Yes, that is what you think it is. Beating away there, swathed in that wobbly wrap of yellow fat, is a human heart. And yes, that is a scalpel skating gracefully through its tender layers, drawing a trickle of good arterial blood. Even if the Irish scene had spawned a myriad of programmes about design, chances are By Design would still be an odd one. As it happens, however, design in its most general sense (and even in most of its particular senses) has hardly been thoroughly explored on Irish television. By Design, a new six part series currently running on RTE 1, is a show that according to its devisor, Garrett O'Hagan, aims to right that particular wrong.
"We wanted to make something that did not just look at design as something to do with fashion or style," says O'Hagan. "We wanted to make something that really looked at design as part of everybody's everyday lives, rather than something that Italian people, or French people or British people did. We wanted to point out that design is something that has always been with us."
By keeping its definitions wide enough, the series allows itself plenty of variety. An early programme hops merrily from wood turner Ciaran Forbes, enjoying some woodland reverie as he chooses a nice bit of tree, to surgeon Maurice Nelligan, singing the praises of the latest piece of operating kit, before getting to work opening somebody's chest with an electrical knife.
What is perhaps most striking about the show, however, is that while it moves over multiple disciplines, it always looks at how design functions in an Irish context.
But if By Design is very much about Irish design, O'Hagan and his producer Ruan Magan have carefully avoided joining in any chauvinistic celebration about a new wave of Irish designers. O'Hagan is at pains to stress that the programme will not be limited in its interests to contemporary work, that it does not conceive of "design" as some new virus recently arrived from mainland Europe. "One of our main aims" says O'Hagan. "is to make people aware that design is something that has always been with us."
The programme aims to have a sweep wide enough to speak not just about the look and feel of everyday objects. It also encompasses architecture, landscape and environmental design, specifically in relation to urban planning, including the city of Dublin and the new city of Tallaght.
Both topics naturally bring the makers up against some prickly, highly politicised issues. "We try and expose some of the difficult areas without forcing an opinion. We try and make some space for the people who were involved simply to explain what informed their decisions and allow viewers to make their own judgments. If we have any aim, I suppose it not to attack what has happened in the past but to influence the opinions of those who are currently working in the area."
Criticisms about the way Dublin was built are nothing new. In the 1920s, the great Bauhaus architect, Walter Gropius was attacking Dublin Corporation's housing plans. What is new, however, is a perception expressed by many contributors to the series, that design, in everything from housing projects to bogs, from knives to genes, has arrived at a crucial juncture. As one contributor suggests: "the constraints of materials used to impose disciplines which the man building the stone wall worked within. Now we can do anything: and that imposes all kinds of choices . . . "
According to O'Hagan we have, in some ways "regressed in design. In previous eras we paid much more intention to the whole area of what you might call `travelling lighter', of trying to use less energy and fewer resources. In the next five or 10 years we will have to come to grips with that way of working once more." But if O'Hagan seems committed to an ecological engaged philosophy of design, By Design is not immune to the allure of the new. The series, which was filmed in widescreen format and using a new digital video technique, Digibeta, will be the first television production in Ireland to be entirely digitally produced.
"The area of technological design is a difficult one," says O'Hagan. "I mean, we've been designing engines since the industrial revolution and for some reason we're still trying to make a car that goes faster. It is the same thing with computer chips, where design innovations have been made all with the intention of working faster. It seems to be a part of human nature. But maybe that desire to go faster is something that we might start worrying about controlling."
By Design is on RTE 1 on Thursdays at 10.45 p.m.