We’ve lost Ken

I’m back at UCLan for the design department’s Conference Week 14 where I’m giving my new talk, ‘Where the F*ck Did that Come From?’ They’re fiddling with tech when I sidle over to the display wall, upon which, as ever, Ken Garland stares back. Ken penned ‘The First Things First Manifesto’ in the 1960s – an iconic call to arms for creators to pledge all free time making work with meaning, as opposed to commercial gain.

I smile, having been as wowed by this form of activism as the other 5,000 or so students to have handed in a paper about the manifesto. And when the course leader, Andy has prepared my slides, I ask him how many. He laughs, a tired chortle, but not without admiration.

“Did he die, Ken?” He asks me. I hadn’t wanted to confront the possibility. I’d spoken to Adrian Shaughnessy on the podcast in 2016 and back then, Adrian, who was good friends, and an admirer of Ken, had alluded to Ken not being in the finest health.

This encounter had come 3 years after Ken had me over to his house to chat for a voluntary awareness campaign on behalf of CALM, The Campaign Against Living Miserably. At 83 years of age, Ken paced his workspace as he spoke passionately about the ills of capitalism, the way the banks had blown the surplus wealth that belonged to all of us.

We don’t retire, you see. Not when we shape our lives around our passions and find ways to get by in this harsh financial system. Ken hadn’t retired, and his fire burned bright.

His spirit, his outrage, and his joy swirled and melded like cosmic showers, as he showed me work, pulling down books from his wall, one collating his work, designed by Shaughnessy’s UNIT Editions. I basked in his glow, even as he bollocked me for saying ‘Saint Martins’ and not ‘Central Saint Martins.’ This I loved. The antagonists have always been fascinating to me.

He sent me away with a copy of his book and so much inspiration that I ran the short distance back to Camden station and swore off caffeine for the train back to Manchester.

So it was with sadness that my fears were confirmed. Ken had passed in 2021. But my ongoing fascination with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth in nature, we as a part of that, means I smile when I think of one of our industry greats, his tempestuousness, his craft, and his fights for what he believed in—not gone, of course, but on to something new. He is one of two Kens to have made a colossal impact on my life – Sir Ken Robinson, of course being the other – to have handed over a legacy I feel a welcome responsibility to build upon through The Creative Condition. My life cause of elevating creativity’s role in our lives, in healing the ills of our days, and to, at time, simply cope without falling apart.