During the past 20 years, this island has gone from being almost unresponsive to design to becoming almost swamped by it. Designers/ makers can now stay and make their living here. That's positive in itself, but some questions are not being seriously asked or answered.

Viewers and purchasers are generally critical of work on show, but lack the self-confidence to exercise that ability. They are often the first generation here to move into buying designer/crafts products. A large buying public is nervous about its critical judgments. Retailing and marketing is generally responsive to purchasers' buying attitudes. They serve a market. It is not their job to educate it, although some seek to do this. The problem of public critical self-confidence has been given few solutions on this island. Improving but still inadequate design courses exist in schools. They are too dependent on a teacher's or principal's personal interests.

There is a totally inadequate provision of exhibitions which present actual objects of contemporary design to viewers for direct assessment from life.

There is no large public gallery on this island capable of showing large to small scale work from furniture to jewellery, for example. Art-centred galleries show occasional design/crafts exhibitions, but as unusual elements in their art programmes.

The Crafts Council of Ireland has no design-centred officer to deal with this relationship of maker, object and user. The role of local development agencies is as regional business and employment resources, which may or may not relate to design or crafts. Regional and national marketing agencies for here or abroad can only consider these activities as small-scale and their needs as outside much of their brief.

In terms of product development, the situation is problematic. Most businesses focus their creative time into the effort and expense of product origination, development and marketing. They reproduce a design for as long as it is saleable. An object made for years or decades causes creative atrophy because it removes or reduces any thinking about new ideas, not merely new objects. In ceramics, for example, there was a major and rapid development of creative ceramics from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, as a result of contemporary government concerns about design expressed through the Scandinavian report and the foundation of the Kilkenny Design Centre.

There was also a low cost of living. English and continental potters brought in a new body of thinking and practice. This became moribund because it did not develop until the late 1980s, when ceramics as sculpture or as freely-formed vessels made a second significant creative impact. This too became a resource for repetition.

These failures to develop design, quality and function involved makers and market. The viewers and purchasers were confronted, too often, by poor design made by potters who knew better. After the initial excitement, the attitude of "Well, the punters will buy it anyway" seemed common.

To counteract this trend, the Bandon Pottery, after approximately 10 years of using the same product design, launched a complete rethinking of its wares at 1999's Showcase trade show. The work itself is exciting and sales reportedly large, particularly in comparison to the previous, static range.

At a wider level, during the last five to seven years, ceramics designers/makers who are graduates from third-level college courses and often also from the Crafts Council of Ireland's Business Development Course, have played an important role in developing contemporary product design here. Jewellery and woodturning have gone through similar processes, where ideas important for initial development have expanded through the effects of alternative design thinking.

These disciplines were both reinvented during the 1970s and 1980s. None of them had any living tradition to draw upon. They have spent 30 or so years creating an effective body of indigenous creative, technical and materials knowledge, from non-Irish sources. They are still developing a body of design thinking which retains its basis in international movements but which has the confidence to adapt these to this island's needs.

Designer furniture is an example of this. Contemporary furniture design did not effectively exist here, or was very rare, before the early 1970s.

Eric Pearce or Knut Klimmek trained at the John Makepiece School in England because no similar resource existed here. They brought its attitudes to furniture design, making and marketing, and this meant that wood became the predominant material for furniture design, until now.

Subsequently, design schools and departments such as Letterfrack, Dublin Institute of Technology or the University of Ulster at Belfast's art department, began to expand the numbers of furniture designers from the mid-1980s. They brought changing attitudes to varying materials and design thinking. Robert Tully, David Dudgeon, Leo Scarff, Brian Hughes, Michelle O'Donnell, Gordon Byrne or John McCrum, to name only a small number of people, have altered thinking about the flexibility of design's relationship to materials and technology here.

IN talking to many designers, it has become clear that the lack of a forum for innovative concepts expressed as objects has become an important concern. For viewers and users, the means of seeing a coherent presentation of new ideas is rare. Too frequently, cash or fashion are more important than design itself.

Where ideas are presented as new, but are market-led, the circle of stultification is well on the way to completion within a movement only 30 years old.

The lack of an adequate gallery specialising in design and the lack of general design education mean that there is not enough real criticism of design - which is a necessary stimulus to craftworkers.

The time has long passed when it was enough to be glad that there was any design at all happening here. The area has now expanded to the point where this attitude has become negative and dangerous goodwill.

Designer and makers, like the public, are caught in critical uncertainty about themselves and frequently show the same nervousness in receiving or offering critiques. The speed of cultural change on this island and the equal rapidity of product fashion changes internationally affect perceptions here.

A proper forum to allow designers to test creative ideas expressed as objects would allow the development of an empathetic peer group. Such a group could be flexible. It could be supportive critically, breaking down the isolation which many designer/makers feel, individually and in terms of finding answers to the technical and conceptual problems which they all encounter.

The exhibition project Chairs, on show at Galway Arts Festival, Dublin and Derry, begins this process. It tests the need for this body of support by throwing down to designers the challenge of designing a chair as an example of functional creative expression.

There have been two main effects. For designer and makers, there a public bench mark for their work, which prevented discussion becoming "talking shop". It gives their own work the context of other designers' work and also provides the opportunity of meeting and talking.

For viewers, an object such as a chair offers ease of access to a designer's creative expression. The variety of new thinking becomes obvious. It has the means of developing its own momentum in its terms, not those of market-led structures. Designers and makers They operate in a critical partnership with viewers and users. Both take pleasure in the work.

Chairs runs at the Aula Maxima, NUI Galway, until Sunday. It tours to the Bridge Gallery, Dublin, next month and to the Foyleside S.C. in Derry in September