Promote, educate and encourage

Peter Zec, president of red dot, talks about the value of ideas and the place of quality in design.

As president of red dot Peter Zec gets to see some of the best design the world has to offer, from the tiniest gadgets to entire interior fitouts and industrial machinery.

Zec is also the founding chair of the World Design Capital, a project aiming to promote design on a city-wide scale.

He was also the first German to be president of the international umbrella organisation of design, ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design).

Although not a designer himself, he has spent years promoting the important role of design of all kinds in our everyday lives. CID caught up with Zec on the sidelines of the Association of Professional Interior Designers (APID) annual conference in May...

What is your first memory of being interested in design?

I didn't show any interest in design until I worked on a project for a centre of media art and technology. At the time people said this centre should be the new Bauhaus.

This was the first time I thought about what Bauhaus was all about. When I started to understand the Bauhaus philosophy I said we should not develop this as a centre for ‘media arts', because artists will go there to play with new technology and produce something that goes straight into a museum.

What we needed was people who would take new technology and apply it to some beautiful things for our daily lives.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was describing the work of a designer.

I went deeper into this kind of thinking. I wrote a book on information design, not the way we mean it today - where information means communication - my term was about how we can make our products more intelligent.

This kind of thinking was about how to combine information with product development, still a key issue today.

What is your background?

I studied media sciences, communication theory and psychology. So I had a background of communication and aesthetics. This is perfect when you deal with designers because you can understand them, but most importantly you have to translate them.

Because designers have not really established their own language, they need interpreters, mediators and facilitators to make things happen. That was my job from the very beginning - working with designers - and that's exactly what we do today.

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