo", as the voiceover refers to them in one programme, puts me in mind of the Two Fat Ladies. There are obvious differences - only one of these gents is fat - even if there are tempting similarities, too, such as a shared love of cigarettes and motorbikes. More precisely, the programmes combine the TV formulas of creative expert performing in his natural habitat and the troubleshooter's house call. So Powell, youthful and scrubbed of face, is the new Jamie Oliver. Seymour is the hairy cavalier, Sir John Harvey-Jones.

Some of the self-set problems in the six half-hour programmes are familiar enough to be, as Seymour puts it, "music-hall jokes": the supermarket trolley; the kitchen bin, the lid of which collects the skidmarks of yesterday's dinner. The opposite case of an object at once unfamiliar yet potentially critical was the emergency life-jacket. The designers were galvanised by hearing the account of a British survivor of the Estonia disaster. "It was the most terrifying creative workshop we've ever done," says Seymour. "The Hieronymus Bosch image that was generated! [He found] nothing in his panicked tunnel vision that said: 'This is going to save your life.' We had to create an archetype that was instantly recognisable." The exercise revealed what should have been obvious all along - that the small-print instructions on existing jackets are useless, and that the regulatory requirement that they should take no longer than two minutes to don might be suitable for a dinner jacket, but not for something that is meant to save a life.

The most innovative project was a razor uniting the merits of electric and wet shaving. Invention, technology, styling - all come together in a slim unit that looks like a low-tech razor, but which, in fact, hides tiny electronic components to turn the blade into a whirring scythe, while special lubricant is trailed out ahead of its path for a closer shave. If the product is ever made - Boots is said to be interested - it will surely be advertised with the help of those pseudo-scientific diagrams. The beats-as-it-sweeps-as-it-cleans cleverness will thrill gadget-seekers, but it will please a manufacturer, too. The lubricant is designed to run out by the time the blade is blunt and both are replaced as a single unit, promising a healthy revenue from sales of refills.

In what may be a jibe at British Airways, which has recently poured millions into the high-profile redesign of its first- and business-class seats at the expense of cattle class, the designers also take a fresh look at the economy seat, borrowing some ideas from modern office furniture. Swissair was the putative client, but the seats are manufactured by an Italian company to a standard design for many airlines, so the key to improvement here rests as much on reshaping a closed market and surmounting its mountain of regulations as it does on design. At least showing it all on the box, as Seymour says, "serves notice in a public way that things need not be like this".

This is the difficulty of the series. The designers' "clients" are not real and nor, necessarily, are the design proposals. Their previous series tackled the design of a toilet, a car and the one everybody remembers, a bra, which is only now going into production. But, at an hour long, the earlier programmes gave a sense of the epic undertaking of bringing a new product on to the market.

The proposals could be entirely polemical. But "the semblance of being anchored in reality", as Powell puts it, is important to the designers' broader message. And so the answer to the plastic flip-top kitchen bin was another plastic bin of similar size and shape, even if it did have a door mechanism like something out of Star Trek. The real problem with kitchen bins is that they are too big (we are told, revealingly, that they have doubled in size since the 1930s). The redesign as a more elaborate and expensive but essentially similar product illustrates the designer's major constraint - a manu-facturer geared up to mould plastic in a certain way. This dalliance with the tribulations of the commercial world explains why Seymour and Powell do not "own" their programmes in the way that Oliver or Harvey-Jones own theirs.

There's nothing especially sinister about designers following chefs and gardeners into the television studio. But they are trying to reach different audiences. We all want to cook better, but few of us want to design. These programmes were commissioned by the Design Council, whose ever- present aim is to awaken a slumbering British industry to the merits of making things that look nice and don't break. (Its slow-burn strategy is to improve design education, and one reason for the brevity of these programmes is that they may serve as videos for schools.) Here, a less glamorous broadcasting genre springs to mind. Seymour and Powell stand to become The Archers of the creative industries, stooges of a badly targeted mission to bring the government's design message to a bemused public, just as the yeomen of Ambridge occasionally slip us subliminal messages from the Ministry of Agriculture. But these are two of our best product designers. They should cut loose and show us how things should be, not how they usually end up.

Better by Design is shown on Tuesdays at 8.30pm on Channel 4

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