Casson Mann, regarded as veterans of the British design scene, straddled the lifestyle design boom of the 1980s and held on tight as it got swept along in the converging phalanx of the media revolution of the 1990s.

Across-the-board creativity – that’s what most designers would like to be capable of: applying communication skills across contexts. Multimedia activities and multipurpose spatial needs make this increasingly necessary. It can be fearsome to be so flexible in practice, but English designers Dinah Casson and Roger Mann enjoy their stretching exercises.

The duo started their practice modestly in London in 1984 with a tiny, custom designed, Knightsbridge ice-cream parlour that was soon jam-packed with delighted customers. Last summer they put the finishing touches to their stage set design for Michael Nyman’s Noises Sounds and Sweet Airs, a tightly budgeted operatic version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set in Italy. Shadow projections of the singers onto huge reversed cyclorama screen, and a phased digital shifting of footlights on a translucent ellipsoid platform, created a palette of illusions with a simple kit of parts. Sometimes the merest intervention, the lightest touch, gets results. But make no mistake, the discrimination behind it must be heavyweight – there is no getting round this one.

Casson Mann, regarded as veterans of the British design scene, straddled the lifestyle design boom of the 1980s and held on tight as it got swept along in the converging phalanx of the media revolution of the 1990s. Alongside their inviting spaces for eating and singing, the development of an increasingly formidable portfolio of schemes keeps a staff of ten fully engaged in their Clerkenwell studio. Projects include permanent and temporary exhibitions for museums, as well as corporate interiors that demand all-round spatial communication. So the designers have little chance of draining their creative juices in just one niche of activity and instead enjoy ‘the cross fertilisation of ideas and techniques,’ explains Dinah Casson, who adds: ’They feed off each other.’

Huge responsibility Two major long-term museum schemes currently make up the backbone of their work. Digitations, a new technology gallery in the Science Museum’s Lottery-funded Wellcome wing, will be completed in 2000, and new galleries for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 20th Century design collection are due to be unveiled in 2001. Both are ambitious groundbreaking projects led by large teams of curators and consultants.

The V&A Museum’s grandly scaled and overdue masterplan will overhaul its espoused values concerning the decorative arts. ‘At the moment most decorative arts museums tell the history of style,’ says Casson. When the new displays are completed they will deal with controversial issues of cultural authority and of social and technical innovation, and will show manufacturing processes as well. This gives the designers a huge responsibility as communicators. For obvious reasons, they cannot yet offer extensive details of how their design will work. ‘At the moment we are setting up vistas for the scheme, which will include some 3000 objects.’

‘It’s very visitor-centred. Anxiety – induced by information – is a major key to exhaustion, so we’ve introduced tactics to allay this. It’s about giving people the tools to enjoy themselves,’ she adds. ‘Like a newspaper, you’ll be able to read the headlines or scan the small print, but it is not going to be all in your face.’ One museological habit the designers will discard is the creation of labyrinthine display shells sunk deep in the building’s interior. ‘You don’t know where you are. For orientation, knowing the outside wall is there and always visible is important.‘
Free-spirited experimentation Exploring the ‘installation’ approach to the use of materials and layout is the designers’ forte. For the Dinosaurs of the Gobi Desert exhibition at the Natural History Museum, for instance, they created an ‘abstracted landscape’ with deep orange angled panels – the red sandstone cliffs of the desert the dinosaur fossils were found in – which created a theatrical backdrop in front of the fussy Victorian Gothic architecture of the Museum.

The ‘landscape’ created for The Garden, an interactive gallery at the Science Museum for children aged three to six, which Casson Mann designed in 1996 (as part of Ben Kelly’s overall scheme: see Frame, vol.2, No.1, p.20), minimises the division between the ‘shell’ and its ‘contents’. Children’s museum spaces – even the ones that look playful – frequently fail to avoid being patronising because of their adult-orientated, over-determined messages. Representation of the playful through images rather than through the creation of a space that encourages play, makes the game element a restrained affair.

The duo wanted to create a safe but exciting environment that encourages free-spirited experimentation. They set themselves some ground rules, as a way of gaining the interest of children in their charge: do not underestimate the imagination of children, do not adopt assumptions about children’s taste, and do engage accompanying adults. A display for visual observation alone was not called for. ‘Each activity is accommodated within a structure designed to be an extension or an expression of the activity itself,’ Roger Mann explains. They steered clear of a step-by-step, showpiece object-led circulation. Instead, the space is fluidly conceived as a playground landscape of memorable, scientific events and features the elements of discovery and interaction in three zones: water, building and ‘ears and eyes’.

Sexiness of software While the V&A scheme is completely object-centred, at the Science Museum’s future Digitations gallery objects will be merely props in a haptic environment. Two floors of the new Wellcome Wing of the museum designed by architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, will be devoted to the theme, illuminated by the hues of a sub-James Turrell blue lighting scheme. Global communication, sounds, images, robots, and the future are some of the subject areas here; while the brain, genetics and nature versus nurture are three high-lights presented on the second floor, dubbed ‘Identikit’. The design theme is the staggering reducibility of everything to a binary code and, as a result, its modification into something else. The liberatingly non-linear and endless aspect of this theme is the basis for the circulation route. The Museum has long had to get to grips with interactive design and pays close attention to its sociological relevance: something no other museum in London has yet chosen to pursue. ‘Casson Mann have taken a lot of care to meet their needs, helping them to identify those needs in these areas,’ remarks Tory Dunne, an advisor on the project and a consultant designer to the Museum. The curatorial project team gave a major thumbs up to Casson Mann’s scheme for being ‘expressive of the process’, with appeal to the ‘technophobe and the technophile alike.’ It won’t be Segaworld, with lots of gizmos. Instead, it promises to apply lateral thinking in order to be highly evocative about the sexiness of software,’ while making a serious probe into ‘what is human consciousness, what makes you unique as a human animal, why we have emotions.’

Casson Mann’s work is strongly interpretative and naturally given to a style incorporating a rich condensation of ideas, some quite scenic, even surreal or earthy. The strong media slant to their client list gives them ample opportunity to indulge in special effects which are always reined in, however, to enhance design concepts that define and place identity, facilitate circulation, and inform and communicate effectively to regular occupants and visitors.

Strong Identity In a small office suite for Hydra Associates, which sells television programming concepts, an array of LCD screens in transparent casings on stainless steel stems shows slowly moving ‘video flowers’. The scene injects a special kind of texture into the limestone-floored reception area. A wall-mounted rug in the boardroom farther along incorporates a projection screen lit ice blue when not in use. The ambience created is enhanced by the rug’s relief pattern, which features tiny television screens. Not surprisingly, every visitor entering the premises is required to pass through an orange-polished, plaster ‘threshold box’.

At the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising’s 1780s headquarters in Belgrave Square, Casson Mann have expressed institutional gravitas counterpointed by the energy of the advertising business. Lighting is the key to communicating this hybrid message. Blue and white fluorescents in the suite of Edwardian rooms produce an atmosphere fitting to a space now geared to multipurpose, multimedia events and presentations. The design is consistent throughout. After refurbishing the stairwell and reformulating access to make it the hub of the building, the high space was given definition with a suspended light fitting that offers the visitor a dramatic new take on the TV screen. Designed in collaboration with JAM, a London designer collective, the lamp is ingeniously made up of a stack of television tubes sandblasted to disperse light, with a neon tube inserted in the middle.

So, do Casson Mann try to make informal spaces with a strong identity, which have a sense of place? ‘Our aim has always been to create spaces that the user will enjoy both on first encounter and through continuing experience,’ they explain. ‘Because of the central role of the client, very often there is a narrative firmly connected to that client. This may be expressed a number of ways – through the use of unexpected materials, light or juxtapositions of forms or spaces – which contribute to a warmth of feeling as well as a strong identity.’

Structured, layered expression in design is one way of giving the globally networked space its sense of location. Building up a relationship with a global client like the British Council, a cultural and educational organisation with hundreds of offices and educational centre across the world, takes time. Casson Mann have recently completed two new interiors for education centres, responding to the Council’s aim to promote access to information and teaching resources, and underlining the user-friendliness of new technologies without allowing the materiality of the printed book to become regulated. Some Britishness At the Council’s tiny (200m sq.) information centre in a downtown area of Thessaloniki, the visitor is greeted by a series of areas into which the designers have programmed a range of overlapping, sequenced services that meld together: education, placements, translation, library, areas for quiet study, IT facilities and ‘milling about’ space. A great many abstract ideas have been incorporated through the use of materials: a dot matrix-effect reception screen; a central, backlit soffit that flies through the centre of the space; and matching English and Greek statements sandblasted back-to-back onto a glass divider screen. ‘It’s pattern-making for a reason,’ explains Mann, ‘an exploration of the connections between British and Greek life and culture.’

The mix of national, programmatic and information needs dictated by council commissions calls for a careful balance of formal and experiential qualities. For their reception and offices in Singapore, the Council ‘wanted to have some Britishness.’ The neat functionalism of Jasper Morrison’s reception seating lends relaxed contemporary contract forms. Introducing elements one by one, setting up the texture of the space, Casson Mann have created what Mann calls ‘a built information landscape.’ An acoustic wall of reclaimed, hand-carved Balinese wood takes up a strong position. The dot matrix motif is ‘shoehorned’ in, appearing on the front reception-desk parcel shelf. The Council already had a dot matrix corporate logo, so it just makes sense. Desks are stepped, not regimented. Everything is improvised.

The way they see their role – as communicators, adept at applying skills in a variety of public and private contexts – is not about ‘lording it over’ the client and his or her anxiety to develop new and versatile spatial facilities. On the contrary, their approach demands receptivity to the brief and its possibilities. ‘Because each project tends to be closely tuned to the client, we find it hard to repeat ourselves. We would have an easier life if we did.’
Casson Mann’s flair for multidisciplinary practice in this developing field has put them in the top rank of an international league of design consultants. So how do they define fruitful design practice? ‘All successful projects depend on both client and designer being demanding of each other. It is the resultant of the two forces playing against each other that makes good work. It is not possible for one to do it alone. ‘