Andy Wightman: 6000 Miles – written piece

Until presented with these ideas, I didn’t know of the existence of the Tarlair Lido. Hidden away beyond Macduff, I guess most people outwith that part of Banffshire will not have heard of it either. But what a delightful place!

In the school holidays in October 2004, I cycled with my family along this coast from Elgin to Aberdeen. It’s one of my favourite parts of the country which, despite an austere feel, is home to a rich culture – one which has remained resilient in the face of the homogenisation and dislocation apparent in so many other places. At 6am I enjoyed a hot cup of coffee and an apple turnover in a small baker’s shop in Portsoy. It supplied confectionery to the big supermarkets all over the north of Scotland. A Cruickshank’s lemonade lorry passed me on the road. We cycled past dozens of small farms and businesses that thrive in these parts. The names and the signage were unfamiliar. These were north-east businesses in the north-east selling north-east products.

In one sense, therefore, coming across signs directing us to the Sashimi Machine in Macduff would have been no surprise. Odd though a reference to Japanese food culture would appear, it would nevertheless have appeared as yet another indigenous response to how to make a living from the land and the sea (or in this case a fusion of the two). It might also have made us pause and reflect for a moment about the Scottish diet of fried fish, bakery products and fizzy drinks!

This self-reliance and independent spirit is rooted in the history of the land – a place that has sometimes been referred to as the ‘poor man’s country’. This was a place where the peasant survived longer than anywhere else in Scotland, where upward mobility was possible in farming and where, as a consequence, family enterprises took root from modest beginnings and, in many cases thrive to this day.

For those with no access to the land, there was the sea. Despite recent problems in the fishing economy, it is the sea that remains at the centre of the economy of much of the north east coast. But the sea is an increasingly contested space where a living is becoming more difficult in the face of environmental change and the regulations and legislation surrounding fishing. I don’t much care for the fish-farming industry where protein from the sea is harvested to feed farmed fish in intensive caged systems. The Sashimi Machine is different. It’s a meeting of farming and hunting on the border of the sea and the land – on the coastline. It’s a place for husbandry of the marine resource to promote healthy eating and, importantly, an opportunity for valuable education on the nature of food and how it’s produced and consumed.

One of the secrets of survival in the modern capitalist economy is to add value and to exploit niche markets. In food products, the north-east has a tradition of excellence and innovation, producing some of the finest produce in the country. Graven Image’s proposal for the future of the Tarlair Lido neatly reinforces this tradition and strengthens it by exploiting the tourism potential. Had the Sashimi Machine been in existence last autumn, we would not only have lingered longer in Macduff, we would no doubt have been anticipating it by exposure to it in the shops we visited and the delivery vans we cycled past on the way there.

Andy Wightman
Writer and Researcher.
Author of Who Owns Scotland

Comment

I’m pleased that Glasgow has won the Arts Council of Great Britain’s accolade to host a year long festival of architecture and design in 1999 because I’m hoping that it will help persuade the world that Scottish and British products are among the best in the world.

It seems that we always think that other countries have more of a winning formula in the design stakes than we do. We value Italian furniture, French fashions and American jeans over our indigenously designed products.

What we often don’t know is that many exotic imports are created by British designers; Claire Brass for Alessi, Tom Scott at Ford, Julie Tierney and Marcus Oates at IBM, and of course Alexander McQueen at Givenchy and John Galliano at Christian Dior.

Along with the rest of the world we envy exciting design from Barcelona, the colourful, rustic styles of Provence and Tuscany, and Germany’s super smooth technology. However, I believe that we have only just begun to mine our rich resources of Scottish design inspiration. We have already found it within ourselves to produce tartan and the Paisley pattern, world class knitwear and textiles, Macintosh coats and, our very own genius, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

In Scotland we are lucky to have a distinguished tradition of design which is currently being rekindled and presented on a world stage in the lead up to our Year of Architecture and Design. In 1999 designers will be challenged to look forwards to the millennium instead of backwards to Scotland’s distinguished heavy industrial past and unrivalled Victorian heritage.

Today, Scottish architects and designers are working to create new ways of living for a new century—designing buildings and products which will place Scotland firmly on the ‘most desirable list’ for a long time to come.

From Glasgow to Shanghai

Glasgow has one of the oldest traditions of design education in the world. It is home to the famous Glasgow School of Art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1896 and has the largest architecture and design community in the UK outside London.

The city was Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990 which gave a further boost and increased flourish to the design community. And in 1999 we got our own Architecture and Design Centre , The Lighthouse, another Mackintosh building which had originally served as the offices for the Glasgow Herald. The building was re-animated by local architects Page and Park. It is one of Europe’s largest Architecture, Design Centres and has become one of Scotland’s premier venues, attracting more than 250,000 visitors in its first year.

But not only is Glasgow a magnet for international aficionados of design, the creative community is increasingly outward looking and many of the city’s leading consultancies now undertake regular high profile international commissions. Graven Images is one such consultancy. We’re an international, cross disciplinary design consultancy which has operated from its Glasgow base for over seventeen years and last year we started to make fascinating inroads into China.

One exciting commission was the creation of ‘Britain at the Leading Edge Showcase’, the UK government’s biggest Chinese event of the year, featuring the work of more than fifty of the UK’s most innovative companies from six industry sectors. Visitors to the Shanghai-based exhibition, opened by Trade and Industry Minister Patricia Hewett, were given a guided tour by ‘Maddy’, a Chinese-speaking avatar created by Digital Animations Group, also based in Glasgow.

We were also asked to design a 200 square metre stand at the All China Hi-Tech in Shenzhen which would be clearly branded as British and would be visible and distinctive in a noisy and competitive environment.

Our solution was to conceive the stand as a promotional vehicle, a ‘prequel’ to the major ‘Britain at the Leading Edge Showcase’ described above.

We created a gloss white floor onto which were carefully placed a series of simple objects; a curved box containing a projected video, free standing totems containing UK sector information, and glass cases containing monitors. Each of the monitors showed the same ‘Maddy’ who acted as a tour guide to the exhibition. All of the text and the video were in Chinese. We were delighted when the stand was given ‘Best Organised’ and ‘Best Designed’ awards for the Fair.

We hope to be returning to China soon and building on our relationships there, and indeed having more opportunities to draw inspiration from a culture and a country so different from our own.

How to find us

Graven Images is located in Glasgow’s Merchant City. Our studio occupies the ground floor in a courtyard which is located just off Candleriggs.

Candleriggs is one of the streets that runs between Trongate and Ingram Street and is around 5 minutes walk from Queen Street Station.

Click on the link below to view map:

click here

Graven Images Introduction

Graven Images is like no other design organisation.

Since 1985 we have continued to provide a unique range of services for business, including interior, exhibition and graphic design.

Our people are talented professionals drawn from a wide range of creative and technical specialisms. We often work in cross-disciplinery teams on projects around the world. Together we create integrated design solutions that work.

We pride ourselves in being structured thinkers and organised, eloquent team-players. We are committed to getting things done and being good people to work with.

Our in-house research capability and academic partnerships ensure that our work is always relevant and innovative.

We respond to client’s real needs with real-world solutions that are creatively excellent and provide measurable benefits.

We are also experienced in supporting businesses through periods of change and in helping clients to identify new strategies and opportunities for business success.

Above all, we enjoy working on tough challenges for passionate people. We love what we do and are proud of what we’ve achieved by working closely with our clients.

Ross Hunter, Managing Director

Graven Images Data

Registered Office:
83a Candleriggs
GLASGOW
G1 1LF

Turnover:
2001/02: £0.93m
2002/03: £1.4m

Established: 1986

Founders:
Janice Kirkpatrick and Ross Hunter

Directors:
Janice Kirkpatrick
Ross Hunter
Andrew Sutherland

Number of Staff:
21 (3 architects, 13 qualified designers and technical staff)

Graven Images Limited is a company registered in Scotland.

Young Blood

Thanks for inviting me to Gracefield, it’s over twenty years since I left Dumfries to go to Glasgow School of Art but I remember exhibiting here when I was at Dumfries Academy.

It’s increasingly important to find places where the public can see how and what creative people do. All too often the public and the politicians like what we produce but aren’t interested in seeing where it comes from or investing in its production.

Educating creative people is a dirty business that’s not as straightforward as teaching sciences and many other subjects. It’s less easy to quantify and measure the progress of a painter than a scientist or a linguist. And in today’s educational climate we have to fight ever harder for the right to exist (banks) but its just as well we do because (interdisciplinary) creativity is at the heart of the new creative economy and it will continue to be so for quite some time as the the arts and sciences continue to converge. An exciting time to go to art school, as ever.

I believe it’s vitally important that different creative disciplines are shown together because regardless of technical specialism whether we’re designing trains, books or wedding dresses or creating sculpture or art, we’re all using exactly the same creative process. It’s the stuff that makes us different from animals and the stuff that allowed us to create civilisation from a pile of dirt and some pretty strange rituals.

It’s also good that new creative talent is given the chance to show itself in Dumfries and Galloway, it’s own patch. All too often in the UK and in Scotland we forget we’re as good, if not better that other more exotic sounding countries. It is possible, and for me preferable, to have in international business based in Scotland and it would be nice to see some of the cultural and economic potential displayed in this evening’s exhibition come home to roost in Dumfries and Galloway.

In this exhibition we have 17 graduates with different technical skills ranging from the design of jewelery and garments to painting and drawing.

Graduates are Kirsty Martindale, Julianne Foss, Stuart Webb, Kirsten Lyons, Pauline Montgomery, Linda McGill, Fiona Lammie, David Shannon, Lee Dickson, Andrew Brown, Derek Payne, Teresa Moore, Iona Somerville, Clare Benson, Claire Roddick, Helen Scott and Julie Houston and they’ve come from colleges throughout Scotland and the UK to exhibit here tonight, so welcome home.

Thankyou to Dawn Henderby and Leslie Jardine for inviting me to open the show tonight and the Arts Team at Dumfries and Galloway Regional Council and the graduates for all their hard work, with the support of Dumfriesshire Educational Trust. The exhibition will tour to Stranraer Museum on 1–29 April with the help of the European Development Fund, so make sure your friends go along and see it.

The City as a Living Artwork

I’m Janice Kirkpatrick. I work as a multidisciplinary designer with Graven Images who are based in Glasgow.

I graduated from Glasgow School of Art from the Department of Graphic Design after studying film, film animation and video. I then went on to do a theoretical MA in Design where I produced objects and furniture.

I now practice for the larger part of my time as a graphic designer but also design and develop domestic products. I teach a few hours a week in the Product Design department in the School of Art.

I was involved in writing Glasgow’s outline bid for Year of Architecture and Design 1999, for which we chose the title, “Glasgow—The City as a Living Artwork”.

This title was selected because we felt it best communicated that Art, if we must call it that, is in everything around us if we can only see it. We also wanted to express our belief that Art is not something dead, or apart from our everyday life, hidden away in galleries, but is an integral and important part of living.

Notions of what Art is change with our changing culture and constantly require recalibration and re-evaluation.

The title was necessary in order to give the Arts Council of Great Britain a clue to what we seek to achieve in Glasow. To those of us who wrote the bid the title was of value only as a tactical marker, what really mattered was the structure of our outline document which has a broad strategic base aimed at promoting the appreciation of design and architecture in the broadest sense through education, example, innovation, participation and communication.

I personally believe that the terms Art, Architecture and Design are inaccurate and even anachronistic and elitist. What artists, architects and designers do is essentially the same. We all share a well documented creative process through which we control the evolution of ideas to a greater or lesser extent. This process is the same irrespective of whether you produce books or buildings or oil paintings. The things that separate us into factions are technical specialisms and snobbery. There’s nothing to stop a painter from designing a hair dryer as long as that painter takes time to access the technical knowledge she or he needs.

All designers, artists and architects underpin and inform their intuition with analytical methodologies, a bit of sociology, a bit of psychology, a bit of colour theory and so on. Sometimes artists use more intuition and a little less analytical method, sometimes not. What is more important is what binds us all together, the creative process and the sensorial language we communicate with. Design, architecture and art are sensorial, utilising all of the senses, not only the visual. I believe we all communicate through manipulating the elements of culture which I believe to be symbols, language, myths, rituals and values.

I believe we would all do the public and our respective professions a great favour by talking more plainly about what it is we do, to each other and the public.

I believe Glasgow’s bid for City of Architecture and Design promises to be a good one because it tries to bring together all the apparently separate factions within architecture, design and art, helping all of us to understand and communicate more eloquently with one another and the public around us in the belief that everyone has a responsibility in the shaping of the future.

I hope that by communicating with each other and inviting the public to participate people will better understand, value and contribute to the world we’re creating around us.

And if that sounds idealistic then I make no apology.

UK Pack Age

UK Pack Age is an exhibition of British packaging which has been designed in the UK. (I consider design to be the process of ‘controlling the evolution of ideas’—the creative process which has less to do with fashion and much to do with underpinning intuition with methodology.)

If you’re a packaging fetishist Britain is a very good place to be as it is festooned with packages of all shapes, sizes, materials and constructions. Napoleon hit the nail on the head when he scorned us, calling us, “a nation of shopkeepers”. But Britain has a distinguished history of design education and has evolved sophisticated methodologies which underpin packaging and retail design, therefore, it follows that we should be good at wrapping things up.

However, packaging is about much more than retailing and we have included in the exhibition items such as coffins and tea bags. The retail environment is a ‘hot-house’ yielding consumer goods that demonstrate the extent to which many packages, such as alcohol and shampoo, have evolved. Curating this exhibition was not easy. One walk through any supermarket reveals several thousand packs, a walk along any shopping street multiplies the choices several hundreds of times.

The game of curation is made harder still by manufacturers and retailers who delight in updating packs with phenomenal speed—in the five months of searching I selected packages and requested samples only to find that they had been discontinued and replaced by new packs.

This is especially true of ‘FMCGs’, or, ‘fast moving consumer goods’, like laundry products, toiletries and staple foodstuffs. These items are almost constantly re-calibrated, more rapidly than fashionable clothing, in order to compete with rival brands and find favour with the latest consumer trends. I would even go as far as to suggest that a nation’s economic health and cultural well-being can be measured by the rate of change of its packaging—because packages do much more than merely act as containers for products, they also act as mirrors of changing cultural attitudes, reflecting who we are and what we believe in, what our history has been and what tomorrow may hold in store for us. A healthy society should be in a constant state of flux. This is expressed through the objects we make, through the thought and care that goes into their detailing and construction, to the consideration given to how they will work in the home as well as in the retail environment, to how gracefully they will age and what impact they will have on the environment. We do get the objects and packages that we deserve.

Packaging performs such a broad range of functions within society that it almost defies classification. I chose to divide the exhibition into three areas: packages that protect and preserve, packages that perform and packages which promote. These four Ps provided a framework which allowed me to discuss some of the many complex roles that packages fulfil. It is important to understand that the exhibition is not a survey of UK packaging design, it is a personal selection and the simple framework provided by the four Ps helps to focus on broad characteristics. In reality, most packs, often the best packs, perform all four roles simultaneously.

Traditionally, packaging design occupies the ground between product design and graphic design, the area between objects and words, between advertising and art, creator and consumer, between manipulator and manipulated. However, as a direct result of technological developments and shared software, designers now move across traditional areas of specialisation. It is now possible to find musicians working as graphic designers, graphic designers working as product designers, musicians working as both and all collaborating with scientists, manufacturers and marketeers. Industrialists and scientists can contribute at many different levels. Because packaging involves elements of creativity and science it is an excellent medium for creative collaboration, perfectly reflecting these new, interdisciplinery trends in creative working and providing a showcase for some of the very best design solutions.

I believe that our supermarkets are among our greatest art galleries. They are at the cultural coal-face, giving an accurate picture of our attitudes at any fixed moment in time. Try strolling through the aisles with no money, or plastic, in your pockets. Examine the limited edition prints, the ironic multiples, the structures formed through display, the point-of-sale installations, the performance, the technology, the architecture, music and drama. Entry is free and if you see something you really would like to buy, the chances are that you can afford it.

Because of the high volume and low cost demands of the medium, packaging is a challenging area for designers to work in. Generally, packs must communicate with great eloquence and within extreme cost restraints. Designers can’t buy their way out of problems, but must instead use their ingenuity.

We always ritualise our deepest cultural activities, such as birth, death, marriage and power-giving, because it transforms them into indelible components within our lives, forming the hidden bonds which weld society together.

Packages tangibly express our feelings for one another. Gifts are expressions of ‘care’ and reverence. They are remote dispensers of compassion where the wrapping method carefully signals the manner in which the present should be given and received and the esteem in which the contents should be held. By extension, many everyday packages have the potential to make us feel good, or careful, or downright disappointed. This is powerful magic for packaging designers and for ourselves as we all like to receive gifts and probably enjoy ripping and unwrapping the layers of paper which have been carefully constructed for our pleasure. We all know the drama of a new purchase and the adrenalin rush as the last wrapper is breached and the delicious mystery of the package’s contents finally resolved.

Carluccio’s packaging is constructed like a gift. It appears to be hand-crafted and uses lots of different, contrasting materials including a traditional hard, wax box wrapped with a softly textured satin bow which feels romantically old-fashioned and well-mannered. Inside there’s crinkly straw, a ‘real’, ‘authentic’ material and crisp cellophane—lots of satisfying textures, sounds and smells to make the act of opening the package a pleasurable and memorable sensorial delight. The whole ensemble makes a group of standard products into a ‘gift’, economically and culturally increasing the value of the goods.

Packaging designers understand and respect the particular demands of different generic products such as soap powder, beer or bread. Many packs are so thoroughly researched, so carefully honed and regularly re-designed that they become like heat-seeking missiles homing-in on appropriate targets.

Each product type is ‘shopped’ in a different way by the consumer who has, often subliminally, been educated by the pack designer to differentiate between economy, mid-value and premium quality products within that generic type. Staple products such as soap powder must shout their messages much more loudly and quickly than more occasionally purchased products such as beer or cosmetics. The consumer expects to enjoy a longer period of time agonising over the purchase of a premium quality treat than a loaf of bread. Consequently the type, colouring and language of soap powder packs is larger, brighter and louder than any other pack in the supermarket. The packs’ messages are simple, brash and indispensable. For without soap powder packaging we would have no way of judging one product against another.

As well as being my favourite area in the supermarket, soap powder aisles provide excellent examples of own-brand products which are designed to compete with brand leaders. Sainsbury’s ‘Novon’ range has diversified to meet the customer’s expectations of the big brand leaders. In addition to ‘automatic’ and ‘biological’ the supermarket now produces ‘condensed’ and ‘colour’ versions of its products in all standard sizes. The products are designed, not as ‘economy’ alternatives, priced well below the market leaders, but as solidly constructed brands in their own right.

Harvey Nichols store has a range of own brand goods which are more covetable and expensive than many premium competitor brands. These handsome and unconventional packs carry duotone photography which makes them distinctive in a sea of multi-coloured images. They are cool, contemporary and desirable despite their economic two colour printing, which proves that is creativity, not expensive production, that is the key to a successful package.

As well as protecting and preserving the products (and the environment) from destruction and promoting brand messages, packs also act as totems and talismans. Packs simultaneously protect and preserve our cultural heritage and our sense of social and personal well-being.

Through many of the exhibits it is possible to uncover a hidden web of dynamic activity ranging in scale from the local and vernacular to vast, global relationships, between designers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Some multinational companies, like IBM, use local designers and carefully source carton material through local manufacturers, producing corrugated card in small batches in order to ensure that each batch is made from the same raw, straw material and is of consistent colour.

Some packs, like Kirriemuir Gingerbread, HP Sauce, Newcastle Brown and Guinness, retain elements of their local, cultural identity while tempering others in order to compete in the national and international marketplace. They are bastions of national identity and valuable national assets. This was recognised by the French government years ago and has only recently been recognised by government in the UK. Pop music, film, architecture, fashion and design are now viewed as valuable commondities central to national economic well-being rather than being viewed as impotent peripheral decoration.

As markets inevitably grow, and homogenise, elements of local identity ensure that products and services remain distinctive and desirable. If every company has essentially the same product, cultural idiosyncracies, as expressed through design, can provide the difference that gives that package an edge on it’s competitors.

When I talk of ‘cultural difference’ I don’t mean that all products from Scotland should be tartan. Cultural elements might include the typefaces created from local references or experiences, attitudes to layout and form and, perhaps most importantly, the manner in which the pack interacts with the user. The initial experience of opening a package colours our attitude to the contents. Manufacturers such as IBM take time to ensure that the out-of-box-experience is rewarding and appropriate. The unpackaing ritual may evoke laughter or humility, it may pamper or excite or tease. Manufacturers also take time to ensure that they communicate with the user and indemnify themselves against uncontrolled unpacking which may damage the contents or the user.

Music packaging deserves an exhibition all of its own because the choices are so vast and the quality of graphic innovation breathtaking. In his video interview Daniel Weil bemoans the conservative attitude of the large music companies who refuse to consider a standard CD box to be anything more than a protective, brittle, styrene, cover for a disc and a leaflet. The packages afterlife in the home and its usefulness outwith the retail environment are not considered. While this is disappointing, many of the smaller music companies have used the limited constraints of the CD format to produce some of the most beautiful packages. Nuphonic, Talkin’ Loud, Mo’Wax, Deconstruction, Intro and Phono are only a tiny selection of the companies responsible for commissioning some of the most exciting new graphic design. They are responsible for launching the careers of a generation of talented graphic designers.

When examining packages it’s important to consider not only who they must attract or repel but the context they will be placed within. Often the next layer of design around the package is ‘point of sale’, which is a kind of mini retail environment all of its own, fitting snugly within the big pack, the shop itself. You can tell from the shop’s facade what kind of retail experience to expect inside. Brown profiled aluminium cladding is the architectural equivalent of the cardboard box. Beautifully detailed stone and glass mean money, both inside and out. As a rule-of-thumb, plastic outside usually means plastic inside. It’s a shame that we have yet to get to grips with big, high-quality, plastic buildings when we’re so good at smaller plastic products, like Persil Concentrated Washing-Up Liquid and Halfords Oil.

The next time you shop, pause for a second before you reach for the package and ask yourself why you have chosen it above all others. Analyse your reactions—are you doing what the designer expected of you? We are all experienced, and usually unconscious, shoppers who could learn so much about ourselves through what we buy if only we make time to pause and think.

The Research Centre

In 1989 I went for a drink with Bob Palmer, the Canadian Director of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture. We were talking about how we might develop cheap and effective events that would have tangible lasting benefits for Glasgow beyond 1990s’ year-long festival. Bob told me that the cheapest and most effective programme he’d ever come across had been hosted by the city of Los Angeles in the late eighties. It simply consisted of a series of meals attended by a constantly changing retinue of diners who had never before clapped eyes on each other.

Over the hour or two spent eating, strangers got to know each other and many developed relationships and businesses with people who’s beliefs and values and visions they shared. Just as cities grow where people meet – at the intersections of roads and around ports, if you bring people together things happen, even businesses happen. Why would we form ‘companies’ if not to enjoy the company of like-minded people?

Lloyd’s of London started life in just this way. It was originally the kind of coffee house that grew up around London’s coaching stations. It’s rules celebrated the sociable atmosphere found in most urban places and for the price of a mug of coffee a person earned the right to speak in Lloyd’s room.

People used coffee houses for more than idle chat. Gathering around a cup of coffee provided the perfect excuse for people of different social rank to get together and exchange information on important subjects such as how busy the roads were or who was trading well or who was inventing a new way of doing or making something. Modern newspapers appeared on the scene and were made available behind the bar, further fuelling the conversation by providing new topics for discussion and news from further afield.

Lloyd’s spawned coffee houses all around London. The model was copied in France before the revolution where it acted as a cover for political groups who hung out around the Palais-Royale. After the Revolution the cafés became banks and banks, once more, have become coffee houses, and bars and restaurants. And I feel sure that many of these new places, if they’re of a high enough quality and designed to be sociable places, will in turn incubate new ‘companies’.

My point is that there’s nothing difficult or special about creativity because human beings are biologically predisposed to create. It’s what makes us different from animals. Our urge to reinvent the wheel and continually create more and better things is our greatest natural asset. So we must be doing something very wrong if we’re failing to capitalise on the most common resource on the face of the planet. I suppose we’re actually gathered here tonight to work out how we manage to stop ourselves from being creative, and that’s a very interesting and very ‘Scottish’ subject.

My own business, Graven Images, grew out of the social and educational environment at The Glasgow School of Art, the Vic Café and the Griffin. There we learned how creative people in Europe and North America configured their lives to be creatively innovative. We knew that we didn’t want boring jobs in boring companies. So it seemed reasonable that we should apply what we’d learned at art school to our own lives and do something interesting instead. We reckoned that was the purpose of education.

Sadly, at that time we were the only students to set up a company instead of going on yet another industrial placement. It wasn’t surprising because, in a way, the School would have been happier if we’d graduated with no jobs, they viewed our actions as precociously insolent. But we weren’t trying to be heroes, we simply didn’t know any better, we’d nothing to lose and we thought Glasgow was a good a place for a design business. So Graven Images was born, based on a model of a European cross-disciplinary design studio, even if it was in a somewhat colder climate.

Thankfully, one organisation believed in us: The Scottish Co-operative Development Committee. They helped us apply for Regional Development Grants, Enterprise Initiative cash and persuaded the City Council to give us a one-off grant of a thousand pounds just because we were a co-operative. In 1986 that gave us £38.40 a week to live on which was roughly the same as a student grant. It wasn’t much but it was enough.

Along the way, so-called business consultants with no actual experience of being in business gave us strange advice. We were told to get a safe job with a future (as if such a thing exists); to get a track record; not to be so damn sure; not to go into business with close friends, lovers or family members; we were told to wear suits and to aspire to be as good as people from London. The high street banks wouldn’t lend us cash and the government agencies wouldn’t give us soft loans, relevant advice or work. But we persevered and learned and changed lots of things along the way, including our co-operative constitution.

It’s a fact of life that institutions and investors are nervous of supporting new creative industries because they don’t look like traditional ones. New creative businesses look different and operate in different ways from traditional models so it’s difficult to find one support strategy that fits all, therefore investors prefer to give low risk project-based funding rather than core funding, a practise strikingly similar to usury.

We can’t really compare new creative industries to the monolithic business of shipbuilding but both are innovative and internationally influential. New creative industries don’t directly employ thousands but they are electronically linked to millions. There are more new creative industries than there ever were shipbuilders, but they’re smaller and lighter and more manoeuvrable than the ocean-going ships. They’re essential components in many global industries as well as being industries in themselves and, unlike shipbuilders, they don’t need to re-tool; they just upgrade software or quickly change direction. Like shipbuilders, they employ people with lots different skills. We employ graphic and interior designers and architects. We all use the same tools: the same hardware and software to collaborate with each other and with writers, musicians, filmmakers, engineers and technologists on projects ranging from two and three-dimensional corporate branding, graphic and interior design for retail and leisure industries to international travelling exhibitions.

Technological convergence and cross-disciplinary convergence of skill focussed around language and software are daily realities of working life. But while being able to discuss music and metallurgy on the Macintosh eases communication it’s not a substitute for knowledge. Innovative companies need research and development and the most pleasant way of uncovering new possibilities is through forming relationships with the many educational institutions on our doorstep. And while we’re on the subject I believe we should educate the marketplace as well as the workforce.

Scotland has an unrivalled tradition of education and innovation that gives us a global marketing advantage. We are expected to be inventive.

Contemporary Scotland has emerged as a mature, intelligent and idiosyncratic mongrel society. Cross-cultural influences and tendency towards the exotic puts us in a good position to express our rich differences through products and services – to make them distinctive and desirable in a global marketplace. We should bask in our Scottishness and create an environment where creativity is embedded in everything we do, where the risk that has traditionally accompanied us throughout history is once more regarded as an essential part of creative life. The more eggs you break the more omelettes you make.

We should stop trying to be American or Catalonian or from London. Ironically, it’s often harder for me to win work in Scotland than it is to win work in England and abroad. Big Scottish institutions are seduced by the apparent glamour and security of working with a London creative team therefore Scottish companies, like mine, don’t get the chance to do their best work at home. I learned long ago that no one ever got sacked for commissioning mediocre work and I think its high time they did.

We must lead by example and invest in creativity. Financially, Scotland’s a poor country. I therefore wholeheartedly approve of any positive discrimination that funds creative solutions, because they don’t cost more but they do take more effort. Effort doesn’t cost more money. It’s easy to get creative people to do their best work but first they must be given a chance.

In 1950 Hugh MacDiarmid spoke about the Arts in Scotland. I’ve taken a bit of his speech, published by Mainstream in 1984, and substituted ‘arts’ with ‘creativity’. It reads:

“The mass of the people will react all right if they get the chance. It is the stupid conservatism of their self-styled betters’ that’s the danger… Amateurism has always been the curse of the creativity in Scotland – amateurism and the inveterate predilection to ‘domesticate the issue’… the progress of creativity in Scotland is dependent upon… wider appreciation and striving after the highest possible standard”.

The biggest challenge we face in Scotland is to allow ourselves to be creative. We have to allow creativity to happen, learn to recognise it and support it, and we can’t innovate slowly, so I suggest we all go up the pub for a discussion and sign some cheques. Then we’ll run a slate and see how many of us have backed a winner.