I
Art For Art’s Sake?
t started with stainless steel light switches and before
you could say “form and function”, premium electrical
accessories were featuring in schemes like the international
Red Dot design awards. Were they any better than their
predecessors, or was it just art for art’s sake? Probably the
latter, but they looked good on the wall.
The evolutionary design of our electronic Programastat wall
thermostats and heating controllers marked a watershed in
our approach, but the real revolution was our approach to
outdoor LED lighting. We simply could not see the point of
the industry presenting what was revolutionary technology that
looked like the dinosaurs it was replacing. So we gave our
London-based designer free rein to tear up the rule book – but
with one key proviso. We did not want design for design’s
sake: each design feature had to have a function.
Meanwhile in the mass market, the pressure on prices was
leading us down the path of bulk offshore manufacturing, with
fractions of pennies shaved of the unit price by minimising
tooling and materials costs. So, even when the industry
was really bringing exciting technical and energy saving
innovations like low-cost LED lighting to you, not just
cosmetic improvements, the irony was that they often look
exactly the same as their predecessors because re-tooling was
too expensive in a price-led market. All too often, that fractionof-a-penny pinching extends to componentry and, at the e