Cultural Landscapes

“We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.”—Winston Churchill

I think we all shape the cultural landscape, and it in turn shapes us.

The cultural landscape is a multi-dimensional space which changes continually throughout time and therefore constantly needs to be re-reinterpreted and re-calibrated.

Much of the data which forms the landscape is intangible and un-quantifiable.

The landscape must be interpreted and explained in order to be understood; it must be qualified.

I will now attempt to explain what I mean by cultural landscape and what my role within the landscape is.

My role in the cultural landscape

Design

Firstly, I call myself a designer. I’m also part of the cultural landscape which makes it impossible for me to stand apart from it to get a clearer view. It’s useful to be asked to talk about my work from different perspective; to be asked to describe or interpret what I do everyday in terms of the ‘landscape’ because it alters my perspective and gives me a fresh insight on my work. As a designer, I share the same common understanding of the creative process with all artists and architects.

I work across several traditional disciplines, usually as a graphic designer but also as a product designer and occasionally as part of a team with interior designers, architects or artists. Much of my work is about analysing and interpreting the cultural landscape. Expressing a new and contemporary view of the world through designed solutions which might be books or might be bars. I analyse intangible information, which I collect from the wider landscape, and synthesise tangible solutions which in turn produce predictable results for my clients—the people who pay me to act as interpreter and synthesiser of solutions. Clients pay me to create objects which fit appropriately within their corporate environments; smaller cultural landscapes with their own grammar of language, symbols, rituals and values expressing their own distinctive personality.

Creative process

In order interpret accurately and create effectively and appropriately I have developed a broad definition of my role within the landscape; I use an analytical, creative process which is concerned with the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas—the process of designing a train, a book or a building is essentially the same, except that the technical constraints differ. The creative process is essentially the same as the process an artist uses to produce art, this process is made up of ‘intuition’ or ‘taste’ and qualified or underpinned by analytical method, such as colour theory, psychology or sociology. The production of ‘art’ sometimes involves more intuition and less analytical method than architecture and design, but not always.

I think design is a controlled process which allows me to interpret data, supplied by a client, and render it in the form of typography and designed objects. These designed objects, or products, perform an active role within the cultural landscape; I create the props and backdrops, the typography, the objects and interiors against which individuals and organisations play out the rituals of their everyday lives. My work provides organisations with a tangible personality, giving form and clearly articulated meaning to their transactions with other organisations.

Elements of culture

The best description of culture I have come across is ‘social glue’—the stuff that makes the landscape stick together. I manipulate many elements within the cultural landscape: language, symbols, myths, rituals and values, like five layers of skin on an onion, which, when peeled away, reveal the ideologies of a culture, the things that we get excited about and impel us into action. All of the elements exists within a multi-dimensional place—the cultural landscape; I control the manner and pace with which a book reveals it’s information or the speed and demeanour with which you pass through an interior space. I control all the references which allow you, like an archeologist, to analyse and understand what kind of place you are at and what time you are in.

Creativity makes use of a sensorial vocabulary which manipulates all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight, bringing order out of apparent chaos and revealing cultural landscapes within of a confusion of dust and ritual. Castelli used only the ‘soft’, intangible elements of the sensorial vocabulary to design ‘soft architecture’.

Typography

My work as a graphic designer has much to with typography in same way that my work as a product designer has much to do with the history of objects and materials. Type is a ‘container’ for language, changing it’s values and meanings—a ‘meta’ language, a language within a language. The way in which something is said or the pace at which information is revealed can be manipulated through typesetting. Typography is intrinsically linked with the history of the world and all of its cultures; it charts the development of speech, conscious thought, the pre-Classical and Classical world, the industrial and the information revolutions. Typography reveals and celebrates cultural differences in exactly the same way that furniture does. We don’t need to sit in chairs, we can sit on the floor, but we choose to sit on a chair because it says something additional about our situation within the cultural landscape.

I am particularly interested in expressing cultural difference through typography, designed objects and interiors. I am not a nationalist or a native Glaswegian but I think it is valuable to understand and celebrate the things in our culture that make us special. We need to feel we have a unique identity in a world which is quickly becoming a global village; a virtual space where we all speak and write with an American accent; where we all have pearl-white products, drive the same cars and have buildings in the same internationally fashionable style. I like to encode my work with culturally loaded references which will have some broad meaning to everyone but special meaning to people who understand Glasgow’s ideologies. These references are like a magic mirror which allows the beholder to see the local cultural landscape.

The Glaswegian cultural landscape

Glasgow used to be the ‘workshop of the world’, an industrial city which likes to make rather than service. It was a city which expressed it’s proud personality to the world through it’s products; it’s ships and locomotives. The city is now a post-industrial city with international aspirations but no tangible vehicle through which to express it’s changing identity.

I work with others, with Graven Images and Nice House, to try and tangibly represent what it means to be in Glasgow in the 1990s—to express what it is to be alive in the city today. We create props and backdrops which allow the people who experience them to gain a unique perspective on the city. We try and help Glasgow reveal a brave, contemporary cultural landscape. To offer an alternative to the landscapes which Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Cunard Queens gave to the world and which they still carry in their mind’s eye. We try to give shape to our own time; to several new cultural landscapes which all co-exist simultaneously and which are continually changing and continually in need of re-calibration and new expression.

Creativity is a potent tool for both analysis and synthesis or reconstruction of the world. It allows us to distil the important components from a multi-dimensional landscape and recompose them in a new way. Analysing and selecting the powerful, recognisable components from the past, re-calibrating the ideologies and aspirations embodied in them and creating a framework with which to construct a meaningful map of the past and the present. Revealing the ideologies that motivate us, excite us and are most meaningful to us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing a strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate; familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive. This is my motivation.

I design typography, products and spaces which have some relationship to the city and the wider world. They are backdrops and props which allow me to live in a Glaswegian cultural landscape rather than in a ersatz Tudor landscape filled with Japanese products and Italian furniture. These new tangible representations are a journey through a Glaswegian cultural landscape. They are, in a sense, site specific because they are created through the power of a specific cultural landscape—they couldn’t have happened in the same way in Nantes or London. These spaces and objects offer a positive vision of the future which using the old cultural grammar and ideologies in new ways, creating a future which is appropriate for Glaswegians.

Kidsize

This is an extraordinary exhibition because most of the objects in it are usually relegated to a fairly inferior position in our lives, our homes and our high streets.

It’s extremely unusual to find childhood and childish things as the core of an exhibition—with the exception of the ‘Toys R Us’ and the Museum of Childhood I can’t think of an exhibition that tackles this subject as completely as Vitra have.

The exhibition comes at a good time as new technologies make it almost too easy for us to turn on the Tellytubbies or the Cartoon Channel or buy any one of the hundreds of thousand of other mass produced toys especially designed to quieten our new generations of would-be shopaholics.

In her speech, Barbara Feldbaum remarked that a socio-cultural comparison of different societies indicates how object dominated our lives today are. While this in itself is no bad thing, as humans we have communicated using objects since the very beginning of civilisation, but it does place a burden of responsibility on us. Because we have to be sure that the objects we surround our children with, those we help and encourage them make and play with, equip them with the skills they’ll need to sustain their natural creativity and help them to lead fulfilling lives.

Childhood, like so much else in the west is being redefined, commercialised and privatised. Children constitute a big part of the population that’s ripe for commercial exploitation. Kids are big business. They deserve much more attention from designers who, I believe, can help them grow up to understand and control their world rather than becoming victims of corporate greed; we don’t want our future generations to become indiscriminate consumers spending their pocket money on whatever advertisers feel compelled to sell to them.

Maybe now is a good time to look at how we used to educate and entertain our children, and examine how others have managed to raise theirs without the help of television and new technologies, after all we do live in a global village increasingly serviced by global companies.

Human creativity is the thing that separates us from the animals and it also separates the men from the boys. It’s great to see the kind of worlds kids create for themselves when left to their own devices. Wouldn’t it be good if they could be helped to retain the creativity they were born with in later life?

I hope you enjoy the exhibition and find it as amazing and though provoking as I did.

Design as a tool for cultural change

“The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”—Mark Twain

“Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you make of what happens to you.”—Aldous Huxley

This paper is about my experience of using design to promote cultural change in an urban environment. The city has a population of three quarters of a million people and I can’t speak for everyone.

I think it’s important that you know I am a practising designer, and only secondly a teacher and a theorist. I’m interested in theory because I need to explain my actions to other designers, clients and students. Theory helps me understand what I do and gives me control over my creativity which is satisfying for me and makes my work more effective.

My experience is based on relationships between creative individuals and organisation in the City and the people we work with; our clients, in both the public and private sectors. I’m interested in the potential impact, socially and economically, of our work on the City. The conclusions I have reached so far have much to do with transforming our experiences as practising designers and teachers into strategy for the City in it’s run up to a year long festival celebration United Kingdom City of Architecture and Design 1999.

I will now try to explain the context and theory behind Glasgow’s decision to use design, or creativity, as a strategy for urban change.

There are five parts to my presentation—four questions and a statement. I believe that all four questions must be answered before any strategy for promoting design-led urban change can be created. They are:

1. design—what is it?
2. culture—what is it?
3. cultural strategy—what is it?
4. the urban environment—what is Glasgow?
5. what Glasgow can hope to achieve

1. design—what is it?

Design is much more than creating obviously stylish things. In the broadest terms design is a creative process. I believe that ‘architects’ and ‘fine artists’ are also ‘designers’ as we share the same creative process before we are named after a specific specialist skill such as ‘sculptor’, ‘architect’ or ‘graphic designer’.

I believe that the creative process is about the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas—the process of designing a train, a book or a building is the same, except that the technical constraints differ. This process is essentially the same as the process an artist uses to produce art, this process is made up of ‘intuition’ or ‘taste’ and qualified or underpinned by analytical method, such as colour theory, psychology or sociology.

Design, as well as being a clearly understood and well documented process is a powerful tool for revealing change in many dimensions. Change is revealed through manipulating all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. The creative process, this controlled, evolution of ideas, brings order out of apparent chaos, revealing cities within of a confusion of dust and ritual. The creative process helps us make sense out of the world around us, identifying fundamental and dynamic issues, presenting information in a structure which we can understand and manipulate. It makes magicians out of all of us and allows us to wield powers which can invoke change. As designers we have the power to reveal only the things we wish the rest of the world to see, we can present information in one or many dimensions; when we arrive in a new city it can seem apparently chaotic so we have to find ways of making sense of it, understanding it, how it works, how the different parts come together, how it may be changed, manipulated. One simple way is to devise a ‘map’ which reveals fundamental or dynamic information, such as energy flow, the flow of traffic through an area—revealing one level of information, a kind of dynamic order within apparent chaos.

Design and the process of designing, the creative process, is ‘tool’ for analysis, synthesis and reconstruction of the world. It allows us to distil the important components from a multi-dimensional image of reality and recompose them in a new way. Analysing and selecting the powerful, recognisable components from the past, re-calibrating the ideologies and aspirations embodied in them and creating a framework with which to construct a meaningful map of the past and the present. Revealing the ideologies that motivate us, excite us and are most meaningful to us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing a strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate; familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive.

The creative process draws upon an armoury of analytical methodologies which can help reveal the particular cultural dynamics of our neighbourhood or region, enabling us to expose, understand and focus cultural change. It also allows us to celebrate cultural change and welcome it because we understand and control the direction change may take in an approximate way rather than fearing it through lack of understanding and control.

2. culture—what is it?

Design, art and architecture have reflected ever changing culture throughout the ages. Culture, or ‘social glue’, the stuff that binds us all together and makes society, changes all the time and constantly needs re-calibrated, re-valued and expressed as new architecture, new products and new rituals. Designers, architects and artists help describe this continual process of change and give it meaning in many dimensions, in time and space. They provide the backdrop and props which help dramatise a new order in the theatre of everyday life. Architecture, design and art, creativity, helps describe and dramatise new ways of living.

Because culture is largely intangible it cannot be measured, it can only be interpreted. Cultural traits are qualitative and need to be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. It can be argued that culture should be seen as a ‘set of solutions to the key problems of survival’.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living and surviving. These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport and designed products which form the tangible theatre of life, the props and the backdrops; our architecture, products and garments. These 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.

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s relationship with the external world, giving an advantage and adding value in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through expressing 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 dinosaur.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through education, participation and communication. Designers can gently orientate citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, such as those embodied by 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 environment with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of order to make sense of an apparently chaotic vision of the future.

Designers are particularly well equipped to express cultural change, bringing forth new order from the continual chaos which surrounds us. Designers use a sensorial vocabulary, a truly international language which utilises language, symbols, rituals, myths and values in order to control and manipulate the world around us.

The core of any culture is it’s ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which motivate us and compel people to act. Because culture is largely invisible, clues have to be discovered from tangible artifacts, then interpreted. These clues are like the layers of skin on an onion which hide and protect the ideologies. There are five layers through which one must pass before an understanding of the ideologies can be reached: language, symbols, rituals, myths and values.

Most creative individuals want to share their vision with the rest of the world and influence the rest of the world. As designers, we are an egotistical, evangelical breed and if we are to truly influence the world for the better, both socially and economically, then we must communicate and explain what it is that we do. We must inform, control and communicate what we mean by our creativity if others are to understand, help and support us. Communication is essential for sustained design-led transformation and the first strand of five strands in Glasgow’s strategy.

The second strand is education which is essential if non-designers are to understand this common language which allows us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and economic environment. There is no correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain at present. In the United Kingdom young people can 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. Is it 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.

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 its 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 the third strand in Glasgow’s strategy. 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 this strategic vision in the midst of criticism and the doubt which always accompanies 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. We must create an environment in which innovation is seen as challenging and not frightening. Failure must be viewed as a necessary part of the process of change.

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.

The fourth strand in Glasgow’s five strands of strategy is participation, 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. All designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

In Glasgow we must bring all of our knowledge, vision, intuition, analytical method, and above all, humanity, to the table when we become partners with the rest of our community in creating a better world than the one we now inhabit.

3. cultural strategy—what is it?

Very simply, it is everything. That is why it is so difficult to create and manage.

Many attempts to change the urban culture of post-industrial second cities fail because politicians and professionals impose wholesale solutions on entire communities. Citizens must be involved in the evolution of their communities and be encouraged and supported to take some of the responsibility for that evolution with the help of other team members, designers and architects as well as politicians. It is important that citizens are enrolled in the process of change at its outset as they are the ones who shoulder the responsibility for carrying on that process and living most closely with the outcome in the future.

Glasgow won the title of ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’ against opposition from cities throughout Britain. The title is part of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Arts 2000 strategy which celebrates a different art form every year in the run up to the millennium. It is Glasgow’s intention to ensure that there will be tangible long term benefits for the city. Winning the title places architecture and design firmly on the political agenda for the next five years and creativity once more in the driving seat of the economy, influencing and creating strategy and influencing the expenditure of huge amounts of money.

Glasgow is a city which loves to fight and loves to party on a huge scale when it wins. The City has a personality which loves to be reassured how good it is. Like a neglected child it thrives on praise. This is not a weakness because the praise is put to good use.

Those of us, architects and designers in the private sector, made a pact before we formally agreed to become part of the bidding team. We agreed to commit ourselves to the project on the understanding that the knowledge, networks and expertise gathered over the two year period would be used by the City Council for the promotion of architecture and design. It was agreed that all information would be catalogued and accessible to any citizen who wished to progress our aspirations or learn from our experiences.

We also agreed that the bid should be a Glasgow bid and not a City Council bid. We wanted to work in partnership with the public sector and put in place innovative decision making structures which would allow change to happen and the City to progress once again.

Here I must thank a Chaos Pilot from Denmark, Anders Sjostedt, who helped me see why Glasgow’s strategy might work. Anders recognised that it was the act of communicating, participating, educating and innovating integral to the process of developing a strategy which were of real and lasting value. The strategy itself was less valuable than the networks and connections made in the process of creating it. Andy Lowe, a marketing lecturer at the University of Strathclyde embellished this point by remarking that; “We do business with those who’s values and aspirations we share, they will be our most stable and rewarding relationships and ones which will sustain us and help us move mountains”.

We made the whole process of bidding into the creation of a broad democratic strategy for the development of a design-led Glasgow. Because culture changes so quickly it is important to allow plans to be flexible. This is why we developed a broad framework within which many projects could happen.

The fifth and final strand of Glasgow’s strategy is; “the promotion of the public appreciation of architecture and design by example”, because we knew that if we got the process right examples of excellence would evolve. These examples and the documented process which brought them into being might encourage others to take risks and progress.

4. The urban environment—what is Glasgow?

However, design can only reveal values which are already present in our culture. We can’t change culture, at least not quickly, we can only interpret it in new and ingenious ways, revealing things which were hidden and finding new ways of breathing life into old values. This is what has brought about Glasgow’s so-called ‘renaissance’. the city hasn’t essentially changed, it’s just chosen to be viewed from a different angle in a new era.

The second city

I believe it is important that cities, especially post-industrial cities, such as Glasgow, use design as a ‘tool’ for cultural change. Providing an analytical framework through which to understand the archaeology of the past and describe what the archaeology of the future might be.

Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. The city has a world reputation based on its design and architectural heritage and has always tended to use the tangible products of the creative process to promote its current personality. Glasgow was Great Britain’s second city, simultaneously ‘The Workshop of the World’ and ‘The Finest Victorian City in Britain’. The social and economic profit from design-led manufacturing was celebrated through municipal architecture. However, the overall effect of the city’s phenomenal development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has not been cumulative for we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have wished.

Different kinds of cities articulate their culture, their personality, in different ways. Glasgow is often described as a regional capital or second city, unlike Edinburgh or London. They are both first cities or capital cities like Paris, Madrid and New York. They communicate their culture through the design and architecture of their national institutions. Through their rich heritage and history. Through their boulevards and monumental spaces, their skylines, seats of government and national, state resources, like the ballet, gallery and the opera which survive on a pre-designated international repertoire leaving little room for individual cultural expression.

Second cities, many of them like Glasgow, express their culture through activities. They are often post-industrial cities with a less monolithic, often unusual, architectural heritage. They expressed their personalities through the production and movement of the products they manufactured: Glasgow through heavy engineering, ships and locomotives, world trade and the maverick architecture of Mackintosh, Chicago through steel, cars, carcasses and the architecture of Louis Sullivan, Barcelona through its port and the architecture of Gaudi.

As the manufacturing of products in many post-industrial cities continues to decline, second cities are denied the traditional means of expressing their identity through their products and services, never mind their architecture. Except in the sense of industrial heritage, a museum and theme park existence where culture is cut short, frozen in time, a sanitised memory and an impotent servant of the tourist industry.

Creative people, instead of innovating and designing new, innovative ways to create wealth, employment and therefore a positive, new expression of our Glaswegian culture, find themselves relegated to servicing, dressing-up and re-packaging history. We’ve never been so needed or so far from removed from being asked to help.

In recent years the United Kingdom has been governed by politicians who do not value manufacturing or innovation, tending instead to re-visit past successes. Unfortunately this fails to yield solutions to today’s problems. We have achieved little in recent times which we can be proud of. In the United Kingdom pride and self-respect have been confined to the past—they are now only memories. Politicians align themselves with economists, seeking solace in the measurable, persuading voters that future success may be found by repeating the past. The future is unknown and innovation is dangerous. Creative people are considered to be unpredictable, mysterious and unquantifiable. Therefore, we are all doomed to failure because the world moves on and it cannot wait for us nor can we use successful solutions from other cultures because there problems are not wholly the same as ours.

Designers, architects and artists have given moribund policy-makers and politicians, people with little creativity, the excuse to avoid creating economic and cultural strategy, preferring the confusion of chaos over order, allowing markets to find their own deteriorating levels of trade and cities to drift in leaderless miasma. In the United Kingdom in the nineties we have a Ministry of Heritage instead of a Ministry of Culture. We live in a society which guards against newness and refuses to plan for innovation, variety, complexity and enrichment. Banality, shoddiness, predictability and myopia are the facts of our lives.

Many of Glasgow’s current problems were created in the City’s recent history when Modernism offered Glasgow and Scotland a different kind of renaissance than it did elsewhere in the world. The civic death of Classicism and rebirth of a new order, heralded by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, or arguably by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson before him, signalled the beginning of a new century.

The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality. Glasgow had an acknowledged track record in Classicism and boasted many fine buildings. The city was encouraged by it’s recent successful history and it believed it could sustain a place in this brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

As modernism gathered momentum Glasgow laid waste to vast areas of the city, destroying much of its classical heritage while trying to move forwards into a vision of the future the west had mistakenly thought to be utopia. The Gorbals, a vigorous, stone tenemented, working class area south of the River Clyde in which much of the city’s contemporary mythology is rooted, died a notorious success. Demolished in the name of cleanliness, its people, who were the life and soul of Glasgow, were banished from the inner city and condemned to suspended animation in the margins of civilisation, in municipal housing estates such as Easterhouse; a new estate with a population of over thirty thousand people but without shops or public houses or meeting places.

Some of the original population of the old Gorbals were rehoused in new high rise buildings which were erected to replace the old tenemented streets. These provided no space for children to play and no place for adults to socialise. Many of the families, and even some of the buildings, began to deteriorate as the last inhabitants were still moving in to their new homes.

To rehouse its population, Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe, driven by central government economists in London and by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates. Corbusier’s vision of perfect sun-drenched flat roofs and windows shielded by brie soleil were hopelessly inappropriate for Glasgow’s driving rain, grey summers and working class culture. Glasgow, with its international socialism, fell prey to the banality and simplicity of international modernism, which provided an instant, cost-effective solution to the city’s housing problems. Central government’s insatiable demands didn’t allow much time to reflect on whether or not this new environment would be humane as well as hygienic. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of environmental health.

Politicians and designers simply failed to recognise that Glasgow’s socialism was different from anyone else’s. Ironically, it was an architectural co-operative that demonstrated that much of what we were destroying, red sandstone tenements, was useful and necessary to distinguish us from other cities—the gridiron plan of four-storey classical tenement buildings could economically be made sanitary and the city once more become solid and Glaswegian. But Assist Architectural Co-operative couldn’t save the city’s declining population, its manufacturing base or its publishing industries, which fell prey to economics and tactical politics. Glasgow came through its most dangerous re-invention in recent times and the city was not about to risk another foray into the future unless it could dictate the terms of its own progress. It is, therefore, not surprising that it is the housing associations and co-operatives, individuals, small groups and informal networks, not the private developers, local authorities and large organisations, who are taking risks and being the most adventurous and innovative with the city’s architecture.

In Glasgow we spend millions of pounds of money preserving our Victorian heritage and still lack the confidence to commission brave new work which expresses life in Glasgow today. We’ve gone half way to breathing new life in the city through saving and repairing the past but we still have the challenge of building the future. We can re-generate but not generate. So far it seems we’d rather live in a false vision of the past than dare to look at what the new millennium might hold for us.

However, Glasgow has learned that quantity doesn’t come cheaply and mass production leaves little room for cultural expression, sometimes derogatorily referred to as mere ‘style’. It is now time for designers to express the rich cultural differences between Glasgow and the rest of Europe, revealing what’s especially valuable in our culture, what adds value to products and services and makes us identifiable, distinct and desirable, in European and global market places.

Glasgow realises that it has to project a positive image of itself if it is to finally come to terms with it’s heavy industrial past, it’s lost world status, and focus the energies of younger generations on new challenges which will create and sustain the city’s vigorous cultural energy. Glasgow knows this will create an atmosphere of confidence which will encourage people to take risks, to innovate, which will in turn attract business, create wealth and ensure Glasgow remains an exciting and varied place to live, work and visit.

In the eighties marketing cities was big business. It continues to be big business in the nineties, especially when tourism is the largest industry in the world. Technology now allows us almost instant access to every far-flung location, and encourages us to choose one destination over another, one potential building site over another and one business location over another. Glasgow is in the game of making itself attractive to potential tourists and investors in a world arena, not just a Scottish, British or European arena. The city views creativity as an essential component in making itself distinct, recognisable and attractive to the rest of the world.

Glasgow’s leaders are beginning to recognise the role which creativity can play in re-orienting public perception of a city. Glasgow is once again re-discovering and re-defining itself. Trying to express it’s post-industrial personality through architecture, manufactured products, the arts and service industries in an intelligent and integrated way. And that’s where we, as educated creative people, professional thinkers and problem solvers, are useful.

Our Glaswegian culture is much more than an art and sport lottery. All we do in our lives is ‘cultural’ activity. Cities are concentrated manifestations of cultural activity. High culture and low culture, there’s no such thing as bad culture, some is just more pompous and high-brow than others and both are vital. Glasgow has both succeeded and failed in it’s attempt to promote a much less one dimensional representation of the city and move public perception away from it’s post-industrial grime and it’s ‘hard man’ reputation.

The City’s successful bid for UK City of Architecture and Design 1999 has provided the focus which will allow this to occur.

5. what Glasgow can hope to achieve

As I wrote this I found myself thinking; “Why on earth am I wasting my time writing about ‘change’, it happens anyway and we get the cities we deserve”. But we don’t get the cities we deserve.

Glasgow is a city, it has a sense of itself, a bit like a city state, like Lichtenstein. It is a complex place with many tensions, constantly at odds with itself and the rest of Scotland and Britain. It has the aspiration to be a great world city and a small, tight political structure which is relatively easy to influence, unlike London which is just too big and doesn’t really function as a united city. London acts like a collection of smaller communities, lacking any centralised political authority, and is therefore difficult, if not impossible to influence or change.

The City has huge civic power. Historically it was the manufacturing (and arguably therefore) the economic power-base of the The British Empire in the late eighteen, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recently it has been home to Strathclyde Regional Council, the biggest local authority in Britain, with responsibility for the education and infrastructure for two thirds of the population of Scotland, and Glasgow City Council, the largest city authority in the United Kingdom. Both have been forced by government in London to combine and form one unitary, single-tier authority with all the destructive power politics and bureaucracy that inevitably involves. Architecture and design are pawns in this political game.

Our safety-net in bidding for ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’ was to form a partnership between the public and private sectors a pre-condition of our involvement.

Politicians view accolades as tactical markers in their personal career development which could potentially deny Glasgow the opportunity to progress. The partnership arrangement was necessary to ensure a degree of humility in the behaviour of the public sector, ensuring that individuals and small organisations have their efforts acknowledged and aspirations fulfiled.

Bureaucracies like to deal in the politics of ‘ownership or destruction’. Huge departments with vast financial resources like to lay feudal claim to everything which might enhance their power and influence, securing their future in times of political unrest, or destroy it, so that others cannot benefit from it. I am encouraged by the amount of inter-departmental fighting over architecture and design as all of this sound and fury signifies that creativity is gaining strength within the City.

Bureaucracies, by their very definition, maintain the status quo and avoid the risks associated with innovation. Partnership was necessary in order to guarantee risks would be taken and change encouraged to happen.

Stephano Marzano, the Design Director of Philips said; “Design is a political activitity”. Glasgow knows that design, because of it’s analytical, strategic process and its catalytic ability to invoke change and create wealth creating products, can help identify solutions to the real problems which undermine Britain and much of Europe today. Homelessness, unemployment, drug abuse and lack of cultural identity are all symptoms of more deeply rooted problems which tend to be treated in a tactical and superficial way by politicians.

Cities which are socially and economically successful must use design in manufacturing as well as service industries and architecture. To actively deny a country the right to manufacture is to deny it’s right to exist. What will the the archeologists of tomorrow make of Glaswegian culture if all they find are Japanese electronic products, American beer bottles and cheap reproductions of seventeenth century English housing types?

Manufacturing and service industries together create employment, reputation, wealth and the stability and momentum necessary to support innovation. It’s a cyclical process which, once broken, requires huge amounts of energy and money to repair and re-start.

Through creating an accessible and attractive environment and through educating, empowering and encouraging the public to take part in designing the future. Through showing people a new perspective on their world through art. If we can take the time to understand and communicate the social and economic benefits of what we, as creative people, do, to politicians and strategists, encouraging them to use design and creativity as the tool for economic regeneration we could help change the world.

The creative process can help solve some of these underlying problems. Through creating employment in new product and service industries, these have massive cultural benefits as will as economic ones. Glasgow intends to design it’s way out of it’s current problems through actively using creativity. When used to it’s full potential design is a powerful force for creating strategy, influencing the economy and revealing the very best of Glaswegian culture in all it’s different regional and urban forms. I believe that in placing design at the top of the agenda Glasgow will enter the new millennium in the same powerful manner as it left the old.

Is 1999 a waste of time?

Is 1999 a waste of time?

‘The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.’ mark twain

Here we are over one year after the Arts Council of Great Britain’s announcement that Glasgow had won the coveted title of ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’. Ironically, I first talked on this subject earlier this year at a festival of architecture and design, in Edinburgh. Maybe this teaches us a valuable lesson in Scottish psychology. God help us if ever we get home rule…

Personally, I’m unconcerned which of the two Scottish cities was charged with the task of hosting the 1999 event, but content that it has come to Scotland because it gives all of us the unique opportunity to explore if a festival can be made from architecture and design, if such an event can stimulate and educate all factions of our culture and economy and if such a festival can ever have a meaningful impact on the whole of society?

Glasgow, through a participative process, decided not to concentrate on bricks and mortar conspiring to concentrate it’s energies strategically, building innovative and democratic decision-making structures which would ensure that good design eventually emerged, not just every now and then, but consistently with increasing momentum over time – creating a climate of confidence which would lead the city bravely into the new millennium. It was process, not product that the bid team, sought to influence and to change. Placing all the emphasis on building a long term strategy for a design led society and economy.

Glasgow was keen to promote it’s bid as a ‘Glasgow bid’ made in ‘partnership’ with Glaswegians. This partnership was between the public and the private sectors. The city emphasised that it’s bid was most definately not a City Council bid, it was not a ‘public sector bid’. Nor was it nor should it have been. The Arts Council of Great Britain no doubt recognised that, with local government reorganisation, ever diminishing municipal resources and an increasingly bureaucratic administration, cities must work with the wider economy in they are to develop and grow in stature. Glasgow knew that the Arts Council would not favour a city-led bid. The flux precipitated by reorganisation could paint an uncertain picture. A city council alone might not be in a position to deliver all it promised in a new altered condition.

There are two absolutely key issues I would like to explore. Issues which I believe must be satisfactoraly answered if ‘Year of Architecture and Design 1999’ is not to be a complete waste of time. These issues are:

Is it possible to develop a city wide strategy to promote the ‘public appreciation of architecture and design?

Is it really possible for a true partnership to exist between the public and private sectors in any way more substantial than in name alone?

Let’s consider the first of these: ‘Is it possible to develop a city wide strategy to promote the ‘public appreciation of architecture and design?’

A city wide strategy to promote the ‘public appreciation of architecture and design’ is firstly a cultural strategy. Albeit one which has the power to influence the economy or society in a powerfully direct way that other factions within the Arts find more difficult to illustrate. Through, for example, creating new products which result in jobs, exports and cash, or investing in education and community groups which influence the way in which existing investment in housing is spent, leading to better housing, new ways of living, an enhanced environment and broad social benefits.

Culture is something which is easy to talk about but very difficult to define. It’s likened to ‘social glue’, the stuff that sticks us together and makes society. Very simply, culture is everything and we in it therefore we can’t ever stand apart from it to gain a more objective view. That is why it is so difficult to create and manage cultural strategies for events like ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999’. It may even be impossible to do so without actively damaging the delicate balance, the tensions and nuances, the characteristics which have evolved in cities over hundreds of years. The very last thing architecture and design need is another cultural ghetto. We have already marginalised ourselves. We stand accused of being precious, unrealistic and uncommunicative and would be ill advised to remove ourselves further from the sensorially disinfranchised larger part of our society. Architects and designers have much to prove in order to win the respect of the rest of society.

Many attempts to change the urban culture of post industrial second cities failed because politicians and design professionals conspired to imposed wholesale solutions on entire communities. Citizens must be involved in the evolution of their communities and be encouraged and supported to take some of the responsibility for that evolution with the help of other team members, designers and architects as well as politicians. It is important that citizens are enrolled in the process of change at its outset as they are the ones who shoulder the responsibility for carrying on that process and living most closely with the outcome in the future. Glasgow’s track record…

The current decline in Britain’s world power and central government’s growing introspection have forced cities to bid for accolades especially created to help distinguish industrially emasculated cities.

Unfortunately, many accolades are ill conceived or underfunded. Few are truly innovative or offer lasting benefit, most are based on the displays of imperial power so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anachronistic re-workings of old ideals which lie comfortably with current political daydreams of going back to the future and quite simply backwards.

Neither ‘European City of Culture’ in 1990 or the ‘Garden Festival’ in 1988 offered long term, integrated remedies for a deeply traumatised, post-industrial society. These titles acted as useful markers, shorter term tactical goals, which raised public awareness and recreated a sense of potency and pride in the city. Many have attached ‘festivals’ with titles which are awarded through competition including ‘Years of the Artist’, new opera houses, conference centres, concert halls, and sports events including the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. All demand the commitment of already over stretched resources to secure a chance of competing and winning – an expensive, exhausting and dispiriting process if nothing is learned, gained or retained along the way. Most bids are lead by local government departments which are exist for one project and are then disbanded with loss of energy and expertise.

Glasgow has hosted the National Garden Festival in 1988 and was ‘Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’. Although these were useful milestones in the development of the City, much experience and momentum gained in their production has subsequently been lost. In 1999 Glasgow will be ‘United Kingdom City of Architecture and Design’ and it is to be hoped that we will learn from our previous experiences.

Winning the title of ‘City of Architecture and Design 1999′, part of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Arts 2000 strategy which celebrates a different art form every year in the run up to the millennium. It was part of the private/public partnership bidding teams’ intention to ensure that this time there would be tangible long term benefits for the city. Winning the title places architecture and design firmly on the political agenda for the next five years and creativity once more in the driving seat of the economy, where it might influence strategy and the expenditure of huge amounts of money.

Those of us, the architects and designers in the private sector, made a pact before we formally agreed to become part of the bidding team. We agreed to commit ourselves to the project on the understanding that the knowledge, networks and expertise gathered over the two year period would be used by the City Council for the promotion of architecture and design. It was agreed that all information would be catalogued and accessible to any citizen who wished to progress our aspirations or learn from our experiences.

We also agreed that the bid should be a Glasgow bid and not a City Council bid. We wanted to work in partnership with the public sector and put in place innovative decision making structures which would allow change to happen and the City to progress once again.

Anders Sjostedt, a chaos pilot, helped me see why Glasgow’s strategy could work. Anders recognised that it was the act of communicating, participating, educating and innovating integral to the process of developing a strategy which were of real and lasting value. The strategy itself was less valuable than the networks and connections made in the process of creating it. Andy Lowe, a marketing lecturer at the University of Strathclyde embellished this point by remarking that, “We do business with those who’s values and aspirations we share, they will be our most stable and rewarding relationships and ones which will sustain us and help us move mountains”.

We made the whole process of bidding into the creation of a broad democratic strategy for the development of a design-led Glasgow. Because culture changes so quickly it is important to allow plans to be flexible. This is why we developed a broad framework within which many projects could happen.

The fifth and final strand of Glasgow’s strategy is, “the promotion of the public appreciation of architecture and design by example,because we knew that if we got the process right examples of excellence would evolve. These examples and the documented process which brought them into being might encourage others to take risks and progress.

A city is much more than than it’s Council. Cities are complex places with as many demands and dreams as there are individuals in them. Architecture and design touch everyone all of the time and it is therefore important that all citizens feel they are included in designing the future of their environment or at least in understanding why the city has evolved to create the environment that forms that backdrop and props against which we perform the drama of our everyday lives.

There are five parts to my presentation – four questions and a statement. I believe that all four questions must be answered before any strategy for promoting design-led urban change can be created. They are:

1 design – what is it?

2 culture – what is it?

3 cultural strategy – what is it?

4 the urban environment – what is Glasgow?

5 what Glasgow can hope to achieve

1 design – what is it?

Design is much more than creating obviously stylish things. In the broadest terms design is a creative process. I believe that ‘architects’ and ‘fine artists’ are also ‘designers’ as we share the same creative process before we are named after a specific specialist skill such as ‘sculptor’, ‘architect’ or ‘graphic designer’.

I believe that the creative process is about the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas – the process of designing a train, a book or a building is essentially the same, except that the technical constraints differ. The creative process is essentially the same as the process an artist uses to produce art, this process is made up of ‘intuition’ or ‘taste’ and qualified or underpinned by analytical method, such as colour theory, psychology or sociology.

The production of art sometimes involves more intuition and less analytical method than architecture and design, but not always. I firmly believe that artists, architects and designers, creative people, would find it easier to explain the usefulness of their skills to other members of society, if they would only recognise the common ground they share rather than defining themselves according to their preferred specialism.

Design, as well as being a clearly understood and well documented process is a powerful tool for revealing change in many dimensions. Change is made evident through manipulating all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. The creative process, this controlled, evolution of ideas, brings order out of apparent chaos, revealing cities within of a confusion of dust and ritual. The creative process helps us make sense out of the world around us, identifying fundamental and dynamic issues, presenting information in a structure which we can understand and manipulate. It makes magicians out of all of us and allows us to wield powers which can invoke change. As designers we have the power to reveal only the things we wish the rest of the world to see, we can present information in one or many dimensions: when we arrive in a new city it can seem apparently chaotic so we have to find ways of making sense of it, understanding it, how it works, how the different parts come together, how it may be changed, manipulated. One simple way is to devise a ‘map’ which reveals fundamental or dynamic information, such as energy flow, the flow of traffic through an area – this is a method which reveals one level of information, revealing a kind of fundamental order in apparent chaos.

The process of designing: the creative process, is a potent tool for both analysis and synthesis or reconstruction of the world. It allows us to distil the important components from a multi-dimensional image of reality and recompose them in a new way. Analysing and selecting the powerful, recognisable components from the past, re-calibrating the ideologies and aspirations embodied in them and creating a framework with which to construct a meaningful map of the past and the present. Revealing the ideologies that motivate us, excite us and are most meaningful to us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing a strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate: familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive.

The creative process draws upon an armoury of analytical methodologies which can help reveal the particular cultural dynamics of our neighbourhood or region, enabling us to expose, understand and focus cultural change. It also allows us to celebrate cultural change and welcome it because we understand and control the direction change may take in an approximate way rather than fearing it through lack of understanding and control.

2 culture – what is it?

Design, art and architecture have reflected ever changing culture throughout the ages. Culture, or ‘social glue’, the stuff that binds us all together and makes society, changes all the time and constantly needs re-calibrated, re-valued and expressed as new architecture, new products and new rituals. Designers, architects and artists help describe this continual process of change and give it meaning in many dimensions, in time and space. They provide the backdrop and props which help dramatise a new order in the theatre of everyday life. Architecture, design and art, creativity, helps describe and dramatise new ways of living.

Because culture is largely intangible it cannot be measured, it can only be interpreted. Cultural traits are qualitative and need to be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. It can be argued that culture should be seen as a ‘set of solutions to the key problems of survival’.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living and surviving. These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport and designed products which form the tangible theatre of life, the props and the backdrops: our architecture, products and garments. These 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.

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s relationship with the external world, giving an advantage and adding value in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through expressing 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 dinosaur.

Cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through education, participation and communication. Designers can gently orientate citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, such as those embodied by 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 environment with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of order to make sense of an apparently chaotic vision of the future.

Designers are particularly well equipped to express cultural change, bringing forth new order from the continual chaos which surrounds us. Designers use a sensorial vocabulary, a truly international language which utilises language, symbols, rituals, myths and values in order to control and manipulate the world around us.

The core of any culture is it’s ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which motivate us and compel people to act. Because culture is largely invisible, clues have to be discovered from tangible artifacts, then interpreted. These clues are like the layers of skin on an onion which hide and protect the ideologies. There are five layers through which one must pass before an understanding of the ideologies can be reached: language, symbols, rituals, myths and values.

Most creative individuals want to share their vision with the rest of the world and influence the rest of the world. As designers, we are an egotistical, evangelical breed and if we are to truly influence the world for the better, both socially and economically, then we must communicate and explain what it is that we do. We must inform, control and communicate what we mean by our creativity if others are to understand, help and support us. Communication is essential for sustained design-led transformation and the first strand of five strands in Glasgow’s strategy.

The second strand is education which is essential if non-designers are to understand this common language which allows us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and economic environment. There is no correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain at present. In the United Kingdom young people can 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. Is it 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.

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 the third strand in Glasgow’s strategy. 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 this strategic vision in the midst of criticism and the doubt which always accompanies 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. We must create an environment in which innovation is seen as challenging and not frightening. Failure must be viewed as a necessary part of the process of change.

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 pathological need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

The fourth strand in Glasgow’s five strands of strategy is participation, 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. All designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

We must bring all of our knowledge, vision, intuition, analytical method, and above all, humanity, to the table when we become partners with the rest of the community in creating a better world than the one we now inhabit.

4 The urban environment – what is Glasgow?

The ancient Egyptians, some three thousand years ago, knew how to sensorially manipulate people. They expressed their cultural values through language, symbols, myths and rituals. These were celebrated in the benign and humane architecture of Thebes and Memphis. In sharp contrast, earlier this century, Albert Speer expressed a different set of cultural values to communicate the values of Hitler’s Germany, re-creating Berlin according to classical mythological values, a domineering, warlike, and monolithic Arian super-city.

However, in Glasgow, as in Thebes and Berlin, design can only reveal values which are already present in our culture. We can’t change culture, at least not quickly, we can only interpret it in new and ingenious ways, revealing things which were hidden and finding new ways of breathing life into old values. This is what has brought about Glasgow’s so-called ‘renaissance’. the city hasn’t essentially changed, it’s just chosen to be viewed from a different angle in a new era.

the second city

I believe it is important that cities, especially post-industrial cities, such as Glasgow, use design as a tool for cultural change. Providing an analytical framework through which to understand the archaeology of the past and describe what the archaeology of the future might be.

Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. The city has a world reputation based on its design and architectural heritage and has always tended to use the tangible products of the creative process to promote its current personality. Glasgow was Great’s Britain’s second city, simultaneously ‘The Workshop of the World’ and ‘The Finest Victorian City in Britain’. The social and economic profit from design-led manufacturing was celebrated through municipal architecture. However, the overall effect of the city’s phenomenal development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has not been cumulative for we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have wished.

Different kinds of cities articulate their culture, their personality, in different ways. Glasgow is often described as a regional capital or second city, unlike Edinburgh or London. They are both first cities or capital cities like Paris, Madrid and New York. They communicate their culture through the design and architecture of their national institutions. Through their rich heritage and history. Through their boulevards and monumental spaces, their skylines, seats of government and national, state resources, like the ballet, gallery and the opera which survive on a pre-designated international repertoire leaving little room for individual cultural expression.

Second cities, many of them like Glasgow, express their culture through activities. They are often post-industrial cities with a less monolithic, often unusual, architectural heritage. They expressed their personalities through the production and movement of the products they manufactured: Glasgow through heavy engineering, ships and locomotives, world trade and the maverick architecture of Mackintosh, Chicago through steel, cars, carcasses and the architecture of Louis Sullivan, Barcelona through its port and the architecture of Gaudi.

As the manufacturing of products in many post-industrial cities continues to decline, second cities are denied the traditional means of expressing their identity through their products and services, never mind their architecture. Except in the sense of industrial heritage, a museum and theme park existence where culture is cut short, frozen in time, a sanitised memory and an impotent servant of the tourist industry.

Creative people, instead of innovating and designing new, innovative ways to create wealth, employment and therefore a positive, new expression of our Glaswegian culture, find themselves relegated to servicing, dressing-up and re-packaging history. We’ve never been so needed or so far from removed from being asked to help.

The current political tactic used by the ‘Eurosceptic’ Conservative Party who have now held power in the United Kingdom for over fifteen years, that of ‘returning to the past’, fails to yield solutions to the problems of the present. We have achieved little in recent times which we can be proud of. Pride and self-respect have been confined to the past – they are now only memories. Politicians align themselves with economists. Seeking solace in the measurable, persuading voters that future success may be found by repeating the past. The future is unknown and innovation is dangerous. Creative people are considered to be unpredictable, mysterious and unquantifiable. Therefore, we are all doomed to failure because the world moves on and it cannot wait for us nor can we use successful solutions from other cultures because there problems are not wholly the same as ours.

Designers, architects and artists have given moribund policy-makers and politicians, people with little creativity, the excuse to avoid creating economic and cultural strategy, preferring the confusion of chaos over order, allowing markets to find their own deteriorating levels of trade and cities to drift in leaderless miasma. What is Britain in the Nineties? We have a Ministry of Heritage instead of a Ministry of Culture. We live in a society which guards against newness and refuses to plan for innovation, variety, complexity and enrichment. Banality, shoddiness, predictability and myopia are the facts of life in Britain, in the Nineties. I suspect Britain is not alone or we would not need this conference.

Recession, design industry’s excesses of the eighties, lack of real understanding of what design is and how it can act as an economic and cultural re-generator have conspired to baffle both the public and the politicians. Designers have scored a dramatic own goal through failing to communicate their worth and learn from their mistakes and we must work quickly to make up lost ground and persuade people to trust and use us once again.

Many of Glasgow’s current problems were created in the City’s recent history when Modernism offered Glasgow and Scotland a different kind of renaissance than it did elsewhere in the world. The civic death of Classicism and rebirth of a new order, heralded by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, or arguably by Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson before him, signalled the beginning of a new century.

The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality. Glasgow had an acknowledged track record in Classicism and boasted many fine buildings. The city was encouraged by it’s recent successful history and it believed it could sustain a place in this brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

As modernism gathered momentum Glasgow laid waste to vast areas of the city, destroying much of its classical heritage while trying to move forwards into a vision of the future the west had mistakenly thought to be utopia. The Gorbals, a vigorous, stone tenemented, working class area south of the River Clyde in which much of the city’s contemporary mythology is rooted, died a notorious success. Demolished in the name of cleanliness, its people, who were the life and soul of Glasgow, were banished from the inner city and condemned to suspended animation in the margins of civilisation, in municipal housing estates such as Easterhouse: a new estate with a population of over thirty thousand people but without shops or public houses or meeting places.

Some of the original population of the old Gorbals were rehoused in new high rise buildings which were erected to replace the old tenemented streets. These provided no space for children to play and no place for adults to socialise. Many of the families, and even some of the buildings, began to deteriorate as the last inhabitants were still moving in to their new homes.

To rehouse its population, Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe, driven by central government economists in London and by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates. Corbusier’s vision of perfect sun-drenched flat roofs and windows shielded by brie soleil were hopelessly inappropriate for Glasgow’s driving rain, grey summers and working class culture. Glasgow, with its international socialism, fell prey to the banality and simplicity of international modernism, which provided an instant, cost-effective solution to the city’s housing problems. Central government’s insatiable demands didn’t allow much time to reflect on whether or not this new environment would be humane as well as hygienic. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of environmental health.

Politicians and designers simply failed to recognise that Glasgow’s socialism was different from anyone else’s. Ironically, it was an architectural co-operative that demonstrated that much of what we were destroying, red sandstone tenements, was useful and necessary to distinguish us from other cities – the gridiron plan of four-storey classical tenement buildings could economically be made sanitary and the city once more become solid and Glaswegian. But Assist Architectural Co-operative couldn’t save the city’s declining population, its manufacturing base or its publishing industries, which fell prey to economics and tactical

Innovation—the politics of change

Facts of life

It is a fact of life that the United Kingdom is governed by politicians who don’t understand or value innovation.

In Britain, in recent times, we have achieved little that we can be proud of: Pride, hope and self-respect have been confined to the past—they are now only memories. Politicians align themselves with economists, seeking solace in the measurable, persuading voters that future success may be found by repeating the past. The future is unknown and innovation is dangerous. Creative people are considered to be unpredictable, mysterious and un-quantifiable. As a nation we are all doomed to failure because the world moves on and it can’t wait for us. Nor can we import successful solutions from other cultures because there problems are not the same as ours.

Designers have given moribund policy-makers, people with little creativity, the excuse to avoid creating economic and cultural strategy, preferring the confusion of chaos over order, allowing markets to find their own deteriorating levels of trade and cities to drift in leaderless miasma. In the United Kingdom in the nineties we have a Ministry of Heritage instead of a Ministry of Culture. We live in a society which guards against newness and refuses to plan for innovation, variety, complexity and enrichment. Banality, shoddiness, predictability and myopia are facts of life.

There is much work for designers to do and we must hope that we haven’t been complacent for too long …

Hope

The creative process, the process of designing, is an excellent ‘tool’ for analysis, synthesis and reconstruction of the world. It reveals the ideologies that motivate us and excite us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing an innovative strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate: familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive. This ‘tool’ should be of use to politicians if designers take time to explain how it may be used.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, must 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.

Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful designers 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. Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful designers must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. We must create an environment in which innovation is seen as challenging and not frightening. Failure must be viewed as a necessary part of the process of change.

We must have hope because we can help and support innovative projects.

Faith

Innovation requires control, process, skill, knowledge and faith. Innovation also demands deep self-knowledge, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how civilisations might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain this strategic vision in the midst of criticism and the doubt which always accompanies change. We must have faith in ourselves.

Designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. The urban environment and the communities who lived there are complex and very fragile. Change must 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.

It is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous products and environments inflicted by designers on an unsuspecting public, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects. All designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one. It is important that citizens are enrolled in the process of change at its outset as they are the ones who shoulder the responsibility for carrying on that process and living most closely with the outcome in the future.

If we, as creative people, can take the time to understand and communicate the social and economic benefits of what it is that we do, to politicians and strategists, encouraging them to use design and creativity as the ‘tool’ for economic regeneration we could help change the world. We must have faith in ourselves if we are to persuade others to have enough faith in design to risk the dangerous opportunities that innovation presents them with.

We must bring all of our knowledge, vision, intuition, analytical method, and above all, humanity, to the table when we become partners with the rest of our community in creating a better world than the one we now inhabit.

Charity

Bureaucracies, by their very definition, maintain the status quo and avoid the risks associated with innovation. Expect nothing from them. Instead it’s important for designers to work in partnership. Partnerships help us understand how our very different worlds work and makes us respect one another. Partnerships and shared risks encourage innovation.

Innovation usually requires funding over a longer period of time because many products are complicated and require extended periods of research, development and testing. Unfortunately, the United Kingdom is now used to ten minute ‘product cycles’ thanks to the Thatcher government’s preoccupation with the stock market. Akio Morito, the then president of Sony warned the UK that it would never again be a powerful manufacturer unless it learned to invest in product development cycles of several years duration. We are a greedy and impatient country who want success today and immediate and profitable return on our investment tomorrow morning.

In Islamic countries it is forbidden for banks to charge interest on money lent, this is regarded as ‘usury’ and it’s a crime. Instead, banks share in the success or failure of each project.

However, designers and innovators aren’t looking for charity, for free money, but we are looking for partners who will help us innovate. Today we live in a world which can’t afford to look only at the financial equation of any project, that’s only a one dimensional picture of the world. We must also count the value of employment and see ‘charity’ as a characteristic which is essential if we are to have a world worth living in, in the next millennium.

Stephano Marzano, the Design Director of Philips said, “Design is a political activity”.

Design, because of its analytical, strategic process and its catalytic ability to invoke change and create wealth, can help identify solutions to the real problems which undermine Britain and much of Europe today. Homelessness, unemployment, drug abuse and lack of cultural identity are all symptoms of more deeply rooted problems which tend to be treated in a tactical and superficial way by politicians.

Countries which are socially and economically successful innovate when designing for manufacturing, the service industries and the built environment. To actively deny a country the right to innovate is to deny its right to exist. What will the the archeologists of tomorrow make of British culture if all they find are Japanese electronic products, American beer bottles and cheap reproductions of seventeenth century English housing types?

Designers working together with manufacturing and service industries create employment, reputation, wealth and the stability and momentum necessary to support innovation. It’s a cyclical process which, once broken, requires huge amounts of energy to repair and re-start. Design provides the analytical framework through which society understands the archaeology of the past and describe what the archaeology of the future might be.

Britain’s future success will depend upon the ability of its creative people to persuade politicians and banks to invest in innovation and work with designers to create a future that doesn’t look like a badly re-worked version of the past.

Why Design Matters

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.

Designers are 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.

Tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

We can be sure 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 and 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 19th and first half of the 20th 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 1930s and the 1960s 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 to 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, in Scotland, we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Hong Kong is also experiencing massive change. 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.

Happy birthday!!!! Hill House

Firstly, I must thank Anne Ellis and The National Trust for Scotland for inviting me here. I have never opened an exhibition before and am honoured to be asked.

It makes me smile to be here because I always expected The National Trust to be immersed in heritage with little thought for contemporary creativity. I never expected The National Trust to so eloquently bridge the gap between the past and the present which they do through this exhibition, “New Perceptions: New Directions”. They have the courage to look to the future in a way Charles Rennie Mackintosh would have been proud of.

Despite having the second oldest and arguably the most distinguished school of design in the world Scotland has only a small design industry and very few places to show contemporary creativity within a national and international context. The perfoming arts and fine arts are well provided for while the Scottish Arts Council perversly fails to recognise architecture and design as ‘artforms’. This is unfortunate as design and architecture are excellent ambassadors for Scotland and the UK because they express culture and have a direct effect on the economy—a point not missed by our present government.

I think it’s great that The National Trust for Scotland has decided on the bold and successful move to include a space for contemporary creativity excellence in an already excellent, creative space created by an internationally recognised Scottish architect and designer. I sincerly hope The Trust continue to develop this example in their other properties.

On behalf of The National Trust for Scotland I would like to thank the European Regional Devolopment Fund, Dunbaronshire Enterprise, Liz Arthur, Bill and Sylvia Potter from Inhouse, David Page from Page and Park, Sir Terence Conran and NTS Studio for their support in making this project possible. I would also like to thank Arata Isosaki for kindly donating his Marilyn chair which pays homage to his love of Mackintosh and to that other 20th Century icon, Marilyn Monroe.

I would personally like to thank Anne Ellis for her tireless energy in supporting design in Scotland when others didn’t or wouldn’t.

I wish you every success with the gallery in the future.

Is Design an International Language?

A world without words

History

From the beginning of time objects have held a special place in the human imagination: the pyramids, sports cars, suits and homewares all help form a tangible picture of who were are, where we come from and what we believe in.

In the ancient world different societies designed different artifacts, different architecture and different clothing and tools. These played an active role in describing different values and different ways of living which gave each society a special, concrete personality.

Because each society was obviously special and different, other societies wanted to trade with them in order to obtain desirable new objects, which were different from their own, and sometimes technologically more advanced. New objects often brought with them new ways of doing things which radically changed how people lived and worked.

This picture remains true today, although we live in a much more complex world with many common values, technologies, needs and market places.

Today’s objects, like those in the ancient world, continue to perform important roles within society; as totems to be prominently placed to act as markers publicly affirming our status in the world, and as talismans which are more discreetly placed to privately reassure us that we have individual personalities. Objects express our ties with society and the values that are important to us.

As the world becomes more complex and more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects within society. Successful buildings or products must be aesthetically functional—they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must perform well—they must feel appropriate or efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, intangible new technologies and help us understand and welcome the future.

Designers

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

Cultural vocabularies

In fact, objects are the vocabulary in an ancient ‘grammatical toolkit’ which is a powerful international language in our eloquent ‘world without words’—a world where buildings and products act as ‘props and backdrops’, helping us to reassuringly order our chaotic dramas in the theatre of everyday life. Objects have many dimensions and there are many ways of analysing what they mean and how we should use them.

Like objects, typography acts as a ‘container for language’ changing it’s meaning in the same way as crystal glasses or plastic cups transform the value of the liquid contained inside. Science has taught us that there is no such thing as a two dimensional object. Even paper and ink have thickness and weight. Books move through time in the same way as we walk through buildings, watch film and videos or look at dancers perform movement scored in Labanotation.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar objects and environments in new ways, viewed from new angles in a new time.

The best definition of culture I have found is “social glue”, the stuff that binds us together and makes society. Because we are all part of culture it’s very difficult to stand aside from it to get a clearer view. There is no such thing as good culture or bad culture. Designers draw upon the aspects of culture which are most appropriate to understand and re-configure for the task in hand.

Designers create in a controlled way through manipulating a ‘cultural vocabulary’ made up of the elements of culture which (according to Umberto Eco and Dr Andy Lowe) includes language, myths, rituals, symbols and values.

They are like the skin of an onion which when peeled back reveal the ideologies—the fundamental driving forces that impel us into action and make us react to the object world around us.

Designers’ solutions, however well controlled, always contain an element of intuition which is unpredictable and uncontrollable. However, the larger part of the designers’ work involves underpinning intuition with analytical method including those offered by the social sciences.

Sensorial vocabularies

The way we create and use objects allows us to control one another and what we choose to disclose or obscure about our own personalities and those who commission or use objects.

The creative process of designing uses all of the human senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight. No matter where we come from, we are all essentially the same and react in approximately the same way to outside stimuli. We have common senses which designers manipulate in order to produce specific responses.

Designers use these sensorial vocabularies to give objects and spaces precise values in different societies. These values vary from culture to culture. In Europe we place a high value on personal objects which are small and heavy, in some Eastern cultures objects which are small and light are given a higher value. These intangible aspects of the designers’ vocabulary are less obvious but often more potent than concrete objects. They frequently produce subliminal responses and can replace the need for more physical and expensively constructed design solutions. Ironically it is smell, not sight, which is the most potent of the senses. Smell has the possibility of transporting us back to our childhood or to a specific place or person.

Sensorial vocabularies are only one element in the designers ‘grammatical toolkit’. In fact, there are many different ‘tools’ which allow designers to change the value of a product or environment, fine tuning it to meet the expectations of the user and the aspirations of the client.

New languages for a new millennium

I have no doubt that design is undoubtedly an international language.

The potential to trade successfully with one another 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. 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 abused.

We live in strange times when objects no longer automatically describe their use. Technology has become seamless and intangible and we must develop new languages if we are to eloquently describe new objects and communicate to users how these new objects should be used.

The best designers solve the problems today’s objects present by giving clues to suspicious users which help describe the purpose of an object. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways whilst simultaneously hinting at what tomorrow’s products might be.

Designers must empower users to understand and welcome the future through education which awakens them to what they already know and react to. Non-designers must play an active role in designing the world rather than feeling impotent and afraid of what tomorrow might hold.

Conversely, designers should not worry about being discarded and replaced by scientists and numerically based engineers. Culture is always changing and constantly needs re-calibration, revaluation and expression as new objects and processes.

Today, new organisations exist which use the familiar creative process but they do not describe themselves ‘designers’. These new organisations are developing ‘multi-dimensional tools’ for the analysis, prediction, synthesis and testing of new products prior to their introduction into the marketplace. They draw upon a mixture of methodologies from the arts and sciences. The ancient alchemy which transformed rocks and stones into magical objects throughout many cultures and many ages is at last being thoroughly investigated and understood so it’s principles can be applied to objects not yet conceived which will help us live comfortably, responsibly and profitably in a new millennium.

GSA, Heads of Departments Conference

What is the design context?

While creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, ‘design’, as we know it, only appeared in the 1830s. ‘Design’ was created by industry in order to meet the needs of industry. The oldest schools of design in the world are here in the UK. The Glasgow School of Art is the second oldest school, founded in 1844, seven years after The Royal College of Art in London.

Design, just like Art or Architecture, means many things to many people, me included. The core definition of design that has underpinned my practice for the past fifteen years remains a broad and inclusive one and has more to do with ‘creativity’ that with ‘design,’ spelt with a capital ‘D’. For me ‘design’ is just another name for the ‘creative process’: an inductive, cyclical and well-documented method of analysing, understanding and manipulating any particular set of circumstances. The information gained as a result of this process is then configured in many ways to produce any number of things: products, buildings or books, but it’s equally likely to result in some form personal expression or in a strategic report.

I believe that the divisions between Art, Architecture and Design are devised to create often useful administration zones, focussed around increasingly complex technical specialisms. But the different disciplines have more in common than they’d often like to admit because all humans are predisposed to be creative, but specialist education makes us more productively creative: more human if you like.

I prefer not to label what I do but, if forced, I refer to myself as a ‘Designer’. My reluctance to name myself isn’t because I’m ashamed of being called a ‘designer’ but because it now only describes a part of what I do. Five years ago I was unambiguously a designer. Today there is no name for what I do, or for the activities of many others like me.

It’s worth looking at the context of Design’s distinguished if rather short history. It describes the progress of the last 170 years and encompasses the mechanisation of craft traditions, the Modernisation of the West, the growth of the motorcar and proliferation electrical appliances, television, radio, sanitary and social housing, branding, advertising and global communications. Design, like almost everything else in the world, struggles to keep pace with the rate of progress.

But the most cataclysmic changes in the design landscape have occurred in the last ten years and they show all the signs of accelerating ever faster into the future. The current digital revolution came upon us so quickly that many of the design professions were forced to change overnight or die.

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. Applemacs 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 Applemac 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 that conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed. But some important things remain – like my sketch books.

In reply to Seona’s question, ‘What is the design context?’ The only context I can vouch for with any certainty is that of continual and accelerating change. Change is the only context that is real and meaningful. No one knows what Design will mean tomorrow, least of all me.

Not only do I find myself working in strange ways and odd times but I find myself working with strangers: now I’m just as likely to work with and employ graduates from the arts, humanities and business schools as I am to employ graduates from design or the fine arts. I’m also much more likely to employ people with specific skills on a job by job basis or to forge informal partnerships with people and organisations that complement my own. I form companies and joint ventures to do specific projects but keep my core business small, light and flexible – because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

So, ‘What do I want from graduates?’

Change can bring with it a feeling of insecurity. In my experience the happiest and most useful graduates are sociable, mature and broadly interested in many things – ‘many things’ can include football, beer, music, skateboarding or fishing – I don’t care, but preferably not golf. In my business you never can tell when apparently useless knowledge, such as how to use a skateboard, suddenly becomes the precondition for doing business.

Graduates must also be flexible because the chances are that they’ll work in many fields other than those that they specialised in. As creative people from many different disciplines work across common software platforms it’s increasingly necessary for graduates to work across traditional disciplines so an appreciation of how others work is practically useful. I especially enjoy working with people who have energy and the confidence to challenge each other, and their clients and superiors, and generally keep life interesting for all of us.

However, I do find that graduates who have real competence in at least one technical skill are more secure and sure of themselves, and it doesn’t really matter what that skill is. Being really good at something, knowing something really well, makes you value the complexity of all that you don’t know. This encourages humility which is, I think, a good thing.

When I talk about technical skills I’m talking about more than software training. Software provides ‘tools’ for creative people but it’s no substitute for learning core skills such as reading, writing, drawing, knowing, understanding that mean we’re in control of our creativity rather than just playing with it. Vocational training is not education and the business of design demands confident, intelligent educated graduates with well-founded, strong opinions and a structured process that underpins their work. The speed of change makes it almost impossible for educators to predict what the world will require of their students so I believe that it’s useful to provide a broad education coupled with specific specialist areas of study – this should sound familiar and it seems to work well.

In my creative industry we continue to use the core skills we were given in art school in new ways. We’ve kept our expertise in particular areas, such as in drawing and in setting type correctly – for the benefit of those clients who appreciate a well-turned line and are willing to pay for our skill and experience.

Text-based knowledge remains, for the time being, the core of our communications system both in the real world and on-line, and English the international language of choice. This worries me because many graduates don’t know how to spell, how to write in sentences and how to set type so that actually communicates. I believe the ability to communicate in spoken and written language is ever more valuable. I continue to exploit my graphic heritage through writing, and publishing, broadcasting and developing critical debate about creativity and how it affects me, because I can and because my education helps me flourish in a changing world. Which is just as well, because the only thing I am sure about is that I won’t be working in the same way for very much longer.

My only certainty is that there is no certainty, which, from a creative point of view, is very exciting. I feel lucky that through my art school education I learned to welcome change, and I feel fortunate that I was given the tools with which to identify reassuring patterns or opportunities, in the apparent chaos that greets me every morning.

In reply to Seona’s question, ‘Does education keep pace with change?’ I would have to say that education has never kept pace with change.

The time that elapsed from the emergence of the first industrial revolution in 1760, to the foundation of the first school of industrial creativity was 77 grimy years.

By the time education had almost caught up with the pace of industrial progress, and its resulting social change, a second wave of industrial revolution was already upon us, it lasted from 1890 to around 1930. By now the RCA and Glasgow School of Art were fully formed, internationally respected institutions well able to work alongside scientific universities and new technical colleges. The results were literally, electrifying.

But this second industrial revolution was very different from the one that preceded it. For instead of being at the mercy of change, an educational framework was already established which enabled strategists to identify, understand and even shape, predict and control the outcome of change. Education had become an integral part of the process of change, maximising its potential. This time round schoolchildren and graduates were equipped with the skills they needed to enter industry and win jobs. Young people were educated to become employees.

Today we’re living through a third industrial revolution that has come to pass more quickly than all but the science fiction writers could have predicted. But this new wave of change is intrinsically different from anything that’s gone before. The previous industrial upheavals expanded through the creation of physical capital: mechanical machines, vast rail, power and manufacturing networks. This third industrial revolution gathers speed in a completely new way: through the creation of invisible, virtual, communications networks and a myriad ever-changing, highly adaptable and creative micro-business made possible by the unprecedented power of digital technologies and microprocessors.

Now creative people have their own powerful and inexpensive machines: their own means of design, production, distribution and promotion through their personal computers. They take what education they can and tailor it to fit, or go on-line or extracurricular to beg, steal and borrow what they need to get by. Therefore, educating students to expect to become employees is no longer a viable option.

Not only has education never kept pace with change it never will unless it stops merely reacting to the needs of industry and starts to proactively and flexibly help individuals and industries capitalise on the creative opportunities created by new technologies.

I believe that the broad education provided by art schools has once again come of age. As well as providing really useful graduates who can go on to become employees or employers. Art schools have an opportunity to return to their roots and work with industry in order to help predict the future. Art schools can help guide industry through change by showing business how to welcome the benefits it brings rather than run scared. Change terrifies businesses but it’s the lifeblood of creativity, innovation and the art school system.

So in reply to Seona’s question, ‘Should the context inform how the school develops?’ I have to say that the context of constant change gives art schools the opportunity, through research, to help industry innovate. Art schools should be in the driving seat of change, not locked in the luggage compartment.

So, where is education succeeding?

There’s a lot about education that’s right but there’s still a lot that’s wrong and the biggest problem education has is in making government understand the rate at which industry is changing. History and common sense tell us that industry must be prepared if it is to responsibly exploit the potential wealth brought about by this latest industrial revolution. And preparation means education.

While Britain may have written the textbook on design education, and be home to some of the finest design talent in the world, it’s our lucky history rather than our scrupulous planning that now place us in our excellent position. And we’re going to have to do an awful lot more, an awful lot more quickly if British Business is to inherit the share of the creative action that it so richly deserves.

The UK is widely acknowledged as the world’s creative capital, on par with the United States (but don’t take my work for it, read the Government’s and Design Council’s published research). However, I believe we’re living on a creative legacy that desperately needs replenishing because it’s in danger of becoming depleted.

Our school curriculum has barely changed since the last industrial revolution. School-leavers still expect to be employees rather than employers. Art, design and technical drawing are still what you do if you can’t do anything else. Creativity remains an option rather than a national obligation.

We must educate businesses to work in partnership with designers and continue to educate designers to think of their work in business terms. Design is a great medium for transferring technology between products and services.

If Business is to grow through creativity then we must educate more designers to ever-higher levels of competence. Business can help designers to discover new ways of validating their work. Because if the risk associated with intuition can’t be predicted, Business will suffer.

Design continues to add quantifiable value to Business through the creation of intellectual capital: the products and brands that are expressed as tangible assets on the balance sheet. Customers understand and expect to pay for design and the added value of having their personalities and values reflected in the products and services they choose to buy.

In the future a product, a process, a service or a building will not be defined only by its apparent form or performance but by its latent market potential. The potential size of a market will be huge, with a similar associated risk: the cost of opportunity will therefore be vast and the rewards for success bigger still. With the support of business, designers will predict and control the necessary risk associated with all innovation.

We now talk about design within the context of the ‘creative industries’, but creativity is much more than just another industry, it’s an integral part of almost every successful industry.

170 years ago art schools were created to work with Industry. Today industry and creativity need each other as never before. We should build on our long relationship and get creativity further into industry, get industrial investment in creativity and creative education, because in tomorrow’s world creativity will be our greatest natural resource, our primary industry and our richest national asset. Tomorrow must be a bright place for art schools, if it’s not business and society will suffer.

Grasping the Creative Agenda

First of all must decide what is the creative agenda? What is to be done?

I believe that the focus of this agenda must be to commercialise Scottish creativity and leverage Scottish creative heritage. By this I mean our heritage of innovation, our unique system of creative education and the understanding, exploitation and communication of the special conditions within the Scottish environment that continues to allow us to be one of the most creative places on earth.

Thanks to technological revolution ‘Creativity’ is now on the ‘to do’ list of almost every other major country. Some of the most unlikely countries: Singapore and Northern Ireland have already made creativity a national priority because they understand that it makes cash and delivers many additional social and cultural benefits. Therefore we must act quickly. We’ve been living off our creative heritage and the ad-hoc contributions of creative people and institutions with no plan and little investment.

I believe that we only grasp the creative agenda through active ownership of that agenda. This means taking the decision to value, and be seen to value, Scottish commercial creativity in all its manifestations: in the sciences, arts and technologies—working across disciplines and concentrating on the connections between these areas of activity which is a Scottish creative characteristic.

It means removing educational, economic and cultural barriers to commercial creativity.

It means actively actively supporting commercial creativity rather than cottage crafts. And it means supporting creativity in order to allow it to fertilise our business sector and the economy rather dismissing for being too risky strange or new.

It means actively supporting creativity far beyond the areas of activity that can be protected by current intellectual property laws (as these offer only limited opportunities—and don’t include many aspects of the service and other industries).

It means actively supporting new ways of working and the development of entirely new types of business predicated on the creation and exploitation of new knowledge, processes, products and services.

My agenda would consist of 3 tactical actions and 3 strategic goals.

Tactical actions include:

Supporting growth of Scottish creative businesses and ensuring that they have a worthwhile future in Scotland.

Supporting leading-edge creative professional practice through industry-led education, life long learning and research.

Supporting the creation of new knowledge and innovative business through industry-led research.

Strategic actions include:

Unlocking the potential of Scotland’s unique creative heritage.

Promoting Scotland as the world’s most creative nation and the world’s Research & Development department.

Planning to allow Scotland to become the thinking behind many of the world’s biggest brands.

(Scotland is about creative thinking and creative doing.)

Tactical actions—further details

Supporting the growth of Scottish creative businesses and ensuring that they have a worthwhile future in Scotland.

– infrastructure & networks
– support for technology
– support for R&D
– educated employees
– support for capitalisation/commercialisation/location

Supporting leading-edge creative professional practice through industry-led education, life long learning and research.

– new educational partnerships (support for businesses as educational resource)
– industry-led research

Supporting the creation of new knowledge and innovative business through industry-led research.

– new industry-led research partnerships
– incentives for businesses to invest in R&D
– support for business to become incubators
– support for commercialisation of industry-led research & pilot projects

Strategic actions—further details

Unlocking the potential of Scotland’s unique creative heritage.

– Communicate, educate and celebrate creative legacy, nationally and internationally—tell new and surprising stories

Promoting Scotland as the world’s most creative nation and the world’s Research & Development department.

– internationally and to all sectors, including cultural and business sectors
– through association with the best people/businesses in the world

Planning to allow Scotland to become the thinking behind many of the world’s biggest brands.

– through actively supporting the creation of new business and cultural relationships

(Scotland is about creative thinking and creative doing.)