One of Kaoru Parry's ceramic necklaces. Photograph: PR  It is a sad irony that Waterford Wedgwood, the pottery company whose profits paid for Charles Darwin's scientific research, has gone into administration because it failed to evolve. When Darwin's grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, first started his company's wheels a-spinning in 1759, he was innovating and adapting at a speed that left his competitors with soggy clay all over their faces. Inspired by the classical forms of ancient Greece and Rome, Wedgwood also kept a sharp eye on scientific advances and experimented constantly with new ideas, materials and glazes. It took over 3,000 painstakingly catalogued experiments to develop the distinctive blue jasper colour we now associate with the company. Wedgwood was also the first firm in England to cook up the perfect recipe for fine bone china.  But when I drove up to Stoke to visit the Wedgwood museum last summer, the place was as dead as a cobwebbed dodo. A few old glories were displayed, like disappointed ancestral portraits, in the alcoves of one airless room. In another, a Japanese couple sat politely through a primary-school level film about the company's history – complete with twee olde English muzak. But it was the gift shop that depressed me most. There among the itsy-bitsy teacups and dinner services for eight, I saw what Wedgwood had become: a Brit-kitsch dinosaur whose china bones could no longer support it in today's economic and aesthetic climate. Two weeks earlier I'd attended the Ceramics in the City show in London, featuring the best new talent in a market that's been expanding over the past 10 years as graduates inspired by the likes of Grayson Perry and Richard Slee had poured out of the Royal College of Art and St Martins. I'd seen revolutionary shapes, colours and ideas. The punters were handing over their credit cards. So why wasn't Wedgwood buying in?  "The problem with Wedgwood goes back to the 1960s," says Professor Emmanuel Cooper, editor of Ceramics Review. "The managers wouldn't listen to anything about the future. They didn't think they needed to." Although domestic demand for dinner services fell away, they sold their Merchant Ivory version of English history abroad, all cruet sets and statuettes in crinolines. Then the American market decreased as the pound grew stronger. "And they did something else silly," says young, Japanese-born ceramic artist Kaoru Parry, "when they moved their production to Indonesia. Because Japanese people loved Wedgwood, but they wouldn't buy it unless it was made in England." Parry was just beginning a project using bone china flowers, made by specialist craftswomen at Studio Hinks in Stoke when Wedgwood announced it was going into administration. Since Wedgwood was Studio Hinks's main client, it too went under. "It would be such a waste for us to lose those skills," says Parry.  To see how potteries should have coped, take a trip to the Design Museum, which this month celebrates both the 1960s work of Portmeirion's Susan Williams-Ellis in a show entitled Pottery Goes Pop, and the 21st-century innovations of Spanish-born Patricia Urquiola.  In 1953 Williams-Ellis, who died in 2007 aged 89, took over the loss-making souvenir shop at Portmeirion (the whimsical Italianate village her father Clough designed in the 1920s – and the backdrop to cult TV series The Prisoner). Like Josiah Wedgwood, she soon began experimenting with new glazes and laboratory moulds and in 1963 launched the psychedelic Totem range. Williams-Ellis also shared Wedgwood's love of history books. Her passion for Victorian natural history engraving led her to create the 1973 Botantic Garden range for which Portmeirion is still celebrated today. This range was groundbreaking because it didn't match. The hip young things of the 1970s could mix and match 28 different plant motifs.  Patricia Urquiola's new range for Rosenthal shows how modern designers can work with industry to develop stunning, desirable objects that combine beauty and function. She laces loopy handles and tactile relief patterns onto the otherwise smooth, white components of her Landscape dinnerware. The range of textures build up throughout the set to create what she calls "a sensual compendium".  Professor Cooper believes that collaborations between designers and industry can be achieved in the UK. "I do think the future is bright for British pottery. We still have some great companies in Stoke. The best British tile company – Johnson Tiles – is up there. We just have to start small again."  Michael Czerwinski, public programmes coordinator at the Design Museum, is organising a debate on the future of British ceramics on 23 January. "We need to talk about the fact that there's been no formal relationship between all these talented, young ceramics graduates and the big potteries. We need to ask why these artists are not being commissioned by the big British companies, who have the resources to help them play with new technology."  In other words: it's potty to let a ceramics industry with so much potential die out now.  China's future in their hands: five ceramicists to watch  Amy Cooper spent much of her childhood playing on the beaches of Cornwall and later became obsessed with "the infinite properties of clay and the myriad techniques that go with it". She now captures the detailed tactility and wonder of those Cornish beach memories in her shell-like porcelain lamps. She lives in Brighton and shares a studio in Hove.  Cumbrian ceramicist Michael Eden decided to take an iconic object from the first Industrial Revolution (one of Josiah Wedgwood's classic tureens) and produce it in a way that would be impossible with conventional industrial techniques. The Wedgwoodn't Tureen was designed on Rhino 3D and FreeForm software and sent to a ZCorp 510 rapid prototyping machine that "printed" the piece out of artificial bone. Although its surfaces are food safe, I wouldn't try serving soup in it.  Kaoru Parry was born in Japan, raised in the UK and graduated from Central St Martins College of Art and Design last summer. She has already given "bone china" a twist with her Homage range of jewellery, designed to incorporate a loved one's ashes into a wearable relic. Her Floret collection of cups and saucers featuring hand-crafted bone china flowers was a specific response to the declining ceramics industry.  Louisa Taylor graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2006 with a master's in ceramics and glass and received a development award from the Crafts Council in 2008. Her crisply playful stacking tableware was "inspired by 18th-century porcelain vessels and the rituals of dining". Each piece is individually wheel-thrown at her Deptford studio.  Allison Wiffen spent 15 years in advertising before retraining as a ceramic artist in 2000. She often uses photographic images in black and white, and is inspired by the 1950s fabrics of Lucienne Day with whom she shares a love of taut linear patterns. Her cufflinks celebrate the architectural and engineering triumphs of the Tyne Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral.
Helen Brown: As Waterford Wedgwood falls victim to the economic downturn, the industry needs to look to young talent to revitalise its fortunes