Priestmangoode

3 June, 2010

Defining a business in a sentence is never easy, but multidisciplinary design studio Priestmangoode comes pretty close with its line ‘our design is all around you’.

From phones to airport lounges and radios to high-speed trains, the company prides itself on designing entire environments, as its founding directors Paul Priestman and Nigel Goode explain.

‘I think what makes us different is that our backgrounds are in product design,’ says Priestman, ‘and we’ve gone from doing very tiny electronic things to the biggest products in the world, like cruise ships and jumbo aircraft’.

At this year’s Travel and Leisure Design Awards in San Francisco, projects designed by Priestmangoode won the Best Large Hotel category for the budget chain Motel 6, part of the Accor hotel group, and Best Transportation for a new first-class cabin for Swiss International Air Lines.

‘I think it was the first time that one company has won two categories,’ says Priestman. ‘So we won for first-class luxury and for one of the cheapest hotel chains in the USA.’

The pair met as industrial design students at St Martins. While Priestman went on to an MA at the RCA, Goode worked for several large industrial design companies before they formed Priestmangoode in 1989. The company now has five directors, all of whom come from product or industrial-design backgrounds. They share a belief that design should be about more than just styling and, as Priestman explains, this has become central to the firm’s unique appeal. ‘We don’t like the word “styling” – design is to do with making things better. Otherwise what’s the point in doing it?

‘The other thing that makes us different is that we’re into mass production. We design a hotel room for Accor; 50,000 of those are rolling out, and that’s great because it means that we could design a tap, we could also design the seats. That’s a different approach, I’d imagine, from architects’ and interior designers’.

This comprehensive approach to design is something Priestmangoode calls 3D branding. ‘When we’re designing for travel, we look at it as from home to destination,’ says Goode, who recently headed up the project for Swiss International Air Lines. ‘It’s not just looking at a knife and fork or a seat or a lounge, it’s the whole experience from home to destination; it’s about understanding the stomer experience.’

One such project is an interior for China’s new high-speed train, set to be the fastest train in the world. ‘We’re immensely excited about the enormous projects we’re doing in China,’ says Priestman. ‘A lot of people i ht say, “Aren’t they just taking our ideas?” but I feel completely the opposite, and I’m learning an awful lot from the way they do things, the way they get things done . The fastest trains in the world in just under a year! It’s just amazing to be involved in that.’

As well as consultancy work, Priestmangoode also generates its own concepts such as the Water Pebble, a device that monitors the amount of water used when showering, which helps people to conserve water, and it recently produced its Health Manifesto, the first in a series of free-downloadable documents ‘examining the way clever design thinking could be employed to improve products and services’.

‘We recognise that there’s a huge amount of research going on in the area of healthcare and we’re not stepping in and saying that we can save the world,’ says Priestman. ‘But I think we can bring our own approach to this. One of the things we saw is that hospitals look the same as 20 years ago – why, when hotels have been transformed? We wanted to use some of our learning, particularly from the work we’ve done in the aircraft industry.’

The Heath Manifesto sets out 10 ‘radical design rules for better healthcare design’ such as ‘nothing touches the floor’ and ‘better information systems to reassure patients and families’.

‘We’re an established design company, but we’re always eager to do new things,’ says Goode. ‘We haven’t just stayed within our own comfort zone. We don’t just want to dip into these things; we want to do something really meaningful and exciting. With healthcare, we’ve worked on a couple of projects and they were really great to work on, but then there’s always this sort of brick wall of how to do something really meaningful, so that’s why we produced the Health Manifesto.’

With all this, it’s amazing that Priestman and Goode find time to be such active players in the design industry. Goode has just finished a stint as an external examiner on his old course at St Martins, and Priestman has been president of the Design Business Association, a member of the Design Council, Chair of the Design Sector Skills Panel and is currently a member of the RCA Council.

So apart from diversity, what’s the secret to the company’s success?

‘Having a great team of designers really takes the heat off Paul and I,’ says Goode. Priestman adds: ‘We are not into hiring temporary staff, and many of our designers have been with us for many, many years. It’s good to know that people like to work here. Also, Nigel and I don’t have secretaries, and clients can have direct contact with designers. We’re a small-company structure doing very big projects.’

‘We run an established business that’s done very well,’ says Goode, ‘but there are still times when I wake up in a cold sweat thinking, what’s going to happen when this project ends? But I think that’s healthy, that kind of hunger.’
www.priestmangoode.com