Thinking well with our technology

Buildings, bridges and towers; water and waste infrastructure; transport systems; colossal pieces of public art; masterplans for campuses, towns, cities and regions of the world. I know they call Goldman Sachs employees the Masters of the Universe but is there any part of our constructed tomorrow that Arup's 10,000 staff around the world do not touch?

Buildings, bridges and towers; water and waste infrastructure; transport systems; colossal pieces of public art; masterplans for campuses, towns, cities and regions of the world. I know they call Goldman Sachs employees the Masters of the Universe but is there any part of our constructed tomorrow that Arup's 10,000 staff around the world do not touch?

Design for Life at Arup's on Fitzroy Street last night marked their first entry into the London Design Festival, and a new commitment to design signified by the appoitnment of a internal design council chaired by Sir John Sorrell. Sorrell opened the proceedings with an acknowledgement of engineers' quest for solutions to some of the world's most complex and difficult problems. Timely, then, in our current search for strategic design - design with a macro-view, design that connects all the resources and drivers and people, design that is sustainable because it anticipates the future and doesn't end in the production of an object or building.

The speakers were the sculptor Antony Gormley and the sound-artist Hans Peter Kuhn. Gormley described his pursuit of "imaginative objects; things that can turn a site into a place, into a designed landscape - like a picture". The example was 'Exposure' the newly-completed gigantic human figure, parametrically constructed with the help of Arup's Tristram Carfrae to squat on a dyke in Leylstad, 1.2km out to sea from inhabited land. Through design, he said, we can invite people to think about human futures.

At first surprised and a little disappointd that an artist should be recruited to headline a design event, I had to concede that Gormley talks about his decisions so rationally and presents his process as so deliberate, that it sounds a lot like design. In explicit deference to Arup, he closed with the thought that "we need to think well with our technology".