Britain and Modernity

Design is certainly a component in our national culture. We don’t have the option to stand outside culture to get a clearer picture of it, because we’re all part of it, design no more or less so than dry-cleaning, dog breeding or drinking, except that they might be rather easier to define.

The point about design is that it’s just another name for creativity. To ‘design’ something is to ‘create’ something in a structured way, based on our experiences and beliefs, usually for a specific reason.

So how do we make contemporary things; globally desirable products and services that reflect the place where they were conceived, things that are recognisably British? Should we make things that are recognisably British, Scottish or European, or does it really matter?

I think it does matter.

The knowledge revolution lets us choose how and where we live and whether or not we want to live in the past, the present or the future. We can go home to a Manhattan style loft or a Tudor semi complete with Mediterranean kitchen. We can watch the History Channel while eating authentic Indian food. If we get bored we simply flick channels or rearrange the furniture.

All of this ethnic and historicist window dressing only masks our desire to deal with the difficult issues of designing to represent the cultural diversity that typifies our country. Unfortunately many designers think inclusivity is an impossible brief so they’ll make ‘neutral’ products and places instead. But it would be a disaster if laziness or political correctness stopped us expressing ourselves because many kinds of difference create an inclusive society while neutrality satisfies no one.

The more we submerge ourselves in other people’s cultures while they claim joint ownership of the English language, the more important it becomes that we define and express who we are and what makes us special. We’re all equal and different and British and entitled to celebrate that. How else will we, and the things we make and do, survive, evolve and remain visible in the global marketplace? Britain will have to express itself or die. Design or die!

While it’s important that we don’t lose sight of what we are and where we are, it’s also important that we don’t lose our sense of time; of living in the present. Designers create the props and backdrops, the objects and architecture that allow us play out the dramas of our everyday lives. If we want to live in the present we have to keep making new things in new ways. We are destined to continually improve rather than just reinvent the wheel.

The future is scary and sexy and inevitable. Britain will inhabit the future or it will simply fall by the wayside. Because creativity is becoming an increasingly professional activity it separates creators from consumers. Those who create will control more of the environments and the lives of those who don’t. Creative power will reside with those who make and distribute things, not those who have to buy them.

The synthetic world grows ever deeper and becomes less distinguishable from the natural one. Designers have more power and therefore need more understanding and control because mistakes made in machine code and genetic code will linger for longer. We invented design education and the tools and methodologies that grease the wheels of creativity and allow us to identify, understand and exploit opportunities for new products and services.

Speed and change are characteristics of our identity and because they’re so much part of us it makes it hard for us to see their value clearly. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the slippery and intangible thing that is Britain might be better expressed as a Website that a tangible lump of geography.
We have the good fortune to live in Philip Dodd’s ‘mongrel’ society; a place that encourages conflict, confrontation and diversity—the essential preconditions for creativity. And of course we have the English language that, like us, has an astonishing capacity for change, reinvention and communication. Our language is a huge asset in tomorrow’s world, in all its different dialects, because it’s also the language of science and technology and it’s spoken in some form or other by one quarter of the world’s population. We’ve also got rich and varied history, a distinguished educational system (that’s not perfect), and healthy street culture.

But how can we be modern if modernity changes with every moment? For me, modernity is a willingness to consider and try new ways of doing things. We can’t change history but we can reinterpret it and represent it and make it ours. One thing is for sure—the cycle of change is speeding up and we’ll have to stop prevaricating over Diana’s death and whether or not the Dome was a good thing and get on with the next thing.

I think the recent exercise in Cool Britannia, naff though it was, was useful. It gave us the permission to accelerate the creative process and examine, and even commodify, some of our cultural characteristics without having to waste most of our energy explaining or apologising for what were doing. It simply allowed us to get on with the job of letting our country evolve rather than actively preventing change.

Our heritage is no longer a burden of crumbling stately piles and gloomy castles or the grind and filth of heavy industries. Thanks to Sir Walter Scott, Trainspotting, Fergie, Tom Jones, Spice Power and Tim Berners Lee we’ve liquidised our ancient assets and turned them into thriving businesses. We might be ancient but we’re justified in capitalising on our heritage and at long last making the past our own and hopefully the future too.

I’m going to quickly show four projects:

The first two are designed to be inclusive. They’re for your granny or your brother. They borrow from a range of cultures and traditions but they aren’t neutral.

The second two are culturally exclusive. Red Lemon is for computer nerds talking about themselves to people who share their values.

RATT is for clubbers with want to party in a specific type of way.

The first two are broad and soft and the last two are narrow and strong tasting, none are neutral.

Favorit and Tinderbox are both mongrel environments. They’re everything: café, bar, restaurant, coffee shop, deli and sandwich bar at different times for different people—the environment is a kind of ‘loose-fit’ and doesn’t impose itself on what happens in it. It’s loose and changeable. The bric-a-brac of product gives it its personality. Hierarchy of different opportunities to use it, to sit and interact in different ways. It sells to many people that mean we have to be all things to all people without becoming bland.

Red Lemon … in contrast this company hasn’t got a history—it’s only a couple of years old. It uses its environment to express as clearly as it can what it is about in order to attract people to work for it. It’s a lure to buy and attract the best of a single group of people to work for them, not to sell. It talks to one group of people allowing us, as designers to be very much more specific in our message.

Room at the Top is also a single pitch to single group of people.

Sweden–Scotland

National values, global virtues

My business, Graven Images, is based in Glasgow, Scotland. But I, and many of my colleagues, spend a lot of time with clients here in London or working with clients and projects abroad, which is now even cheaper and easier that ever before.

When we founded the business eighteen years ago, we made a conscious decision to be an international company and to make our base in Glasgow, rather than in London or LA; the two cities which offered us contacts and possibilities. We decided to stay because we knew Glaswegian culture was rich and complex and would influence our creativity and give our work a different perspective from most of our London-based competition.

In the global marketplace you need all the advantages you can find and I know our Scottish location is attractive to clients, especially corporate clients, and it provides us with a rich cultural resource on which to draw in order to make your work as unique, distinctive and desirable as possible. Glasgow has given us all this and much, much more.

Glasgow

Most importantly, Glasgow gave us a broad and deep context within which to work. Our obsession with its social structures and institutions led us to form partnerships with academic institutions, that allowed us to invent the analytical tools and methods which now underpin much of our creative process.

Glasgow is a highly organised and intricately factionalised city. Its preoccupation with structure taught me the value of order and hierarchy in everything from books to buildings. It’s a place of strong contrasts and surprising contradictions: Glaswegians are forthright and questioning, they’re not shy to ask difficult questions, which produces strong and eloquent designers and architects. I believe that our process is robust because people question what we do.

Language, communication and publishing are also highly prized. And we were lucky that Glasgow gave us the chance to design one of the world’s oldest English language broadsheet newspapers at the moment when the world changed from analogue to digital. We’ve also designed a tabloid evening paper, which in many ways is much much harder to design that an elegant broadsheet.

The city also invited us to create a branded system of communication for what was then the UKs largest local authority—and then it challenged us to find consensus for our proposals amidst the chaos of two colliding political regimes. The experience we gained through this crash course in politics has been invaluable in working on many projects for governments in Westminster and in Edinburgh. We curated, designed and toured UK Style, the country’s first expression of ‘Cool Britannia’, the international exhibition of UK street style and design for the DTI while the Thatcher government was still in power. Working with 10 Downing Street we produced the Shanghai-based event that formed the backdrop to Tony Blair’s first visit to China after the handover of Hong Kong. We’re currently building two Chinese-based exhibitions curated and designed by us in conjunction with CBBC. These form the backdrop of the DTI’s major event in China this year, called the Leading Edge Showcase.

Moving from politics to pubs, Glasgow has even helped us to understand how to make sociable interior spaces. In Scotland people come indoors to meet and drink, like many Europeans they prefer to stand up (and don’t like carpet), and even the city’s smallest pub, or shop, as it’s locally called, has at least three distinctive types of space configured to meet the needs of lone customers, couples and groups. We’ve now transferred our pub-derived social knowledge into corporate workplaces and high street coffee outlets.

And of course, I can’t talk about Glasgow without mentioning the Glasgow School of Art, the world’s oldest undergraduate art school where I was educated. The power of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s building endures long after my time there, and it continues to remind me that projects with small budgets can be inspirational.

Glasgow has a special place in its heart for architecture and design. No other city in the UK has the energy, resources and the networks to support a year long festival of architecture and design, such as Glasgow’s huge event in 1999 when it was UK City of Architecture and Design.

My Glaswegian context has many different dimensions from which I, as a designer benefit. Glasgow was and remains Scotland’s most cosmopolitan and ambitious city with the largest population of designers, architects and artists outside London. In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was the powerful ‘workshop of the world’, generating industrial products and wealth while Parliament in Westminster absorbed itself in the colonisation of foreign territories. The wealth has gone but Glasgow’s strong relationships with continental Europe, North America and Ireland endure. It’s these networks that give me the broad perspective that benefits my business and the work I produce for my clients.

Scotland

However, just as London isn’t England, Glasgow isn’t Scotland. But what’s currently happening in Scotland is interesting, especially if you believe that design can generate wealth and make a significant contribution to the economy. Personally, I believe that design is a political activity, and I know that creativity is the catalyst for wealth creation.

Scotland has some world-class companies but it doesn’t have a dynamic economy, in fact the MD of HSBC recently said that Scotland was in permanent recession. This isn’t strictly true but we do have a perpetually small rate of economic growth. Which is odd if you consider that of all the patents granted throughout the world for new inventions in the last 50 years, 40% have been to inventors from the UK, and a disproportionate number of these from Scots. Scotland has always been great at having ideas, and poor at converting them into cash, and this remains true today. The fruits of our national creative heritage underpin much of modern life—the telephone, money and banking, television, the fax machine, pneumatic tyres and tarmac for roads, colour photography and now even cloning and many aspects of bio-sciences. We produce the thinking behind many of the world’s biggest brands, but with the exception of banking, we have failed to reap the rewards for our creative investment.

In the UK, design has been absorbed within the government term, Creative Industries. I believe that this is a good thing because the Creative Industries focus on the commercialisation of creativity, which is at the root of what we, as designers, do.

In Scotland, the Creative Industries have a special role to play in our future as they must deliver the promise of our creative heritage. Thankfully, key politicians in our new parliament are approachable and interested in our creative resource. They are showing signs of following the innovative government processes adopted by devolved government in Northern Ireland, where cross-departmental groups ensure creativity is at the core every part of government, and eventually, hopefully, in every aspect of life.

The Scottish Executive have already formed new partnerships in order to deliver policy effectively within the creative sector. The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City is already in the second year of a three year programme to deliver government policy on architecture.

The Creative Industries network, also administered by The Lighthouse, has several hundred members throughout Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northern England. It is already proving to be a valuable source of economic information for both industry and government and is showing every promise of transforming into an industry-led partnership with government, with a mission to release the economic potential of this significant part of the Scottish economy.

Personally, I believe that Scotland has much to gain by placing design at the heart of the economy, as a primary industry, with the potential to create new wealth by working in partnership with businesses, education and government. I believe in doing this we could truly convert our national values into global virtues.

Innovate Or Deteriorate—Design Or Die

The Role Of Design In Innovating For Business Success

In one sense there’s nothing new about Millennium Products.

Ever since the first industrial revolution in 1760 several British governments (and even some members of the British royal family) tried to persuade businesses to work with designers. Like Millennium Products, many of these attempts to promoted the use of design did so by showcasing examples of ‘best practice’. But initiatives were sporadic, usually tactical in order to solve short term economic problems, success was therefore patchy and economic progress slower than it might have been.

What is really remarkable about Millennium Products, in relation to all that has gone before, is the commitment of government to a long-term strategy that aims to get creativity into the heart of every part of UK culture and economy, not just the product industries, and not just for short-term tactical gains.

There are many things that make this selection of 1012 21st Century artefacts different from the great exhibitions of the last two centuries; the extreme complexity and diversity of the products which range from the steely heaviness of traditional industrial manufacturing to the lightness and invisibility of new digital media. Millennium Products encompass both product and service industries. There’s also an urgency about the way in which their economic and cultural benefits are communicated, not only to manufacturing industries but to every conceivable type of business, including the business of educating future generations of designers, industrialists and consumers. It seems that a government has at long last come to the conclusion that creativity is no longer an option, it’s a national obligation.

I’m told that the Millennium Products were originally conceived as a way of dispelling crusty and outdated stereotypes of the UK, to show that we’re innovative and forward thinking, not drowning in history and heritage. Whether this is, or isn’t true doesn’t really matter because it was very timely. Millennium Products coincided with the exponential growth of digital technologies that continue to sweep through the world like a great wind of change, transforming everything they touch and accelerating us into tomorrow’s world.

It seems that very suddenly we’ve found ourselves in the midst of a new technological revolution; the third in less than 250 years. Change on a scale that would have been unimaginable ten years ago has now become our way of life—it’s the only way of life for most businesses. We’re all running for our lives, me included, we’re all running in order to survive and to keep pace with the breakneck speed of technological and cultural change.

Having spent the last fifteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ with my architect partner Ross Hunter. I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when phototypesetting disappeared. Overnight the graphics studio changed shape, out went typesetting rules, cow gum and line board, putty rubbers, registration marks, mark-ups and mark-up pens, overlays, Rubalith, Schafelines, halftone line and dot screens.

In the interior design part of our company the architects and designers lost all but one of their drawing boards, complete with their parallel motions. They also lost Rotring technical pens and endless bottles of black ink. French curves and adjustable set-squares were next to go. Apple Macs began to appear in our studio, so we dismantled the process camera. It had been an integral part of graphic production and had originally been craned into position. But we took it apart bit by bit and threw it in a skip – one day it had been worth fifteen thousand pounds, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worth nothing—we couldn’t even give it away. Today the studio looks less cluttered. I use electronic mail, a mobile phone and a laptop, which conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed. But some important things remain, like my sketch books.

As the physical world changes before our eyes, so too does meaning of everything. Things that were once familiar and unchanging now demand that we reconsider their purpose in our lives. The sciences and the arts are merging. Hardware yields software, wetware and intelligent networks. The terms ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘art’ and ‘science’, even ‘life’ and ‘death’ now fail to define what were once ‘absolute’ conditions. Even ‘time’ takes on new dimensions in the digital age.

Nothing is as it was, five, two or even one year ago. We feel as if we can create almost anything we can imagine. Everything we have dreamed of now seems probable and possible.

As a designer I welcome this exciting upheaval. But I find it worrying that with all of this new knowledge, and all of these new opportunities, we are still surrounded by banality, mediocrity and historical pastiche in communications, products, services and architecture.

Why is it, that while the future looks so tempting, many businesses continue to live in the past rather than embracing the future? Why can’t they recognise that the world has changed? Instead they prefer to rearrange the furniture or stand still and gather dust. Are unable to face the uncertainty of innovation and become paralysed, doing nothing at all?

Perhaps these businesses have inherited a cynicism about new ideas. New ideas are often presented as mere ‘entertaining diversions’ from tried and tested ways of doing things. But the excuse that “we’ve always done it this way because it works” is no longer an option. What works today may not be good enough to work tomorrow. Digital modelling, rapid prototyping and a host of new tools for accelerating the research and development process mean that new rivals appear from leftfield and make your company obsolete overnight.

Other businesses maintain a superstitious attitude to innovation. They regard creativity as dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’ and creative people as unpredictable ‘artists’; reckless, irresponsible individuals who over-excite employees and ‘rock the boat’ by asking uncomfortable questions with unfamiliar, unsettling answers. It should take comfort from the knowledge that creativity is nothing new, it’s been around since the beginning of civilisation. Even ‘design’ as we know it, first appeared in the 1830s. There’s no excuse for being suspicious of a tried and tested process that’s been professionally practised for over 170 years.

In fact, it’s worth remembering where ‘design’ came from because it help us place it in context and see more clearly how we can use it to make sense of all of these new opportunities that are ripe for exploitation.In the first industrial revolution of 1760 the old creative industries broke with their craft traditions and entered the Machine Age. The first of many schools of ‘applied art’ was established 77 years later, inventing the idea of an ‘industrial designer’. The industrial designer was a person trained to exploit technology and ensure that products were both aesthetically pleasing and functional; that products were wilfully designed to stimulate new markets and satisfy customers.

But by the time the designers helped industry to catch up with the increasing pace of progress, a second revolution had arrived and its results were quite literally, ‘electrifying’. This time designers were ready to exploit scientific discoveries with brands, structural concrete, cars, cookers and Crimplene clothing.

Much has changed in the 170 years since ‘design’ was invented. That tomorrow will be different goes without saying. Because of the incredible speed of change, even today is different from yesterday; we go to sleep in a different world from the one we woke up in; Henry Lane Fox of lastminute.com will agree that a year is a very long time in the Digital Age.

Businesses shouldn’t be scared of designers because ‘design’ is just a new name for the old process by which we control the evolution of our ideas and design the products, environments and services that help us to perform our daily rituals, inhabit new technologies and satisfy our demands for new ways of doing things. Today, businesses can’t afford to be scared of change and they can’t afford to be suspicious of the creative people who can help them make sense of change and turn it to their advantage.

Unlike the industrial designers of yesteryear, modern designers rely on much more than intuition. We work in cross-disciplinery teams. We borrow from the sciences, arts and humanities. We create our own validated methodologies with which to underpin our intuition and help predict and control the process of innovation.

It’s also important to remember that every new product, service or brand helps us to communicate with one another by expressing our valuable differences; the things that differentiate you from your competitors and make you visible and attractive to customers. Designers express these differences as products, services and brands, turning them into core assets; intellectual property that can be further extended or traded in order to create the primary wealth that helps your business and your economy grow.

So how will you help your business meet the challenge of change? How will you recognise opportunities for new services, processes and products, or new ways of working that will guarantee a future for you and your employees?

Too many businesses are standing still when everything around them them is moving—they will be consigned to the past, to the slow lane of the economic motorway.

It’s no use watching the opposition because that will tell you what’s already been done, that’s yesterday’s news. It’s no use only asking the public what they want because they will describe a version of what already exists, that too is history.

‘Design’ was originally created by ‘business’ to meet the needs of industry at a time of great change. Today, in the midst of our current industrial revolution, business and design need each other as never before.

In tomorrow’s world creativity is our greatest natural resource; it’s a primary industry and a rich national asset. Unlike your forefathers, in tomorrow’s world you have no alternative: You must innovate or deteriorate, design or die.

The identity that can’t speak its name

Stories from Stockholm

It’s June the ninth, and a grey anaemic dawn fingers the morning’s headlines. I start my day in Stockholm with a second-hand copy of the Financial Times, filched from a drowsy colleague as we passed in the hotel lobby.

I’m in Stockholm at the invitation of both the Design Council and The British Council to discuss the importance of creativity in business with a group of forty or fifty small and medium-sized enterprises. My talk is one of six in a morning workshop that’s the last in a series of events focussed around Millennium Products, an exhibition of some of the one thousand and twelve “innovative and bright new solutions to old problems”. Each one of the exhibits is from the UK, all are excellent and seventy-eight are Scottish.

Between sleep and coffee I pick over the fall-out from the General Election graphically illustrated, ink on pale pink, on the pages before me. The FT puts a ruddy flush on the cheeks of those who decorate its pages, breathing colour and life into the grey faces of spent politicians and their well-worn words. I wish it would do the same for Scotland.

As the hungry arrive I gather what news I can find strewn about the breakfast room. What little there is lies buried within the pagan process of prediction and analysis that now passes for proper reporting. Two-in-a-row might be a first for Labour, but judging by the dismal turnout to vote, it’s come as a distant second in the lives and priorities of the Scottish electorate, which is not altogether surprising. This morning I’m asked to consider how Tony’s kids have grown, whether Blair dyes his hair and the significance of Cherie’s frocks. As if any of it really matters to those of us disinclined to ponder horoscopes, crystals, checks, florals or stripes in the relentless search for clues to Scotland’s future.

Only one paper has bothered to ask what the Election might mean for the nascent Scottish Parliament, and it’s published in Chicago, Illinois. That our future should be debated in the lofty pages of the Herald Tribune preserves my sanity and reassures me that I haven’t nailed my company colours to the mast of a sinking ship. I still believe I’m part of a place that can be bigger and better than the one I left last night. But Scotland’s media silence is a salutary reminder that Scottish issues might as well be written with invisible ink as far as the parochial London media, and most of our own papers, are concerned.

I decided some days ago that this would be the point when I’d begin to write. At that time I had no idea I would be in Stockholm. But being here, on the morning after the General Election, puts me at an advantage because it gives me the chance to place my impressions of Scotland within a wider perspective, not as I remember them from previous trips abroad, but as they actually are, here and now.

In the design business, distance is a precondition for achieving true focus and an understanding of how different cultures manifest themselves. Distance helps me to see more clearly. It helps me to understand and value the things that make me, and others, who’re not like me, look forward to the day ahead. ‘Design’ is a process of controlling creativity. It’s a process of understanding and manipulating the elements of culture: our languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values, in order to produce a specific outcome like a book or a building or the desire to walk down a particular street. It’s an inexact science, composed of intuition and underpinned with stolen methods, but it’s one that works. The hardest part of designing in Scotland is the impossibility of removing myself from the ebb and flow of my own culture in order to see it more clearly. While I try to keep my head above our rich broth of conflict, creativity, history and humour, the lessons it teaches make me quick and incisive when reducing foreign cultural brews to their constituent parts.

Designing is about more that just rearranging the furniture and Scotland is a good place to educate the creative professionals who need the mother of all laboratories in which to test and hone their skills and tools.

In order to understand why things are the way they are, in Scotland and elsewhere, we must view them from different angles. Like precious crystals we hold them up to the light, and slowly rotate them to see how they change shape from one second to the next, sparkling, reflecting and dissolving before once again becoming sharp-edged and diamond hard. It helps to see things close up and then very far away. To achieve maximum contrast and get a feeling for where the edges might be, because the most interesting things always happen at the edges, when something becomes what it’s going to be, or it dissolves and fades into nothingness; it’s the point of resolution or dissolution or devolution. Right now Scotland is in this interesting condition, teetering on the cusp of beginning or ending, and I’m a thousand miles away trying to find out which.

I drift away from the black and white certainty of the Tribune’s well-thumbed pages and towards my own frustration, anger and shame. I’m secretly pleased that somewhere in the world there’s a Herald that’s keeping up the broadsheet end of the business, helping preserve Scotland in the wider world while we prevaricate over it’s future, if we allow it to have one. Self-loathing washes through me like the premonition of certain failure. This is the Scottish condition, and it would stop me from helping myself, and keep those who would otherwise help me at arms’ length, if only I gave it license to rot from the inside out.

Charles Kennedy was right when he said that “There is still a poverty of ambition at the heart of this government”. But then, we probably get the governments that we deserve.

The Blair years, and those of Major and Thatcher before him, are punctuated by much talk of our ‘cultural identity’, and quite rightly so. The best description of ‘culture’ I’ve ever come across is “social glue”, the invisible stuff that binds society together in a special way that make us unique and distinctive. Culture isn’t just about ballet and opera and ‘high’ culture. Culture isn’t only the prerogative of the Arts, it’s everything we do: how we work and play and what we believe in. Culture is part of our economy and our politics, our strategies and our plans for the future. Those aspects of our culture that we choose to display to outsiders, colours their opinion of us and affects the regard in which we are held, which in turn influences our balance of trade and our economic growth.

In the past fifteen years I’ve attended dozens of international forums on the importance of cultural identity in countries as far apart as China, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Korea, New Zealand, North America and Spain. I’ve discussed Scottish culture in contexts ranging from creativity in cold climates to furniture manufacturing, innovation, packaging design, alternative arts, food and drink, marketing, sport and education. All of the countries I’ve visited are searching for new perspectives on themselves that will help them and their product and service industries become more distinctive, desirable and competitive. The message is simple; in the global marketplace Culture equals Cash. In that same fifteen years I’ve only once participated in a similar international conference in Scotland, and on that one occasion the agenda was set by the London organisers.

It’s not that I’m peeved at having not being invited to a party, there simply wasn’t a party to go to. Scotland has vast, unrealised cultural dimensions, but when it comes to working out how we use these positive aspects to our advantage we have no forum for their discussion. We don’t invite international specialists to help us and we don’t use our home grown experts either. Instead we subject ourselves to the kind of tartan and heather asset stripping that we wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else.

According the findings of The British Council’s 2000 report, Through Our Eyes 2—How the world sees the United Kingdom*, Scotland remains a land best known (where it’s known at all) for its men in skirts. Under pressure we undersell ourselves and opt for the lowest common denominator or the cheap one-liner because we have no plan to construct a more complex, valuable and modern image of Scotland abroad. Instead of promoting ourselves in any number of positive ways: as a teacher, healer or innovator we create ‘Scotland the Brand’. Which in a single brushstroke reduces Scotland to the same level as a tin of baked beans on a convenience store shelf. Without intelligent intervention Scotland will remain crystallised in nineteenth century commercial script; a faded tartan pattern that’s stuck on Marks & Spark’s shortbread and Autumn Breaks for the over-fifties.

When I’m abroad I’m from a place that may as well live only in my mind, or in the Brig o’Doon fantasy that persists in the minds of others, or I’m from ‘England’, which I’m not. So, when I should be selling my business, I take time to explain that Scotland is the part of the UK to the north of England. I don’t do this because I’m a rabid nationalist, but because it’s unlikely that I’ll get business from someone who doesn’t know where I’m from. There are times when I feel I may just as well be from a remote village in the Amazon basin rather than from the culture that gave us the oldest English language newspaper, telephones and television. Why, with our excellent network of international Embassies and Councils do we still fail to explain our location and the status of our constituent parts? Probably for the same reason that many Americans believe English was their language first.

The British Council’s Through Our Eyes 2* report sought to establish current perceptions of Britishness from graduates and young professionals from seventeen countries, with damning results. Many of those interviewed believed that Britain occupied much the same dank corner of the nineteenth century as London smog, Royal Garden Parties and clotted cream teas. Most had heard of the four constituent parts of the UK (85% named England, 80% Scotland, 72% Northern Ireland and 67% Wales) but, “almost no one (only 5%) spontaneously thought that the United Kingdom was the same place as Great Britain”*, which left me wondering what they thought about The British Council. What seemed obvious, not so much from the statistics but from the quotations of those interviewed, was that many confused Britain with ‘England’.

If you were from another place, you too might be forgiven for not knowing that Britain, Great Britain and the United Kingdom are different ways of describing the same place; the UK, which to give it it’s full name is: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Even Encyclopaedia Britannica states that “The names United Kingdom, Britain and England are often confused, even by U.K. inhabitants”**, and Great Britain can also refer to the UK minus Northern Ireland. It’s therefore not surprising that many people don’t understand that Scotland is a nation in its own right, not merely a sub-set of England or a district of London.

There can be little chance for Scotland to make itself truly known to the world if the old British Empire is allowed to continue its unnatural life. The name ‘Britain’ will continue to signify the past and the anachronistic, colonial values it represents, while all the time we mouth platitudes about equality, diversity and inclusion. Britain shames us all as well as allowing us to wallow in sickly Merchant Ivory sentimentalism when we should be getting on with the future of all of our Isles. Brits abroad are not an altogether positive force these days. Brits conjure images of insular Ex-Pat communities and English football yobs. As The British Council Chairman, David Green, points out in the Report’s foreword*, “I am more concerned by the high proportion of young people who associate us British with an arrogant and condescending view of other countries. Anyone who watched, for instance, the scenes at Charleroi during Euro 2000 can easily understand how these perceptions arise”. Needless to say, I am not a Brit when I’m abroad.

For now, Scotland remains a silent member of the foursome that makes up the United Kingdom. In law Scotland may be an unresolved entity but it’s a nation and a state and therefore deserves an unequivocal name.

There are many reasons I would get rid of ‘Britain’ not least of which is that it condemns Scotland to a living death on a dusty bookshelf in the British Tourist Authority shop off Trafalgar Square. But the simplest reasons are the best; that it’s hard to do business with someone who doesn’t have a name, and it’s still harder if you have several names and keep changing them, because no one will trust you. If ‘Britain’ wasn’t prefixed with ‘Great’ it would have dropped from use a long time ago.

However, meaningful change doesn’t happen overnight. So instead of talking about Scotland ‘going it alone’ we need first of all to get rid of ‘Britain’, if only as a prelude to the materialisation of Scotland and the beginning of a structured and informed debate about the UK. Only after we’ve hacked our way through the years of undergrowth and neglect that have obscured ‘Scotland’ will we be in a position to see what Scotland really is, and what it might become within the UK, Europe and beyond.

While it is difficult to discuss Scotland and the UK when the names keep changing, it’s impossible if there’s no forum for discussion. Parliaments may be great places for politicians, press conferences and postcards but they’re not where ideas actually happen; that’s in the homes, offices, school and colleges, factories, pubs and towns throughout our geographically challenging country.

What now seems like weeks ago I cast my postal vote, but not before I’d wasted hours trawling the Internet and the telephone directory in search of an address for the Returning Officer in my Ward. For the country that has managed to produce Bell, Baird and bits of Lara Croft, eGovernment is not yet virtually a reality; it’s a symptom of a much bigger problem.

Despite Scotland’s creative and technological legacy government can’t seem to arrange all of the bits in the right order. Content development, innovative science and technology, publishing and broadcasting should allows us to overcome the disadvantages of our geography and help to create a connected, proactive, informed forum for change. Instead we fund armies of middle managers to produce mountains of reports on ‘broadband’ and ‘sectoral clusters’ while the educational institutions and creative industries who can help turn change to our advantage remain an undervalued, often under funded and underused resource.

In the time it’s taken us to construct part of our Parliament in stone and mortar we might have laid the foundations of a digital democracy that would have been the envy of everyone.

Having survived, and even flourished, in the industrial revolutions of the eighteen and late nineteenth centuries, Scotland could quite reasonably be expected to be hustling for a chance to exploit the rich opportunities third time around. Uncharacteristically, Scotland the Brave, is nowhere to be seen. Some would say that we’ve transcended our geography and are busy doing business, selling Scottish power to the US or running banks in other countries. If this were really the case we’d have integrated, modern systems of communication and transportation, and we’d be much better off.

We’re now in the midst of a third industrial revolution, which has come to pass more quickly than anyone but the writers of science fiction could have predicted. Having spent the last fifteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when phototypesetting disappeared overnight. My studio changed shape, out went typesetting rules, cow gum and line board, putty rubbers, registration marks, mark-ups and overlays. In the interior design part of our business, designers lost all but one of their drawing boards. Then Apple Macs appeared, so we dismantled the process camera that had been craned into our studio threw it in a skip—one day it had been worth £15,000, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worth nothing. Today the place looks less cluttered. I use email, a mobile phone and a laptop that conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed.

I work for companies thousands of miles away, with people I’ve never met. We correspond digitally and I get paid electronically. I keep the core business slim, light, flexible and adaptable because I don’t know what we’ll be doing tomorrow and neither does anyone else, including the government.

Why, when my life has changed so completely does the process of government still cling to monuments and wigs and a whole secular vocabulary of strange objects, words and rituals?

Speed, lightness and the ability to adapt to change are characteristics of this latest industrial revolution. In order to keep pace with progress, politicians, like businesses, must get closer to the aspirations and needs of the people they represent. In this Knowledge Revolution no Minister can hope to be master of their brief. They too must form partnerships with people and businesses that can broaden their knowledge and help them to take the decisions and risks that are a necessary part of keeping up with change. It’s the quality of our knowledge, and our ability to creatively use it, that will put Scotland in the driving seat of this new economy.

In the last year we seem to have lost our vision for the new Parliament. We, like it, have become heavy, weighed down by its gravity. But creativity, science and technology could deliver systems of communication that would allow us to pit our collective wits in designing our future in partnership with government, not in spite of it or in isolation from it. One thing is for sure, if Scotland is to progress, the people who lead it, and participate in every level the political process, must become connected, decisive, fast and virtual too.

Eventually I get to the best bit of the paper, the sports section on the back pages. I’m never sure if sport is relegated to the rear because it’s of lower value than the political news that hogs the front pages. I prefer to believe that they’ve saved the best for last in a final attempt to brighten the day with some worthwhile chat and pictures of healthy people.

Frankly, I’ve had enough of the post-electioneering. I’m more interested in how Iain Macpherson does in Sunday’s German World Supersport race, or whether Coulthard claims pole in the Canadian Grand Prix. In the absence of fast politics and real action nearer to home, Scots born motorsport stars grab the attention of the press. They sustain our reputation for daring-do and cutting-edge technical innovation while we blindly await the arrival of our saviour in the shape of a latter-day Bruce.

In Sweden, they ask me, “How is Larsson?” and, “How is your Parliament doing?” Mjellby and Miralles (another Swedish national treasure who plays for Celtic and the Spanish architect of the Scottish Parliament), occupy the same compartment in the minds of educated Swedes. Both are world class players capable of making competitor nations a little envious, and more than a little nervous. As Herald journalist William Tinning astutely pointed out (in an article about the Californian Lottery), the Scottish Parliament costs the same as four of the worlds’ most expensive football players. That’s not bad value for a building that will undoubtedly enter the international architectural premiership and last a great deal longer than the career of a football player.

Our dexterity in culture and sport announce to the world that ‘we’ve arrived’, that we’ve progressed from a hand to mouth existence and have the spare time and cash to invest in seeking strategic alliances and business partners, amongst those whose values and rituals complement our own.

Buildings and football, like music, dance and theatre are the corollary of nationhood. Not only do they help us appear distinctive and desirable in the global marketplace; they allow us to meet other countries in a civilised manner and on an equal footing. It’s for this reason that ‘culture’ is the first and the last thing on the menu at every international summit. It’s the starter and the dessert, the bread that holds the sandwich together and the metaphorical mayonnaise that binds society and stops it from falling apart.

Small countries, like ours, have limited cash and must put their money where they’re strongest to get the best value for their money. Scotland has historical and international credibility when it comes to both football and architecture, but when we want to display our technological and scientific innovation we turn to David Coulthard, Colin Macrae and Jackie Stewart. Mastery of speed celebrates not just velocity and control but also the teamwork and partnerships that are an essential part of modern life and a precondition for business success. Motorsport is an area in which we excel and another wise choice when it comes to signalling our Scottish aspirations and values in the international arena.

Instead of telling some of our best kept secrets, Dario Franchitti, Niall Mackenzie and Neil Hyslop continue to grow in popularity abroad but are known only by a tiny majority at home. Instead we collude with our most negative mythologies and with the press that feeds our predilection for the pernicious and singular vision of the ‘rags to riches’ winner; and the stereotype that favours the individual and the ‘privateer hero’ over most of the rest of us. As a result we prefer to hide amongst our vast army of self-condemned losers rather than risk the ridicule of failure that, in other cultures, is best pals with success. Other countries have many more competitors and chances of winning, while in Scotland we have few winners and lots of losers.

Scotland isn’t really a team player; we don’t like to compete unless we know we can win and that’s not a good message for potential business partners. It’s at times like this that I wish Jeremy Paxman would write a book about The Scots in the hope that it would save us, and our most potent symbols, from ourselves.

Clive Gryner from the Design Council in London kicks the day off by showing an amazing image of a hi-tech silver bridge that’s “somewhere in Scotland between the Firth and the Clyde”. Only later does it dawn on me that this is Falkirk’s Millennium Wheel on the Forth and Clyde Canal designed by Marks Barfield Architects. Clive then introduces the work of the Design Council; a Westminster funded machine with an annual budget of £XX. The Design Council works to transform attitudes to creativity and innovation in government, business and education throughout England and Wales, they also promote UK innovation abroad. If we have a similar organisation in Scotland, I haven’t yet discovered it. Thankfully, The Lighthouse, our long overdue Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, champions Scottish designers, technologists and inventors, ensuring that we’re represented abroad.

Other speakers at the event include Peter Horbury, who’s Head of Design at Volvo in Sweden, who tells me he’s originally from Renfrew, and, Carol Moore, a American expert in new technologies with IBM Global Services in Amsterdam. Carol’s heard about one of my ex-students, Julie Tierney (who’s also from Renfrew). Julie’s a product designer with IBM who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in the early nineties. Since IBM closed their Design Centre in Greenock (which once created and manufactured more computer monitors than any other company in the world) she’s based herself at their facility in Raleigh, South Carolina. Her international reputation is considerable and her products counted in millions of units, and millions of dollars.

For me, this ninth of June is just as depressingly familiar as it was ten, or even fifteen years ago. The day does not herald a bright new dawn and a golden second opportunity to finally, eventually get things right in Scotland. The products and the people may be different but the problems are just the same. It’s just another great exhibition with lots of good ideas. Some are in production but too many products and technologies are prototypes not yet fully developed, protected, licensed, manufactured or commercially exploited.

I’ve known the designers of some of the products on exhibition since they were students. Hamid van Koten and Ian Carnduff formed VK&C who designed and subcontracted the production of their multiple award-winning recycled paper lighting to a Scottish company. There’s One Foot Taller, founded by Katarina Barac and Will White. They won the coveted Peugeot Design Award at the Milan Fair for their rotationally moulded Chasm chair, which was manufactured by a company in East Kilbride. After several years in business Will White has left One Foot Taller to gain experience in plastics manufacturing that might move the company forward. Ian Carnduff is now in the USA, taking a break from his business and earning some decent cash. I hope they come back, but the sad thing is they’re not the only ones.

The economic and social potential of Millennium Products is limited by our inability to exploit our would-be winners. We invest in the education of amazing people with great ideas, but we have no strategy to support them or their businesses as they progress. We’ve no infrastructure, no vision, no management skill or experience to pass on to them. We even fail to help people convert their ideas into intellectual property; the core asset and currency in the new economy.

Scotland simply doesn’t see the bigger picture; the need for infrastructure and the partnerships that can deliver it; and the need for the mentoring, development and investment that will strengthen our hand. We often can’t tell the difference between riches and rubbish. We also confuse ‘money’ with ‘means’ not realising that cash isn’t always the solution. We’ve got plenty of cash; half a billion in Scottish Enterprise alone. What we lack is the means to put our cash to good use, and the will to ask others to help us.

In this third industrial upheaval creativity is our greatest natural resource, our primary industry and our richest national asset. Our history clearly shows us that it takes only takes one good person to start a revolution. It therefore makes sense to play tai chi, not with ‘theoretical sectors’ but with the creative individuals and institutions that can help us live up to our greatest myth, that of Scottish innovation.

At a time when green issues, small countries and cities, unspoiled landscape and quality-of-life are viewed as advantages, why are we still losing jobs, investment, our best people, our international presence and our credibility? Why are all of these things that mark our country as a probable winner in this third millennium not exploited by our politicians, who continue to argue in analogue while the rest of the world deals in digital?

As every business undergraduate knows, in order to make the most of change and the opportunities it creates you must first of all know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses. If Tourism is our biggest industry it’s madness for us not to have a Minister for Tourism. If our future depends on creativity, broadcasting, publishing and new media technologies, we need Ministers who can focus on these issues and get the job done.

How, when the world has changed so completely, have we failed to change the methods and manifestations of government? What hope do we have of inhabiting the modern era or of making tomorrow’s politics relevant for young people if we still have ‘Ministers’, ‘Lords’, ‘Chancellors’, ‘Chambers’ and a feudal confection of archaic barriers to understanding, inclusion and progress?

Instead of seizing the opportunity to modernise government, we appear to have crammed Scotland’s unique characteristics into a proprietary structure of departments, offices, ministries and agencies, as if one size fitted every country, hot, cold, large or small. We’re coasting along on autopilot; going through the motions and rituals of government in much the same way as we have done for hundreds of years, in a place four hundred miles away.

Through this transplanted, and often anachronistic, system we continue to perpetrate our own brand of repression on ourselves, ensuring that we have our age-old excuses for our poor performance, and someone else on which to pin the blame.

It’s not every day that a country is given the chance to reinvent itself, but as Westminster slackened our moorings, Devolution, far from launching us into a bright new future, has merely allowed us to discover what we’ve become, which is probably much the same as we were in 1707.

We must break away from our old habits, have the courage to change our behaviour, invent new and relevant rituals and fast forward three hundred years.

For the time being let’s forget about Scottish independence. We don’t yet know who we are. We haven’t decided what to believe in, so we’re not sure what to throw away and what to keep and value. Only when we’ve managed to pick the diamonds from the dross will be able to show the world what they’ve been missing.

“The British are one thing and the Scottish and Welsh another, and let’s not even talk about the Irish. There are marked differences; in fact, the Scottish are really nice, but it’s hard to understand them.”

Argentinean interviewee, Through Our Eyes 2*

* Through Our Eyes 2 – How the world sees the United Kingdom, Robert Ratcliffe, The British Council, October 2000, ISBN 0 86355 467 9

** Encyclopaedia Britannia, Britannica.com/eb/article?eu=120033&tocid=0

SHARE—the tyranny of taste

Taste or intuition is a difficult subject to discuss, it’s something we’re taught to distrust, or disparagingly, “leave it up to the women to decide”.

In Britain we don’t value our emotions, our intuitive responses to the world around us. This goes some way towards explaining why we got our social housing programmes on the sixties and seventies so wrong. We built housing schemes the size of entire towns, driven by money and numbers, taking no account of how the end result looked or felt. No matter how well a building functions; if it looks awful or feels wrong, because it’s made of inappropriate materials or it’s miles from shops and schools, it won’t work, occupants will want to leave it or vandalise and destroy it.

Lots of research has been done on vandalism and it’s been proven that people tend not to vandalise things which are well made from appropriate materials. Page & Park Architects knew this when they designed the Italian Centre pedestrian areas and Cathedral Square. Both areas contain use high quality finishes, form nice spaces which people want to spend time in and use artworks and sculpture to add additional interest for the beholder.

However architects and designers don’t have a monopoly on good design, they only had the benefit of a design education. We’re all capable of being good designers, of having good taste, of understanding and using our intuition, because we can learn from our own reactions to the world around us. We are all capable of being in control of the choices we make and confident that we are making decisions which will work. All we need to have is a basic understanding of how the physical world around us works and what the rules are. In order to do this we need to understand what we mean by design and what I think we mean by the word taste.

All architects and fine artists are also designers—they all use the same creative process and the same sensorial language, maniplating us through what we see, hear, feel, smell, touch and even taste. Architects aren’t better than product designers or anyone else for that matter, they just have a particular set of skills which allow them to build big and very noticeable objects which people feel are important because they last a long time and often cost a lot of money.

When commissioning design it’s important to remember that we are all human and respond to the world in roughly the same way. We are all capable of changing the world around us for the better we are all capable of being creative.

Designers use all of the senses when they design objects, buildings and environments, not only the evidence of their eyes—that’s only one dimension. This is easily demonstrated—if you go into a church, close your eyes, feel the drop in temperature, hear the echo and smell the musty air. All our senses help us build a more complete and multi-dimensional picture of our environment than our eyes alone could do. Our sense of smell is thought by many experts to be the most powerful of our senses because it can evoke powerful memories which take us back to a specific time and place.

As a country we really undervalue our senses which is foolish as our senses tell us what to buy and how to live. The UK has recently had a disastrous record in manufacturing because we make products which work but which don’t appeal to people, we have lost out to countries such as Japan and Germany who produce more expensive goods that work and look better and give reliability.

The ability to design, to make things look good or work effectively, is something we can all learn. Design is a well documented process, it’s properly called the creative process, a means by which we consciously control the way an idea or an object or a building evolves and takes shape, step by step. This process can be very long in the case of buildings because they’re complicated objects to produce and the process requires much negotiation and development along the way to take into account the needs of different groups; the client, those who’ll live in the building, those who’ll maintain the building, the known technology of the day and the guidance of planning and statutory authorities who articulate and control local and contextual needs. We don’t create buildings or chairs or clothes in isolation, we develop ideas and exchange and change ideas according to the information we have, according to materials, according to how the finished building will be used. Start to question why certain materials are appropriate in some rooms but not in others. Flowers and ‘fluffy pink’ can be okay in the bedroom but not in the living room or kitchen?

Designers construct a brief, in conjunction with the client or end-user, which might define who will live in the house. Where the house will be situated. Where it lies in relation to the sun and its neighbours. What its dimensions, materials can be. What current legislation, historical context can effect its eventual shape. Design is a process of continual negotiation and testing.

Some of the best designed products and buildings work especially well because they provide solutions which work at lots of different levels—someone once said, “You get from Art what you take to Art”. This is really true, as our own experiences shape what knowledge we take to and get from any situation—maybe you’ll find a house attractive because it has a secure entry, good sized rooms which are inexpensive to heat and nice big windows with good views, someone else might agree with you on all these points but also appreciate that the materials used for the door frames are Scottish hardwoods or that the door handles are of the correct period to correspond with the original age of the building. Someone else might think the flat is similar to one they’ve seen in a film and that makes it more special for them. All of our different opinions are valid.

Our ability as humans to see and share different private worlds is special. We should celebrate difference rather than condemn people for having different opinions. We should try to understand why we like and dislike our instinctive choices and measure our choices by discussing with one another how appropriate a house is—this helps listen to other people and also gives us confidence in our own opinions.

Remember, there are as many solutions to any one problem as there are people in the world although some solutions will be better then others.

Good design should perform more than it’s most basic, utilitarian function—for instance, we don’t need chairs to sit down, we can sit on the floor. But chairs allow us to sit in a particular way which says something additional about the kind of people we are and how we like to be seen. We often judge our friends by the music they listen to, the television programmes they watch, the clothes they wear and the team they support.

The objects we choose to buy and live with also tell us a lot about ourselves. Objects dramatise our lives, they are the backdrop against which we act out our everyday lives. How they look and behave affects how we feel about them and how we interact with them and each other (bank refits and Stalinist bru).

The hotel is a good example of how we and the environment work. Architecture and objects provide the theatrical backdrop for big set piece performances in the dining room three times a day and a continuous performance in the front lobby. Our ritualistic behaviour in a hotel shapes the building which in turn forces us to use it in a particular way. Houses perform a similar task, balancing outside and inside space, public and the private space and giving areas which promote family activites, childrens’ play and social interaction and amentities such as workspace and shopping.

The more things you experience in life the greater the resource you have to draw upon when choosing how to live, the kind of home you’d like to live in and the kind of objects you want to surround yourself with. Sydney Devine and Scottish Opera are at opposite ends of the spectrum but there both good in different ways.

There’s no such thing as bad taste, everyone has different taste—we just have to recognise that people see the world differently and understand what each of us is trying to communicate through the objects we choose to live with.

However, there is such a thing as bad design, where objects and architecture fail to perform even the simplest functions or fail to recognise the complexity of the function they were designed to perform and end up being patronising or demeaning—social housing in the ’60s and ’70s was a provide perfect examples with their radical ideas about hygiene and stupid, simplistic theorising about ideal social groupings like the nuclear family. Some solutions are bad because they are over complicated, mixing and clashing too much contrasting information.

Much of ‘design’, or ‘taste’, is about confidence as well as experience. None of us would be very confident about reading or writing if we hadn’t been taught to at school. We all left school knowing how to read and write but not knowing how to see or feel. We aren’t really taught to understand the physical world about us visually or through our senses, to decode it and learn to recognise how we express our different ways of living through buildings, environments and objects. This is sad and wrong and not our fault. We’re all late beginners when it comes to seeing and feeling.

It’s important to understand that it’s very difficult for someone to make you look silly if you have a strong opinion about an object or environment and you’ll get better at expressing your point of view the more you talk about it. People only make others look silly for choosing to like something because they don’t understand it. It’s a defence mechanism. No-one can have wrong taste you can only have your own taste which will develop throughout your life. So, ask lots of questions: ask yourself why you like your local pub, why you like your shoes or your kettle and start to analyse why you feel strongly about things and you’ll start to find out some things about yourself which you never knew before.

Consider the objects around you:

-shape
-light/heavy
-soft/hard
-warm/cold
-loud/quiet
-what does it remind you of?

The Case For Design

None of us need chairs to sit on, we can sit on the floor. However, in Europe, we choose to sit on chairs because culturally we acknowledge that furniture is important to us both at home and in business.

Our British furniture industry presents a huge opportunity to express our rich British way of life with all it’s regional and historical variations in a Federalised Europe, through design, for financial profit. Every woman, man and child in Europe needs furniture products. Every business in Europe buys furniture products. Research demonstrates that British furniture products fail to do as well as they might in Europe because potential customers simply don’t like them, the way they look or work. It’s not because they are un-usable or cost too much. Only six per cent of domestic products are imported to the United Kingdom from third world countries—price and utilitarian function are not the primary issues but aesthetics and innovation are. Quite simply, our furniture products culturally and aesthetically fail to distinguish themselves in the marketplace and fail to excite the end user or specifier.

There are four reasons why the furniture industry is vitally important to Britain and why we must find a way to realise its potential:

1 Furniture is important to Britain because culturally it should satisfy our utilitarian and social needs for products that support us through our daily tasks in comfort and in an appropriate manner or ‘style’.

2 The furniture industry is important for Britain as its products should dramatise and distinguish our homes and businesses from the homes and businesses of our competitor countries, differentiating British products and the service industries which use them from other European products and services, enabling Britain to be visible, desirable and competitive in the marketplace.

3 The furniture industry is important for Britain’s prosperity because it should have the capability to produce products with a high added-value and broad margins, products which have a specially designed ‘British’ personality customers will learn to identify and for which they will expect to pay a premium price.

4 The furniture industry is important to Britain because it should be an infrastructural industry, encompassing consultancy services, manufacturing, wholesale, distribution and retail—a collective force capable of supporting and protecting itself through integrated long-term strategies, research and development and therefore innovation, enabling Britain to lead markets, not follow market leaders.

But does the British furniture industry achieve all it might? Research tells us it does not. There are two main reasons I have identified which go some way to explaining why we underachieve: our history and our current business values:

1 Our recent historical predeliction for heavy engineering, science and the primacy of mathematical, quantitative measurement over the arts and qualitative measurement, does not place Britain in a strong position when dealing with issues of aesthetics and style. Marketing graduates, and most engineers, unfortunately cannot draw or conceive new product ideas in three dimensions but tend to be market-led and therefore anti-innovation. This is probably why we revere and follow the market leaders. Aesthetics and style are ‘human factors’ employed by designers which defy numeric definition and conventional means of measurement. They are mistrusted by the traditional business and financial sectors as require non-numeric interpretation and explanation in order to be understood.

Britain is also unique in Europe in that we do not have a Ministry of Culture. We have a Ministry of Heritage and we have a furniture industry, much of which is based on heritage products. Not British heritage products, not Elizabethan Oak or the Art Deco of the Cunard Queens, a re-interpretation of French Louis IVX will do. In Britain we don’t look to the future or live in the present, we live in the past, often someone else’s past which we endow with misleading notions of quality which confuse end users who mistakenly associate the present with poor quality. Whilst this may lull us into a false sense of security it won’t sell products in Europe, especially when the rest of the world is looking to the new millennium. Businesses want furniture which expresses technological progress and confidence in the future not furniture which hides in the past or tries to sell an English interpretation of French reproduction furniture back to the French.

Instead of employing graduate designers in order to create an innovative controlled and positive statement of British product design, we persist in emulating products produced by our competitors but without their economic climate or experience. Britain has no long term future in producing goods which aspire to be Italian, Spanish or just plain cheap—the Italians and the Spanish will always do it better. We must be concerned with ‘adding value’ to products through exploring our own cultural richness and expressing it in qualities customers can be helped to recognise, to see value in and pay a premium cost for. Britain cannot compete with developing countries on a cost and volume basis, nor should we need to.

2 This current situation is further aggravated by the short term attitudes and values adopted by business. The three monthly reporting structures of PLCs and product cycles as short as ten minutes in financial business sectors. New furniture products may be developed over years, not months, and the payback period may take even longer. The benefits are market leadership and sector share, strength through integration of all aspects of the industry and long term stability.

So why does the furniture industry need designers? For 3 reasons:

1 The European furniture we so eagerly import doesn’t out-perform British furniture ergonomically. Most furniture products fulfil their most obvious function adequately; to support our bodies comfortably and assist us in performing a variety of tasks. However, much European furniture does out-perform British furniture through doing much more than fulfiling ergonomic requirements alone; our European competitors recognise that aesthetic satisfaction is also a functional requirement of a successful product, not a last-minute, stylistic addition but an integral component in the design of any successful product.

2 Furniture can be made durable and cost effective but what is much harder to do is to make it recognisably British, or Scottish or Welsh or East Anglian. The French, Spanish, Italians and Germans seem to understand and value the expression of their cultural identities through products because they know there is a direct correlation between cultural characteristics and financial value. Spain, Italy and France all have recognisable regional cultures: Catalonia, Tuscany and Provence, we know them all through their products which are jealously designed and nurtured to ensure they are identifiable and desirable in the marketplace. This does not preclude modernity or an international outlook but ensures we have our own identifiable, British interpretation of what we consider to be avante guarde or exotic.

3 The expression of our British cultural difference, our cultural specialness, through designed furniture can help us make our products aesthetically distinguishable, desirable and command premium prices in a Federalised European marketplace.

For these three reasons graduate designers must be employed by the furniture industries if we are to make products which both work well and are attractive to customers and specifiers. Engineers are poorly equipped to control the soft issues in product development, the vital components which fine-tune a product and ensure that it fulfils the expectations of it’s target market. The evolution of these aesthetic elements must be controlled by a designer if the final product is to be financially successful. Thankfully, in Britain we now have innovation in design education which acknowledges the need for designers who are equipped to deal with both engineering and aesthetics—this puts us in a position where we have the capability to lead in the furniture industry if we have the confidence and foresight to do so.

You must take design seriously if the British furniture industry is to have any impact in Europe.

We are fortunate in Britain to have an extremely rich and diverse cultural reservoir, a strong youth culture and a steady supply of excellent graduate designers who are the envy of many of our European competitors and already a successful export unlike our furniture products. Many of these designers belong to a brave new generation equipped with an armoury of analytical methodologies with which to underpin their intuitive skills and actively control the evolution of a new product and its eventual outcome.

Design is about controlling all of the different parameters which make up a successful product and ensure its financial success in the marketplace. Designers are the people who are perfectly equipped to analyse what is special about Britain and work with industry, distribution and retail, ensuring that British products are encoded with recognisable, desirable and value-added components; these elements which specifiers and users desire in furniture products and would consider paying extra for because they enhance and focus product performance, feel new and reveal a confident aspect of Britain which is world class.

However, design doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor do designers wait for Britain to enter the twentieth century and the European marketplace. Many designers, frustrated with British myopia, have decided to become their own manufacturers and distributors, often failing to realise their true economic potential through lack of economies of scale, finance and experience.

In a sensible industry we should have a structure through which educationalists, designers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and specifiers would be encouraged to find strength through forming lose ties where it is in the whole industry’s interest to collaborate in the pursuit of a common aim.

If designers are to unleash their powerful armoury of skills for Britain’s benefit, and not exclusively for our competitors, in a way which compliments the whole industry: manufacturing, distribution and retailing, they must be represented in a common forum where knowledge and experience will be shared, strategy developed and understanding reached through a common aim; that of securing a world class future for the British furniture industry.

Mistaken Identity

Good design and successful corporate identity management come about through control. Design orders chaos.

Good design and corporate identity management are evident when the personality, or soul, of an organisation is clearly defined and articulated; when numerous messages both complex and simple are communicated well, time after time, to both the client, organisation, and the rest of the world.

Good design and corporate identity management come about through dialogue and negotiation, through knowledge shared between the designer and the client organisation. They rarely arise through accident and must be consciously and positively called into being.

Design is structured activity based on analytical methodologies and informed intuition. It is therefore important that you employ well-educated designers. All good design is underpinned by clearly defined process, clarity and attention to detail (God is, after all, in the details).

Design is a multidisciplinery problem solving process. The process of designing a brochure is essentially the same as designing a building although the technical aspects differ. In Britain the education system has a tendency to pigeonhole designers in departments dedicated to specific technical applications in the mistaken belief that this is what industry requires. A multidisciplinery practice can offer a more holistic evaluation of problems and posit more radical and effective solutions.

NOT departments dedicated to specialisms but individuals with complete design intelligence.

In my experience the creation and maintenance of corporate identity could immediately become more cost effective if designers were used properly and allowed to exercise their skills. Design, like most professional services, tends to be billed against time spent irrespective of whether the time is spent thinking or making or specifying. The best value time you can buy from a designer is thinking time. In order to get the best value out of this time its important to accurately articulate the problem—the first guideline to save time and money is to construct a brief.

Work with the designer to write the brief.

* ensure the designer understands the corporate culture and has accurate information.

* ensure the designer is aware of any potential problems and irrational likes and dislikes.

* ensure the designer has access to individuals within the organisation responsible for implementing the outcome of the brief or championing the corporate identity.

When you pay for designers to solve problems you should get the additional bonus of educational evangelism. Good clients tend to be made rather than acquired. Designers are used to explaining the why’s and wherefores—so use designers to champion causes on your behalf.

The second role of cost effective corporate identity management is to disallow preconceptions; design is an analytical activity not a deterministic one. It is similar to homeopathy, looking at root causes and their solution, not merely at symptoms. “So, you think you want a logo”—but there could easily be another more unique, appropriate and inexpensive solution. Designers are educated to absorb, analyse and articulate cultural change so use their skills for your benefit.

To simply produce a brief demanding pre-determined response, or produce a brief with insufficient information requesting a speculative response is not a serious way to obtain an accurate and cost effective solution. Initial speculation on the part of the client can lead to significant savings as the problem is accurately defined before any solutions arise.

The third guideline for cost effective corporate identity management is to avoid the mistaken belief that an expensive manual is any sort of end in itself.

The unit cost of many corporate identity manuals doesn’t correspond with their usefulness. All organisations undergo constant cultural change and an inflexible document quickly becomes obsolete.

The manual shouldn’t be worshipped or cast in stone—The Herald, The Broomielaw—both evolving projects.

Individuals within organisations must feel empathy with their corporate identity. Guidelines must be communicated in a simple non-didactic, non-legislative way. People must understand why colours etc. have been chosen. People dislike being ordered what to do, or patronised. People dislike systems which legislate against any creative imput and abhor systems which confuse, or are incomplete. Unnecessary bureaucracy leads to maintenance of the status quo.

However professional the generic printed binder may look, if often fails the produce to desired response. People have a healthy disregard for the printed word.

GIL gave The Herald a system with which to solve their problems —“Kit of parts”—“set of tools”. Tools are inert if not used—people have to use them. The manual in effect is “a request for action/involvement”.

The fourth guideline for cost effective corporate identity management is to make more use of sensorial vocabularies rather than visual ones.

Design isn’t only concerned with the visual but with all of the human senses and comunicates with a sensorial language utilising myths, rituals, symbols, values and beliefs in order to articulate culture.

The tangible aspects of design language include written and printed material, moving images, products and other artifacts, interiors and architecture—they are the expensive parts of design language.

The intangible aspects of the design vocabulary are less obvious but more potent: smell, taste, touch, sound, temperature and light. They produce a frequently subliminal response and when used intelligently often diffray the need for a more tangible and expensive solution.

Bread shop without smell; church without an echo, difference between and canteen and a restaurant.

Invest in clear thinking and attention to detail. The quality of the design process should replace the weight of specification. Good design is about control—sensorial control as well as financial control.

Meaningful Differentiation

1

The evolutionary process of civilisation is painful and has doubtless killed many innovations as quickly as they were conceived. Solutions to many problems may well have been prematurely discarded in favour of others which solved the immediate terrors of disease, starvation and lack of shelter.

2

If innovation threatened those in power, creative individuals would be killed or derided. Their names added to the long list of people who dared to ‘do things differently’.

3

If a problem was solved too quickly the creator might have been burned as a ‘witch’, effectively banning exploration of the ‘magical’ unknown. Consequently, new ideas have developed and travelled slowly.

4

We have inherited a suspicion of new ideas, which are cynically presented as the ‘exception to all known rules’. Today’s ‘superstitious’ businesses still consider creativity to be dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’.

5

Design is as old as civilisation. It is the creative process which controls the evolution of ideas, bringing order to the world, bringing forth cities from the chaos of dust and ritual. There is a seamless evolutionary route from the development of speech, drawing and writing, to the creation of products and architecture. Objects help us to perform tasks. They also help us to communicate and help businesses to function. They are the props and backdrops against which we play out the drama of everyday live.

Has any generation felt privileged to live in the present? I don’t think so. But we should feel lucky.

6

We are fortunate to live in wealthy regions where we have the resources to realise the business opportunities presented by challenge and change. We’re lucky to live at at point in time when we’re catching up with ourselves and with all we’ve learned in the history of civilisation.

Today, designers rely on much more than intuition. We work in cross-disciplinery teams. We borrow methodologies from all of the sciences, arts and humanities, from history and fiction. We create our own methodologies.

7

We use all of this information to underpin our intuition, creating new perspectives on the past, the present and the future. We begin to see tomorrow in sharpen focus, with real clarity, with better understanding. We are better able to predict and control the shape of tomorrow – it’s architecture, products and services.

8

We now have the technology to create an anthology of the past, to look at and reevaluate the sum of civilisation. With this collected information we can glimpse a more refined model of the world – even if that model changes too quickly for us to crystallise it’s many meanings.

9

Our gaze is never constant because we too change with alarming speed; becoming chimera: men with animal organs, prosthetically enhanced and genetically and culturally mutated. Nothing stands still, everything resonates with meaning.

With our stone age bodies and classically fashioned thoughts we inhabit the age of invisibility. We move with the heaviness of leaden boots along the bottom of the ocean while all around us is lightness, intelligence, invisibility and speed – a matrix of chaotic possibilities.

10

The sciences and the arts are merging. Hardware yields software, wetware and intelligent, effervescent networks suspended invisibly in gas.

The meaning of everything changes: ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘art’ and ‘science’. All fail to describe the spectrum of states existing between, and beyond, these polarised definitions.

We need new multi-dimensional languages to describe these myriad new phenomenon. In the rush to name and claim each new realisation scientists steal poetry in a bid to qualify the unquantifiable. Artists and designers raid the maths and science block in order to legitimise, professionalise and quantify the essentially unmeasurable.

11

We stand in the middle of a model of our universe, amidst more information than we can meaningfully process. We are in the eye of a tornado which has gathered in strength, depth and speed throughout history. We are simultaneously part of it and apart from it. We have created it and are created by it. We stare transfixed, trying to still it with clumsy animal gestures as it confoundingly changes before our eyes, sparkling and threatening to overwhelm us with pure, potential energy.

All of this new information may yield a glorious renaissance, a point in history in which the contemporary world binds with it’s ancient past. A time in which we process wisdom from all ages to create a truer, more confusing, model of the world.

Everything we have dreamed of is now probable, possible.

12

As a designer I can’t imagine living in a more exciting time. But I find it worrying that with all of this new knowledge, and all of these new opportunities, that we are surrounded by banality, mediocrity and historical pastiche in communications, products, services and architecture.

Too many British businesses are standing still when everything around them is moving. They will be consigned to the past, to the slow lane of the economic motorway.

So how will you help your business meet the challenge of change? How will you recognise the opportunities for new services, new processes and products? New ways of working that will guarantee a future for you and your employees?

It’s no use only watching the opposition because that will tell you what’s already been done, that’s yesterday’s news. It’s no use only asking the public what they want because they will describe a version of what already exists, that’s history. You must think anew and venture into unchartered territory.

Tomorrow’s businesses must innovate or deteriorate. They must design or die.

13

We live in a time when we can make almost any material, any process, we can imagine.

Designers are given thinking tools with which to help you make today’s dreams tomorrow’s products. Tools which help organise and give shape to this new and chaotic information.

We now have degree courses in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Music – science and art , not ‘pure’ subjects working in isolation, but ‘tainted’ subjects designed to produces graduates with a broader understanding of the world. We have degree courses in Product Design Engineering incorporating aesthetics, cultural issues, physics, mathematics, ergonomics and design history. Today’s designers need these skills to make sense of and to make use of this new technological knowledge, expressing it in diverse products and services that will fulfil the latent aspirations of tomorrow’s clients and customers.

14

We know we must understand before we create. We understand more today than at any point in time. We are developing new tools which predict the outcome of our actions, making risk less risky.

Dangerous opportunities presented through creative innovation are less dangerous than they have ever been. Consequently, innovation will become the norm rather than the exception. Turning dreams into realities will be commonplace in tomorrow’s world.

15

British businesses have the chance to work with the very best, most challenging designers. In the UK we have the world’s oldest and best creative resource – the most skilled designers, the best talent. The businesses who choose to work with these world-class designers will win tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be created by teams. Teams will be made-up of professionals and non-professionals, businesses and individuals, designers and scientists and economists.

There will only be one rule – that tomorrow’s successful teams must be creative if they are to succeed.

16

It still seems that the world moves very quickly and we understand so little – it’s taken us forty years to understand ’50s products. That’s why we like retro-styling. It’s a retrogressive respite which momentarily halts the terror of tomorrow’s products. But we’re learning ever more quickly and no amount of hiding in yesterday’s services and bland architecture will stop the demands of our overwhelming aspirations of our age of transparency. An age where we absolutely rely on physical artifacts to give tangible shape to invisible technology. For the first time in human history tomorrow has no shape, unless we choose to give it one.

All of human history is a rehearsal for the new world which is daily uncovered or created, which daily doubles in size and offers your business unparalleled opportunities for economic exploitation.

17

New software has helped us to create common languages which deliver us from hundreds of years of technical specialisation. Creativity is democratised, it’s on the streets, not fetishised and professionalised in art galleries and universities. We individually have the power to bridge the space between dreams and realities if only we have the courage to try and make sense of a little part of what we now know, turning intangible information into physical reality. For only by doing this will British businesses culturally and economically inhabit tomorrow’s world.

18

Meaningful differentiation, intelligent diversity, is inevitable – it’s happening exponentially, all around us. It provides businesses with fertile territory for new services and products.

Designers grow tired of preaching and start new companies who do for themselves what they would gladly have done for their clients – if only they been asked.

We no longer live in an age of darkness, but an age of lightness. Businesses need designers to help them breathe in this new knowledge and breathe out, filling the world with new shapes for products and buildings and strange, exciting new service industries.

A lace factory in East Kilbride weaves a slender slingshot which will propel a satellite into a new orbit.

Now is a time for you to:

explore true feelings not false facts

feel insecure not falsely secure

generalise don’t specialise

live in today and tomorrow not yesterday

acknowledge there are no certainties only probabilities

Now is a time for possibilities. A time for being better, being different, for cherishing diversity, encouraging individuality, informalising, being inter-reliant, breaking-out of preconceived ideas, evaluating and revaluating, recognising and welcoming change, being inquisitive and proactive.

Now is the time to stop dreaming about tomorrow and start to create it.

Now is a time for you to to work with designers and to make creativity the first priority in your business. with other nations, other objects, in contrast, act as discreet talismans, expressing our regional and individual personalities. Some objects perform both roles simultaneously.

Today’s successful products and services must tangibly express our international relationships and the values that are important to us. As the world becomes more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects to eloquently distinguish and celebrate our cultural differences, differences which offer powerful trading advantages; showing competitors desirable aspects of our society that they may wish to gain through trade.

Cultural difference is a valuable national asset because it differentiates us from our competitors. Products which are visibly different are distinguishable and attractive to consumers who, in turn, use products to describe their own individuality. In our complex, and often contradictory world, with many globally common values, technologies, needs and markets. The quality of ‘difference’ adds value to products and services and commands premium prices. Consumers expect to pay a premium price for products which have the ‘added-value’ of being different and special.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Culture, or ‘social glue’ has five layers, these can be likened to the skin on a onion, which when peeled away reveals our most dearly held ideologies – the things we get excited about. The five layers are language, symbols, myths, rituals and values. However, designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar things in new ways, viewed from a new angle in a new time.

The best designers help us to understand new things by giving us clues which help describe the purpose of an object or a process. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways while simultaneously hinting at what the future might be.

Glasgow

Cities change all the time, they’re in a constant state of flux. Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. Glasgow has always used design to promote whatever its most recent reincarnation might be. We were ‘The Second City of the Empire’, ‘The Workshop of the World’, ‘The Finest Victorian City in Europe’, ‘The Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’ and we’re ‘UK City of Architecture and Design’ in 1999. We also had one of the biggest type foundries in Europe and thankfully still have a school of design and two schools of architecture. However, the overall effect has not been cumulative; we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have liked.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport. They are also expressed through the designed objects which form the props and backdrops in our ‘theatre of live’: our architecture, our products and garments. Local differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations. (Some are maybe illegal…)

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s success in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through evolving indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaurs.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through communication, education and participation and communication. Designers should be part of a team which gently orientates citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, like those embodied in heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed place with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of power which help citizens make sense of an unfamiliar and daunting vision of the future.

Most designers want to share their vision with the rest of the world. Designers are egotistical and evangelical and if they’re going to usefully influence social and economic change they must learn explain what it is that they do if others are to understand, help and support them. Communication is vital for sustained design-led change.

Education is essential if non-designers are to understand the common languages which allow us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and the economic terms. There is a growing correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain thanks to the Blair government. For far too long young people have been allowed to leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area.

Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. It’s therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

However, designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by it’s very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is essential for a healthy city. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain a strategic vision in the midst of the criticism and doubt which will always accompany change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/ obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

Participation is key to any innovative, design-led project because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects and all designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

—————–

tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

One thing that we can be sure of is that tomorrow’s successful products and buildings will be complex and, if they are to succeed, they must be aesthetically functional – they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must be appropriate and efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, invisible new technologies, they must help us to understand and welcome the future rather than confuse and scare us, or make us feel stupid.

In the nineties the traditional design professions are merging and being replaced by a collaboration of people and skills: new media, science, art, music and fashion. New design processes and designed products reflect the past and reveal an exciting future. Brave new brands express fresh consumer aspirations and innovative ways of living. The UK is an energetic, eccentric, creative laboratory – an off-shore voyeurist and an island melting-pot where anything goes, everything rocks.

The new designers are often a product of the UK. They are from a broad art school education, collaborating with others who often have no academic back-ground at all. They are creative people who form unconventional partnerships: artists and graphic designers, film-makers and architects, poets, musicians and product designers. In the past artists and designers shared the common language of drawing, today, it is often the addition of new technology, common hardware and similar software platforms that have given people a common language which has allowed them to talk and work together. This gives us new ways of seeing the world and new kinds of products which express our new experiences.

The new UK style is the vigorous creative expression of contemporary British street life and culture. Fashion, products and music describe how young people live and work in the UK. These everyday objects build a picture of our society: a place which is rapidly changing. New trends are emerging. These trends reflect both cultural and technological change, describing how we might live in the new millennium.

The UK was the first into the industrial revolution and the first out. Throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries the UK was the ‘workshop of the world’, the premier manufacturing nation. Our manufacturing pre-eminence has waned but our strength in design and creative innovation remains unchallenged. The nineteen thirties and the nineteen sixties were important creative moments in recent British history and today the Japanese acknowledge that 70% of all new ideas originate from the Britain. The UK of the nineties is a special place to be, it is the creative capital of the world and it is undergoing another renaissance, arguably the biggest this century and one which will have consequences reaching far into the the next century.

The new UK Style is important because it is a collection of objects: buildings, products and garments which express re-valuation, growth and renewal, giving us clues how we may live tomorrow. The UK, like Hong Kong is in a state of flux which, through intelligent control, can be the lucrative generator of economic innovation and generation.

In order to design well, it’s important to control creativity. In order to control creativity we must have a methodology which underpins our intuition. We must also understand the personality and aspirations of the clients and markets we are creating for.

If I were asked to define the personality of the new UK style I would say that it was:

complex

dynamic

contradictory

idiosyncratic

intelligent

humourous

ironic

irreverent

optimistic

and, energetic

Every region in every society in the world has a different character. Good design, like good art, must be sensitive towards these fragile differences and eloquent in expressing them as products and buildings and garments.

The UK invented design education which has it’s roots in the country’s manufacturing past – schools like the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London were established as an educational resource for Victorian industries. Much of the new UK style began life in the many schools and institutions of art and design throughout Britain.

Many of today’s graduates have rejected conventional business structures and have formed unconventional collaborations with other people who offer a new perspective on art, design and fashion. All this helps move traditional creative disciplines out of the institutions and on to the street.

New cultural trends

One characteristic of new British design is a trend towards inter-disciplinary working. Collaborations such as those by Born Free and Inflate where fashion meets product design, and Tomato, a changing collaboration between poets, advertising creatives, graphic designers and film-makers and collaborations between designers, manufacturers and retailers such as those found at Nice House and SCP. Many young creators such as One Foot Taller, Mo’Wax and Inflate have decided to become their own client and set up in business, controlling their own promotion, manufacturing and distribution. These young businesses can respond rapidly to change and are quick to describe new ideas through objects or music.

Traditional boundaries between creative disciplines are breaking down. Every day technology becomes more flexible and user friendly and artists, designers, musicians and architects find that they have a common creative process which underpins all of their work.

Many collaborations are between professionals and non-professionals, graduate designers and non-graduates. This often leads to strange hybrid products and objects. Many tiny pockets of energy give rise to highly individual products which come from very personal experiences such as Precious McBane who were hairdressers and now design furniture and theatre sets.

The de-professional-isation of design is another interesting phenomenon which signals cultural change. Many old technical professions are being de-skilled and presented in new media formats which allow more people to access them. The big messages about creativity and design and their usefulness in business and in everyday life are getting on to the street. People are opening their eyes and their minds to new ways of living.

new languages for a new millennium

There is no doubt that creativity is gathering power within the world of international business because there is a growing understanding of the role design plays as an international language allowing us to trade successfully with one another. The potential to trade successfully depends on our ability to recognise and understand cultural differences, ensuring we encode our products and buildings with the appropriate messages while respecting the special cultural expectations of individual societies. In the UK we are beginning to enjoy the idiosyncrasies in our cultural personality and rely less on a monolithic view of life in Britain which is no longer true but probably never was. In the UK we must be careful to protect and nurture cultural differences because they are a fragile and valuable source of human richness and economic wealth which will diminish and vanish if they are misunderstood and abused.

Who are the guardians of creativity and style?

The real guardians of UK creativity and the new UK style are not the formal organisations and national institutions. The real guardians of UK style are the individuals and local, informal networks made in the process of designing and working. The invisible networks created as creative people seek out partners who share similar values and aspirations. These networks are fragile because are unsupported by formal institutions and would die if forced to conform to a national policy on creative direction. Instead they depend upon courageous individuals who dare to be different. In Glasgow we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Designers can play a constructive role in finding a route through the confusion, finding order within apparent chaos and helping to present and promote the positive elements in the emerging personality of a renewed culture. These elements, new languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values can form the basis of a palette which will underpin the development of new products and services, these in turn will attract trade with other nations who desperately want a piece of this fresh, new action.

Design + Cities + Culture

Design has always mattered but it’s only recently been called ‘design’.

Design is the process of controlling the evolution of objects through manipulating the elements of culture and all of the human senses.

Aldous Huxley once said “Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you make of what happens to you”. In our time and place it is designers who straddle the ever-lessening gap between the arts and sciences and who try to make sense of and give shape to our chaotic world.

Designers are only a recent addition to the list of sorcerers, magicians, scribes, kings, architects and artists who have helped shape the world. All have helped direct the creation of cities from a confusion of dust and ritual, responding to the ancient human fear of chaos and disorder. Designers have subtly manipulated city plans, the form of buildings and objects, re-shaping and controlling the way we respond to the physical world.

In the ancient world different societies designed different architecture, clothing and tools. These expressed unique cultural values, technologies and ways of living which gave each society a special, concrete personality. The pyramids, sports cars, suits and homewares all help us to form a tangible picture of who were are, where we come from and what we believe in. They form an eloquent world without words.

Each society is obviously unique and special, other societies need to trade in order to obtain desirable new objects, products, technologies and processes. New objects bring new ways of doing things which radically change how we live and work.

As long as society and technology continue to change we will need tangible new objects and buildings which describe that change. Today, we live in the age of speed: a time of unprecedented change and continuous re-calibration. Our aspirations are ‘space age’ but our universe is ‘stone age’, therefore we need ecologically, socially and economically sustainable methods of change.

Today’s objects, like those in the ancient world continue to perform important roles within society; as totems, international markers which publicly affirm our status in the world and help to define our relationships with other nations, other objects, in contrast, act as discreet talismans, expressing our regional and individual personalities. Some objects perform both roles simultaneously.

Today’s successful products and services must tangibly express our international relationships and the values that are important to us. As the world becomes more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects to eloquently distinguish and celebrate our cultural differences, differences which offer powerful trading advantages; showing competitors desirable aspects of our society that they may wish to gain through trade.

Cultural difference is a valuable national asset because it differentiates us from our competitors. Products which are visibly different are distinguishable and attractive to consumers who, in turn, use products to describe their own individuality. In our complex, and often contradictory world, with many globally common values, technologies, needs and markets. The quality of ‘difference’ adds value to products and services and commands premium prices. Consumers expect to pay a premium price for products which have the ‘added-value’ of being different and special.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Culture, or ‘social glue’ has five layers, these can be likened to the skin on a onion, which when peeled away reveals our most dearly held ideologies—the things we get excited about. The five layers are language, symbols, myths, rituals and values. However, designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar things in new ways, viewed from a new angle in a new time.

The best designers help us to understand new things by giving us clues which help describe the purpose of an object or a process. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways while simultaneously hinting at what the future might be.

Glasgow

Cities change all the time, they’re in a constant state of flux. Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. Glasgow has always used design to promote whatever its most recent reincarnation might be. We were ‘The Second City of the Empire’, ‘The Workshop of the World’, ‘The Finest Victorian City in Europe’, ‘The Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’ and we’re ‘UK City of Architecture and Design’ in 1999. We also had one of the biggest type foundries in Europe and thankfully still have a school of design and two schools of architecture. However, the overall effect has not been cumulative; we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have liked.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport. They are also expressed through the designed objects which form a the props and backdrops in our ‘theatre of live’: our architecture, our products and garments. Local differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations. (Some are maybe illegal …)

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s success in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through evolving indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaurs.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through communication, education and participation and communication. Designers should be part of a team which gently orientates citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, like those embodied in heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed place with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of power which help citizens make sense of an unfamiliar and daunting vision of the future.

Most designers want to share their vision with the rest of the world. Designers are egotistical and evangelical and if they’re going to usefully influence social and economic change they must learn explain what it is that they do if others are to understand, help and support them. Communication is vital for sustained design-led change.

Education is essential if non-designers are to understand the common languages which allow us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and the economic terms. There is a growing correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain thanks to the Blair government. For far too long young people have been allowed to leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area.

Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. It’s therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

However, designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by it’s very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is essential for a healthy city. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain a strategic vision in the midst of the criticism and doubt which will always accompany change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/ obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

Participation is key to any innovative, design-led project because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects and all designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

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Tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

One thing that we can be sure of is that tomorrow’s successful products and buildings will be complex and, if they are to succeed, they must be aesthetically functional—they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must be appropriate and efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, invisible new technologies, they must help us to understand and welcome the future rather than confuse and scare us, or make us feel stupid.

In the nineties the traditional design professions are merging and being replaced by a collaboration of people and skills: new media, science, art, music and fashion. New design processes and designed products reflect the past and reveal an exciting future. Brave new brands express fresh consumer aspirations and innovative ways of living. The UK is an energetic, eccentric, creative laboratory—an off-shore voyeurist and an island melting-pot where anything goes, everything rocks.

The new designers are often a product of the UK. They are from a broad art school education, collaborating with others who often have no academic back-ground at all. They are creative people who form unconventional partnerships: artists and graphic designers, film-makers and architects, poets, musicians and product designers. In the past artists and designers shared the common language of drawing, today, it is often the addition of new technology, common hardware and similar software platforms that have given people a common language which has allowed them to talk and work together. This gives us new ways of seeing the world and new kinds of products which express our new experiences.

The new UK style is the vigorous creative expression of contemporary British street life and culture. Fashion, products and music describe how young people live and work in the UK. These everyday objects build a picture of our society; a place which is rapidly changing. New trends are emerging. These trends reflect both cultural and technological change, describing how we might live in the new millennium.

The UK was the first into the industrial revolution and the first out. Throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries the UK was the ‘workshop of the world’, the premier manufacturing nation. Our manufacturing pre-eminence has waned but our strength in design and creative innovation remains unchallenged. The nineteen thirties and the nineteen sixties were important creative moments in recent British history and today the Japanese acknowledge that 70% of all new ideas originate from the Britain. The UK of the nineties is a special place to be, it is the creative capital of the world and it is undergoing another renaissance, arguably the biggest this century and one which will have consequences reaching far into the the next century.

The new UK Style is important because it is a collection of objects: buildings, products and garments which express re-valuation, growth and renewal, giving us clues how we may live tomorrow. The UK, like Hong Kong is in a state of flux which, through intelligent control, can be the lucrative generator of economic innovation and generation.

In order to design well, it’s important to control creativity. In order to control creativity we must have a methodology which underpins our intuition. We must also understand the personality and aspirations of the clients and markets we are creating for.

If I were asked to define the personality of the new UK style I would say that it was:

complex
dynamic
contradictory
idiosyncratic
intelligent
humourous
ironic
irreverent
optimistic
and, energetic

Every region in every society in the world has a different character. Good design, like good art, must be sensitive these fragile differences and eloquent in expressing them as products and buildings and garments.

The UK invented design education which has it’s roots in the country’s manufacturing past—schools like the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London were established as an educational resource for Victorian industries. Much of the new UK style began life in the many schools and institutions of art and design throughout Britain.

Many of today’s graduates have rejected conventional business structures and have formed unconventional collaborations with other people who offer a new perspective on art, design and fashion. All this helps move traditional creative disciplines out of the institutions and on to the street.

New cultural trends

One characteristic of new British design is a trend towards inter-disciplinary working. Collaborations such as those by Born Free and Inflate where fashion meets product design, and Tomato, a changing collaboration between poets, advertising creatives, graphic designers and film-makers and collaborations between designers, manufacturers and retailers such as those found at NIce House and SCP. Many young creators such as One Foot Taller, Mo’Wax and Inflate have decided to become their own client and set up in business, controlling their own promotion, manufacturing and distribution. These young businesses can respond rapidly to change and are quick to describe new ideas through objects or music.

Traditional boundaries between creative disciplines are breaking down. Every day technology becomes more flexible and user friendly and artists, designers, musicians and architects find that they have a common creative process which underpins all of their work.

Many collaborations are between professionals and non-professionals, graduate designers and non-graduates. This often leads to strange hybrid products and objects. Many tiny pockets of energy give rise to highly individual products which come from very personal experiences such as Precious McBane who were hairdressers and now design furniture and theatre sets.

The de-professional-isation of design is another interesting phenomenon which signals cultural change. Many old technical professions are being de-skilled and presented in new media formats which allow more people to access them. The big messages about creativity and design and their usefulness in business and in everyday life are getting on to the street. People are opening their eyes and their minds to new ways of living.

Nnew languages for a new millennium

There is no doubt that creativity is gathering power within the world of international business because there is a growing understanding of the role design plays as an international language allowing us to trade successfully with one another. The potential to trade successfully depends on our ability to recognise and understand cultural differences, ensuring we encode our products and buildings with the appropriate messages while respecting the special cultural expectations of individual societies. In the UK we are beginning to enjoy the idiosyncrasies in our cultural personality and rely less on a monolithic view of life in Britain which is no longer true but probably never was. In the UK we must be careful to protect and nurture cultural differences because they are a fragile and valuable source of human richness and economic wealth which will diminish and vanish if they are misunderstood and abused.

Who are the guardians of creativity and style?

The real guardians of UK creativity and the new UK style are not the formal organisations and national institutions. The real guardians of UK style are the individuals and local, informal networks made in the process of designing and working. The invisible networks created as creative people seek out partners who share similar values and aspirations. These networks are fragile because are unsupported by formal institutions and would die if forced to conform to a national policy on creative direction. Instead they depend upon courageous individuals who dare to be different. In Glasgow we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Designers can play a constructive role in finding a route through the confusion, finding order within apparent chaos and helping to present and promote the positive elements in the emerging personality of a renewed culture. These elements, new languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values can form the basis of a palette which will underpin the development of new products and services, these in turn will attract trade with other nations who desperately want a piece of this fresh, new action.

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse is much more than an architecture centre.