Government-sponsored design: Changing attitudes to design policy in Britain between 1946 and 2016

The 1946 exhibition, Britain Can Make It, was conceived as ‘British industry’s first great post-war gesture to the British people and the world’. It was organized by the Council of Industrial Design, the body established by the Board of Trade two years earlier in order to influence and encourage higher standards in British manufacturing. Though it had no direct powers and operated mainly through persuasion and education, the CoID was a powerful government-funded organization and exhibitions like Britain Can Make It were an important means of promoting ‘good design’. In retrospect, the design landscape of post-war Britain – with its belief in government intervention, control and planning - looks relatively unique. Today the state-funded organizations that once educated the British public on design and lobbied for higher standards have been substantially weakened. There is no longer any sense of overarching ideology shared by those in government about what constitutes ‘good design’ and the various agents responsible are increasingly fragmented and have few regulatory standards to work with. But does this mean that the state has stopped trying to express its social, political or cultural agenda through design? If so, just who is educating the public on ‘good design’ today? This paper will reassess the objectives behind the Britain Can Make It exhibition, and compare it with current design policy in Britain today. More specifically, it will ask, what constitutes government-sponsored design today