About 8 years ago I felt I should take some time off to resolve certain conflicts I was finding within design - particularly the wasteful failure of design related to people's needs. There was a pointless controversy between engineers and designers and I found myself loathing the adoration of an attitude that allowed designers to make absurd mistakes year after year without being taken to task for them. During my sojourn I came up with Healthy Industrial Design. It is important to understand my reasons for inventing HID from a historical perspective. In the time of the Angevin kings about year 1100, product design was already well under way. Men's shoes were becoming longer and longer until eventually they were so long they had to be tied from the toe to the knee. When approaching your lady you had to open your toes out to avoid poking her somewhere embarrassing. Although this may be excused as a harmless fad, this fashion or style was, startlingly, carried through into the armour of the day - except that you needed chains not string to support your long-toed shoes before you charged off to fight and, perhaps, die. We will laugh at this foolishness of our forefathers, but today in the west, and this is only one easily verified example, almost every single foot is deformed and our children are being born with our deformities. Meanwhile, we lost souls, are

comforted by aesthetics and style in design. In serious newspapers and design journals the design and fashion writers applaud repeats of the long-toed shoes of 1100. Recently an umbrella was designed with holes in it. This piece was lauded by one excitable Guardian critic, 'at last here is a designer who has freed himself from functionalism', he babbled. I suggest that history clearly exposes to us the absurdity of the stylistic and fashion approach to design; that this traditional method is not at all a harmless fad. When mixed with life and death it really matters; this method in inappropriate to our needs; design had lost its way and is obsolete; the time has come to say so. This is not a problem just limited to clothes. Office furniture is a classic modern example. People differ in size and this cannot be accommodated without adjustment in desk height. Yet out of nearly 600 office furniture ranges we find less than 40 have fundamental adjustments and it does not just relate to cost. Serious companies and the Government Health and Safety Executive propose that shorter people be provided with footrests (and presumably taller people with foot wells!).People have increased in height about 100mm over the last 100 years but furniture had lowered by 100mm over the same period. How did our ergonomists work this out? The reality of the problem is not understood. And I for one wonder why?