Graduation Speech

Thank you Seona, for inviting me to speak today. It’s a very great honour to be here, and to share the day with such a large number of people with so much creative potential, and their families and friends.

It’s exactly nineteen years since I last attended a graduation ceremony, and that was my own. But this is the very first time I’ve worn my academic gown: now I feel ready for it, and I like the idea of it. It’s nice to know, at last, what colours I have on my hood – I always wondered who decided what colour went with what qualification, and whether it was dictated by ancient laws or simply by a chance collision of colour and comptroller.

Either way, graduation is a strange phenomenon. It’s the only ceremony that we have at Glasgow School of Art. In fact, the School could be said to have an environment that’s largely ceremony and exam-free. Because of this it can be hard for people on the outside, our friends and families, to understand exactly what we do, how the School works and just how we achieve such high levels of success year after year.

Our recipe (and it’s an original and very old Scottish recipe) is one of immersive education where dedicated staff support learning and continuous assessment within a studio environment. The studio is the cornerstone of our system: it’s a special place where students learn from, and with, each other. It’s also the place where staff and students unerringly, relentlessly and totally, bend to the task of producing professional creative people. Unlike training, education can’t be forced on the uncooperative, it requires full participation and consent. There is no opportunity to miss classes or cram for exams, because those four, or more, long years are a huge exam and an enormous team effort.

Like many of you here today, I found coming out of the other end of Glasgow School of Art exhausting, inspiring and liberating. I was as ready as ever I could have been, when I was unleashed from Garnethill. Like some of you, I was the first person in my family to enter Further Education. But while I approached it as a great adventure, it was threatening and uncharted territory for my Mum and Dad. They had lived through the second world war and quite literally fought so that I could be educated. Because of people like them I could have studied geography, biology or politics, but my art teacher, Kate Thomson, intervened and told me, in absolutely positive terms, that I could forget about all of that, because I was going to Glasgow School of Art.

I was very lucky to have a teacher who recognised my potential and who helped me to make the right decision, but it was hard for my parents to know how to help me, what to expect or how to behave. While I was still at school my father would take me to and from life-drawing classes. While he had an unshakeable belief in the value of education, he doggedly refused to look at my work: he simply didn’t know how to deal with it, or with me. While my parents took unspoken pride in my continuing education and supported me as best they could, they harboured secret terrors about what happens in art schools. These were occasionally but ferociously expressed: the, “you’re-not-going-to-art school-if-you’re-going-to-do-stuff-like-that”, while watching a TV documentary on Picasso, stays with me and is the reason I continue to promote understanding of creativity and the increasingly huge contribution creative people make to our economy, as well as our culture.

In addition to teaching me to see, understand, and be in control of much of my life, Glasgow School of Art has given me many of the things I value most: the ability to be productively creative – to take pleasure in, and responsibility for, making something from nothing – which is the basis of all wealth creation and every form of civilisation; it gave me confidence in my abilities, to know my strengths, my weaknesses and my limits, and to be able to make the most of what I have, through hard work and tenacity; it made me respect other people and their ideas, the value of team working and the opinions of my peers; the School gave me the stamina and optimism to seek ever better solutions through creating new knowledge and new ways of working; it taught me to be brave and challenging and encouraged me to find new quests that continue to test and stretch me, my colleagues and my clients; it taught me to feel secure in the knowledge that creativity is the limitless resource at the centre of my life and that it can’t be taken from me, the School has also given me the unshakeable belief that my life is worthwhile and that I, like you, can make a difference.

The School did so much more than educate me and help me to grow up, on a more secular level, it was also a dating agency and business incubator. Through it I met my partner and co-conspirator of twenty years: Ross Hunter, the architect with whom I created our eighteen year old business; which now gives us, and our colleagues, secure, high-quality employment. Though I still lay the blame for setting-up my business fairly and squarely on my Father, who would have been just as content if I had become a secondary school teacher, so I would have a secure job. While well-meaning, the image he conjured up: that of returning to the world before art school, worried me so profoundly that I resolved to haul myself by the scuff of the neck into a future constructed from all that I had learned. With the support of the School, I founded a business in my Masters year, and if there are lessons to be learned from my experience they would be, listen to others but live your life; the skills that you have been given will help you turn your dreams into realities, if you work hard and believe in yourself, and never, NEVER, take ‘no’ for an answer.

The decision to study at art school can be difficult for families and friends but it’s amazing to see the effect of the School on the people we love. Education is powerful, and at its best it’s transformational and magical. I have a feeling that today’s ceremony is as much an acknowledgement of all of the unconditional support we receive as we learn and grow, as it is a celebration of what we and our tutors have achieved.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the closer you get to graduating and achieving your four or five-year goals, the less important these goals become. That’s when you know that you’ve been educated: it’s a process that starts and never stops and you will already have moved on to a new stage in your life with new challenges.

That is why, all those years ago, I didn’t wear my academic gown.

Good Buy Girl

Museum collection with attitude, how we live today 100 years hence.

Objects give clues as to how we live, design is tool for synthesis and analysis of the world.

Terence asked me to choose items which described how I lived not necessarily how I aspired to live—it’s very personal and should be. It’s not about Italian furniture and white carpets. It’s about what I choose to buy in the supermarket or the bar. How I spend my spare time and how I travel.

Ducati 916—technology, packaging—marriage of functional aesthetics and technological performance. Design is control, the creative process of ordering chaos using a sensorial vocabulary which uses all of the senses, not only the visual. Talk about bike: sound, smell, sensation. smallness, compactness and personality.

Tactel knickers—something comfy to ride the bike in. Du Pont + M&S (Traacy Hodgeson) technological collaboration to produce a fabric before it became Busby Berkely style big knickers.

Playtex Wonderbra—changing female form according to an ephemeral ‘style’. Technological achievement which reminded me of Eiffel who designed ladies suspenders, 3 million ‘Wonderbras’ are sold worldwide every year including 30,000 in the UK every week. The bra has 46 separate parts and 26 different processes in it’s construction.

Design articulates culture through language, symbols, rituals, myths and values.

Theatre, props and backdrops against which we play out the drama of everyday life.

Type as a ‘container for language’’ which changes it’s shape and value like water changes shape and value according to whether it’s poured into a crystal glass or a plastic container. It’s not what you say but how you say it.

The future of creativity

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to speak at the Royal Museum, and thank you for coming along.

I aim to talk first and show some slides before letting you ask questions if you want to.

About six months ago I was called by the Museum and asked to give a title for my talk. Because I was writing a book about creativity at the time I thought it might be useful to explore some of my observations and ideas during this lecture.

So, I’ll try and start at the beginning.

Some people think creativity is primarily the property of artists. It’s not. Creativity is something we’re all born with. It’s our most common natural resource and the thing that separates us from the animals. We’re all creative even if we think we’re not, even if we’re embarrassed or confused by what it means to be creative. We’re all interested in what creativity can do for us, how it can enhance our lives in some form or other; whether it manifests itself as fashion, painting, writing, a new software programme, new medicine, new architecture or some other kind of innovative invention or everyday activity like how you design your garden or wear your clothes and hair.

But the really interesting thing about creativity is that it’s nothing new, it’s as old as the human species.

Artists and designers, people who create professionally are taught to be creatively productive through underpinning their intuition with methodologies that are begged, borrowed and stolen from other arts and sciences. Sometimes artists use more intuition than methodology than designers but not always. The only things that separate artists, designers and architects are the labels we give ourselves. Artists don’t have a monopoly on creativity any more so than anyone else, although their agents would often have us believe otherwise. Likewise, they’re no more or less likely to sell their work than other creative professionals.

The creative process, the cyclical method through which we create, test and refine the specification for new and better things is common to all of us and professionally practised by scientists, architects, engineers, designers and artists. However you like to be labelled, whether as a designer of theatre sets or tram sheds or books, you go about the process of having and refining your ideas in exactly the same way as the next person, before applying the arcane knowledge that defines your specific technical discipline. Through this process of conceiving and refining our best ideas and making new things we perpetually re-order the world, remodel civilisation and making it contemporary in order to reflect our changing attitudes, technologies and beliefs.

While we’re all born with the potential to be creative we often have the confidence to do what comes naturally knocked out of us at an early age by the social or cultural pressure to conform or by schools and universities that care more about training and exam results than real education.

Some countries sustain and encourage creativity better than others while others are scared of it and try to hide it. Many of the Pacific rim countries have problems encouraging creativity because they have problems such as ‘face’ that makes it almost impossible for young people or students to challenge accepted ways of doing things without causing offence to their elders and teachers. They’re often hybrid countries lacking cultural diversity and productive conflict, unlike our mongrel society that thrives on constructive conflict.

One country that’s particularly renowned for innovation is the US. The US is interesting because when it was settled just over three hundred years ago it had no indigenous industry compared with Europe and the rest of the civilised world. But in a very short time the US has come to be the most economically powerful nation in the world and it continues to dominate the stock exchanges with new hi-tech industries. The US is good at taking risks and supporting failure because it’s impossible to succeed without failing sometimes. There’s nothing worth gaining that doesn’t involve an element of risk, in fact one Chinese definition of ‘risk’ is “dangerous opportunity”.

While the US has been quick to use patent law to own ideas and turn them into businesses and cash, it’s important to note that the another country known for creativity and it’s ‘risk averse’ lack of confidence to capitalise on it’s creative potential, is Scotland.

Scotland has a distinguished history of cultural and scientific innovation. It has enjoyed impossible challenges and remains unfazed by larger competitors, like the Nat West Bank and is largely tolerant of new or unconventional ideas. Scotland also has a long and distinguished history in providing world class education—which is a vital resource in helping to control and transform raw creativity into useful products, processes and services. It’s a naturally cosmopolitan place that suspects London may not in fact be the centre of the universe. Scotland has many idiosyncratic attitudes that are useful in a quickly changing world that’s immersed in media, where nothing is what it appears to be. That’s why I like living and working here.

I call myself a designer because I don’t know how else to describe what I do. However I realise that although it’s a comparatively new job description it’s already well past it’s sell-by-date.

Designers of many different descriptions create the architecture and objects that form the props and the backdrops that make up the vast stage on which we enact the mundane drama of everyday life.

But design is just the most recent term for someone who controls the shape of the man-made world in order to surreptitiously encourage and manipulate others to behave in predictable ways. Throughout history kings, priest, scribes, architects and scientists; powerful people who are literate in written, drawn, visual and sensorial languages have ordered the world and created civilisation from a chaos of dust and rituals. They’ve learned how to control the shape of the man-made world ever since we first emerged from caves and began to separate ourselves from the natural world. Because, fundamentally, design is about control.

Until recently it’s been hard to understand the histories and practices of many disparate creative professions. But the development of new technologies: software, hardware and common languages now allow us to collaborate across disciplines and pool all the knowledge we’ve accumulated throughout history in our biggest library ever.

Through the World Wide Web, and The Internet, we have access to a growing reservoir of knowledge to make invisible tools that shape and control the man-made and now the natural world too.

We now have the power to design with molecular depth and global breadth. Everything we have dreamed of is probable, and possible. We try to reconcile our innate creativity and therefore our biological addiction to progress with the cataclysmic potential of our new inventions … while our eyes still have something solid to focus upon and laws to protect us from the things we make, if indeed such laws exist …

I explore the future of creativity through my practise, though teaching and through researching and writing a book for Cassell and a television series for BBC2. In order to structure my thoughts I’ve followed the evolution of common objects demonstrating how our most fundamental human condition is threatened in unprecedented and ironic ways.

The six objects I use are the chair, the wheel, the word, the home, the body and the plan. Chairs are about hierarchies and order, words are about power, homes are about context and place, bodies are about nature and ideals and plans are about describing, owning and exploiting ideas.

Chairs

Before we can understand the sweeping changes happening in a world we’ve made for ourselves we first have to understand the vital role objects play in our lives. Chairs are interesting because we think we use them for sitting on when in fact we use them to order society and communicate with one another.

We don’t need chairs to sit down; we can sit on the ground. But, chairs, like all objects, say something more that words can about who we are and what we believe in. How we sit, publicly and privately, and what we sit on, defines our place in the home, the workplace and society.

Objects help us dramatise and ritualise our lives: HRH The Queen rules from a throne while Beavis and Butthead snigger on their sofa. The layout of chairs in parliament describes the shape of government while the Speaker’s chair controls, the umpire’s chair commands, the ejector seat explodes and the electric chair makes us sit up straight, civilising us while it kills us using clean modern power.

Chairs are packages of information; three-dimensional sentences in an object language. Through them, and with all of our other objects, we control how we communicate through the common vocabulary of our senses and the varying elements of culture: the languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values that we use to uphold and protect our fundamental values; our ideologies. As a general rule, we need to slow down and become more suspicious of how we react to the man-made things around us. We’re all unconscious experts, instinctively rearranging our furniture. Only by slowing down and questioning our actions will we learn to understand and control them.

Words

Before we learned to read and write we were the original and the only containers for our words. Like books we were bound in skin and had a spine, we altered our facial expressions and gestures and modulated the tone, volume and accent of our voices in order to change the meaning of our words.

Written and printed words physically represent us and our spoken language because typography ‘contains’ information in much the same way as objects.

In just this way typography acts as a ‘container’ for language, changing its meaning and value, like water when poured into a crystal glass or a plastic bucket. What we say is often less important than how we say it.

Throughout history the ability to read and write conferred power on the author, power over those who couldn’t read and write. But now new digital technologies threaten us and our words with a new totalitarian dark age; a time where more technology means less understanding and control of what we say and how we say it.

While personal computers appear to offer us the freedom of speech that at last delivers us from the endless tyranny of professional scribes, kings, clerics and compositors. Instead, they make us dependent on the private companies and governments that control invisible, global technologies: the search engines, the telecommunications carriers, the hardware and the software that allows us to speak and write in the belief that what we say is our own private property. It’s not.

For, ever since we first used sticks to write in mud we’ve fought to control the techniques and technologies of writing in all its different forms, whether as written or drawn thoughts and words, images, objects or other types of coded communication. We’ve controlled others with words through casting spells, preaching gospels, making laws and the constitutions of companies and countries. Words remain forever synonymous with power. From writing’s humble origins 8,000 years ago in Mesopotamia to the modern technologies of Monotype, Murdoch and Microsoft, we continue to fight to control the shape of our words and our world but we’re losing the battle and Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch are winning.

Wheels

“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine; from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is non-corporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.”
Milan Kundera, Slowness, Faber and Faber, London, 1995

Speed is our ecstasy and our most elementary human addiction.

Religion and philosophy quickly recognised the wheel’s paradoxical potential as a model of both the divine and secular worlds. The irony of moving forward while apparently standing still appears to be miraculous and reveals the mathematical perfection of a designed universe, presumably constructed by a higher intelligence; a god who created and designed. The wheel came to represent the universe and all that it contained, in perfect equilibrium. Ironically, the wheel also describes the futility of our own mundane lives, as we appear to stand still while everything whirls in circles around us, evading our grasp and our understanding. The wheel is also a model of stasis and perpetual change, efficiently transferring energy from one plane to another, becoming at once a religious meditation and an ecstasy of technical perfection; like a well-greased prayer machine.

The wheel, like our innate creativity, is a natural thing: the revolution of the planets and the cyclical changing of the seasons, so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever break our addiction to reinvention and need for speed and change. We couldn’t get off the technological treadmill even if we wanted to because wheels give us what we naturally crave. The last time we reinvented the wheel it gave us the car and the motorway, suburbia and pollution. Every time we reinvent wheels they change our world in ways we can’t predict or control. But we must try to control our impetuous creativity before our cleverness accidentally catapults us into a new age of invisibile technologies and immeasurable power to creative, with often unpredictable results.

Our appetite for speed and the next new thing has compelled the arts and sciences to collaborate on the production of tomorrow’s world. After more than two hundred years of separate development, the technical revolution has caused the arts and mathematician to converge and create new and better things using ‘rapid-prototyping’, ‘fast-tracking’ and ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing methods. But if we’re not careful we may create the future we’ve always dreamed of, a place of supernatural speed that isn’t subject to gravity, where things have no tangible form unless we choose to give them one. The allure of the accelerating wheel has already moved us further and faster towards a seamless and weightless future that we were somehow destined to create but paradoxically can’t yet inhabit.

Homes

There’s no place like home because home is the unique set of circumstances that make each of us special and different. Home is part of our identity, helping us to understand who we are in relation to the rest of the world.

But few of us can afford to live the way we want to. Instead we allow ourselves to be commercially exploited and socially engineered in the mistaken belief that in return we get a modern standard of living.

House builders, like other manufacturers, have systemised the production of homes to appeal to the broadest range of customers in many locations for financial profit. To create the illusion of choice homes are composed of a kit of cosmetic parts that give the impression of different architectural styles.

Home decoration industries work with house builders to provide a range of custom products with which we personalise our homes. They even encourage us to discard our real lives and buy a whole new lifestyle package.

Magazines and television programmes demand we recreate someone else’s idea of home in our own private space. We’re pushed to choose Roman style, or Provencal, anything but our own authentic, and often unstylish, cultural experiences. It’s as if we’d conspired to turn the clock back to a different times and places, even if they never really existed. Each new season brings new colours, curtains and references to other countries and times in the endless quest to be seen to be fashionably at home.

Private industries have snatched our private space and stopped us creating things without their help. Even our amateur creativity has been exploited and commercialised by DIY; but we don’t do it for ourselves, we do it because we’re told to open our front doors and turn our private spaces into a lucrative public show.

Corporations and governments have conspired to ensure that we have little control over how we live and what we make. Increased patenting of original ideas and the ownership of technologies has professionalised the creative process, relegating our ‘amateur’ creativity to a kind of recreational therapy; a vestigial part of the thing that once civilised us. We’re being stripped of our creativity and reduced to the status of animals.

Loss of our private space and our creativity damages both our personal and our national identities as new global companies destroy the local things that make our products and services visible and desirable in global markets. Instead of being a robust and durable foundation, home is fast becoming a fragile and endangered place as the commodification of our national and regional cultures continues.

Home is the benchmark against which we measure and judge all other cultures and places. If we lose this unique reference we limit our ability to design successful homes and economies in the future, and we’re in danger of seriously losing the place.

Bodies

Our attitudes to our bodies continue to change as we gradually extract ourselves from nature and decide how we’d like to look rather than putting up with what we were given at birth.

As we went about process of constructing our world we felt naturally inclined to improve and control nature. But we quickly realised that we too were natural and therefore imperfect. We were in no fit state to decide what was good or bad or what shape the ‘ideal’ human should be. Someone else had to help us make that decision, preferably someone with an overview who understood the project, who’d maybe had a hand in our construction and wanted a second shot at getting it just right.

Through a process of flawed argument that must have borne a blasphemous resemblance to the Darwinian theory of natural selection, we came to believe that god was an eternally fit, youngish man.

The resulting model was a collection of butcher’s prime cuts; an amalgamation of carefully selected ‘aesthetic’ exemplars defining the optimum condition of our various body parts. This new ideal bore ironic similarity to our own creation, except that we were flawed, a catalogue of errors; happy or not so happy natural accidents brought about by injudicious liaisons and a series of mistakes in the transcription of our genetic code. We hoped that in time these errors would be put right.

But diversity and variety are facts of our species and quite possibly the reason we’re still here today. Instead of regarding differences as a valuable part of being human we persist in pursuing unrealistic ideals with limited results and short-term gains.

Today’s cosmetic surgeons continue to emulate the aesthetic lines of the Vitruvian Golden Mean—the Classical ideal in living flesh, as they go about their daily business of correcting nature’s faults or helping us conform to one impossible ideal of beauty that encircles the globe.

Today, science allows us to venture far beyond the crude tailoring of living flesh. They believe that the possible solution to ugliness and ageing lies within the human body itself. The genes and proteins produced in our own bodies will be adapted to become the drugs of the future. They will be engineered to trigger growth and repair in area of our bodies that are dying through old age or sickness, or to switch off growth in cell growing too rapidly or abnormally as they do in some cancers. Many biotechnologists believe there’s not a cell in the body that couldn’t do with tweaking to optimise its performance, eventually allowing us to cure the condition known as ageing.

Our bodies are the physical starting point for almost everything we make; this means we use them to redefine the scale and proportion of the whole shooting match, from buildings to theme parks and golf clubs. In this way we ensure that our manufactured goods work for most of us most of the time, both physically and ideologically.

But what shape the world will be if we stop being ugly, old or individually different?

Plans

In the past, if we wanted to know how something worked we could draw it, or physically take it apart then put it back together again. But drawing or dismantling won’t help us understand the inner workings of a television or a mobile phone because modern machines use components too small for our eyes to see, or invisible technologies we can’t detect with our senses. In order to understand how these things work we need specialist tools and professional help. In fact we’d probably need a whole group of technical advisors because it’s unlikely that any one person could explain the detailed parts and processes of even a humble fax machine.

Designing something was once a straightforward process that required simple tools and little investment. But since the industrial revolution increased mechanisation and global markets, the rise of manufacturing conglomerates and increased legislation make it almost impossible for the creative amateur or lone inventor to develop an idea and take it to the marketplace while still retaining ownership the original idea.

Today teams of people with different skills design new products using special software ‘tools’ that allow them to see, manipulate, plan and sometimes prototype intangible components. The configuration of the software and its interface; the bit that allows us to perceive invisible things ‘face to face’ are beginning to have an acute impact on the tangible appearance of finished products.

As products continue to lose physical mass and weight we grow increasingly dependent on the intervention of software and machines to render the intangible tangible and give us a grip on the invisible stuff we use to make them. However in the race to plan new products with mega and nanotechnological tools, and in many diverse dimensions, it’s easy to overlook our human condition and our most basic needs. So it’s not surprising that many of the things we make will exhibit an unprecedented aesthetic. In fact, if God is in the details of things we make, he must be a machine determined to diminish our human condition and alienate us from a world so perfectly constructed we no longer recognise any trace of ourselves in it.

Most of us accept that it’s only a matter of time before the functions of many products are integrated within our bodies. While we’ll no longer be able to blame each other for losing the car keys, we’ll only have ourselves to blame for losing our genius to speak through object, without using words and all of the silent intelligence that words can’t express.

The creative cycle moves forever onwards without end, deepening our knowledge while revealing the depth of our ignorance, but all the time providing us with the means to die for our ideals or live with the truth of our imperfections, and who knows what tomorrow may bring.

Patent laws, originally created protect the invention of machines during the industrial revolution, are now applied to new biotechnological inventions, with profound results.

Our own creativity and our private spaces have already been commercialised. Now nature is being named and claimed. It’s now possible to own the blueprint for a living organism. Our world is being privatised and our access to it controlled for commercial gain by a minority of global organisations that transcend geographical boundaries and national legislation. They can afford to identify and protect the knowledge they own.

“Wherever there is no vision the people perish.”
Bible, Hebrews

It seems the only vision of our future is a corporate commercial vision, and that’s no vision at all.

So, what can we do to protect our creativity?

The start of a new millennium is a good a time to rediscover what we’ve forgotten or taken for granted. To learn how we can apply our ancient knowledge help understand and control the shape of tomorrow. Because in tomorrow’s world the gap between our stone age bodies and space age aspirations has widened as our biological destiny to reinvent the wheel catapults us into a new age of invisibility that has no obvious tangible shape or conclusion.

Our addiction to speed allows technology to transcend laws designed to protect us, our ideas and our genetic inheritance. Law has already decreed that we don’t even own our genetic material or our bodies. Computers have become patenting machines, embedding our ideas in someone else’s software and turning public creativity into private profit.

In this new age of invisibility, intangible laws and corporate confederacy reduce us to the status of animals; a resource to be used. The natural creative legacy that shaped our ideas and plans is now named, owned and assigned to others through patent laws. But creativity is no longer at the centre of human civilisation, neither is the free exchange of ideas. Ownership is everything.

But we can stop ourselves from getting lost in the future by learning how we civilised ourselves the first time round. We can re-learn lost knowledge and learn how yesterday’s powerful creators shaped their world. Before we rush to recreate a tomorrow’s world we must pause and understand the changes happening around us, and to us, today.

Design has always been about controlling creativity. But what shape will tomorrow’s world be if we don’t resist the temptation to change the very thing that gave it scale, shape and variety in the first place: ourselves?

We must fight for our right to create tomorrow’s world, or it will be created for us, not by us. And the most valuable things at stake are our genetic legacy and our most basic human birthright: our creativity.

I’ve become more interested in the changing cultural and economic values of creativity as I’ve seen my life, my environment and the way in which I work change beyond belief. Many of my assumptions about the future of creativity are directly based on my experiences of working in Graven Images and in collaboration with other creative organisations, here and abroad.

* Established 1985 on graduation from GSA with Ross Hunter

* multi-disciplinary, employing 15 people in Glasgow, including musicians and film-makers, architects, interior and graphic designers

* Scottish base for international company, but not nationalistic

* important to give tangible shape to contemporary life in Scotland and make ourselves visible in the European and global marketplace

* interest in culture and identity and irritated by the puerile polar visions of Scotland that permeates tourism and the media: tartan or Trainspotting, at one point we founded a range of simple furnishings with retailer Nice House called Home Produce—to show what we could produce locally, we called our brand Tartanalia

* gradually more clients in throughout the UK, more than half of work comes from London

* frustration at general lack of ambition in Scotland and ability to think outside of one tiny country

* frustration at lack of confidence and lack of intellectual base in design professions who’re too happy with superficial style and less concerned with why things work. We like scientists and technology and try to create opportunities to work with new people and learn new things

* met Larry Keeley at Doblin Group in Chicago, asked if we were allied to academic institutions—we are because that’s how we remain intelligent and relevant, straddle spaces between specialisms, arts and sciences etc because cross disciplinary collaboration is what the future is about

Creative Corporate Control

Creative Corporate Control

Organisations, like people they have personalities. Identities whether corporate or personal are complex and highly influential. In this presentatoin we will explain what corporate identity is, indicate why it is so important, examine why it is very difficult to create and finally demonstrate why it must be design rather agency driven.

What is corporate identity?

Corporate identity is a description of the very soul and ideology of an organisation. Definitions of corporate identity abound, but Bernstein (1984) argues that corporate identity is a planned assembly of visual cues by which the audience can recognise the company and discriminate one company from another and which may be used to represent or symbolise the company.

It has been fashionable in the west to ridicule corporate identity as does Garland (1992):-

“Lets face it corporate identity is a worn-out case: a puffed up monstrosity that’s been oversold, overpriced and overrated.”

Garland goes on to say that corporate identity was born the 1940s in the US.

Both these attitudes are incorrect and misleading. In fact Eygptologists could point out that all the pharos fromKing Zoser to Ramses III have not only embraced corporate identity but have used the symbol of the bee honey to represent royalty. The bee is a wonderfully benign and positive symbol. It is both a provider and protector.

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As we will demonstrate later all the religions of the world have widely adopted the use of various corporate identities.

Even a brief examination of the historical perspective of corporate identity reveals that through out time all human activities, whether be the sacred , governmental or profane, have been very widely used. Before the invention of money each sovereign ruler used the seal to embody his power, authority and continuity. When money came into use corporate identity ran riot.

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It has not looked back since.

Why is corporate identity so important?

Golzen (1988) points out that corporate identity is an expression of the core values, just as personal identity or personality is the core of the person. When corporate identity works, it is a reflective mirror image of the organisation. When it fails it can be like an obsequious flatterer who only reveals what he thinks you will like to see but eventually will be disastrous.

It is common mistake to think of corporate identity exclusively in terms a graphic identity. It should also embody the three dimensional design of architecture.

Why is corporate identity so difficult create?

The reason why corporate identity is so difficult to create is because of the uniqueness of all organisations. As Olins (1989) points out:-

“Every organisation is unique, and the identity must spring from the organisations own roots, its personality, its strengths and weaknesses.”

The only way to truthfully to discover and portray an organisation’s corporate identity is to penetrate its ideologies. To be able to this a detailed understanding of the organisation culture is vital.

Culture is one of those words which every one uses be is rarely fully understood. Even academics have great difficulty in coming to terms with its definition. Wuthnow (1984) complains of its trivilalisation by it being often refered to as that residual realm left over after all other forms of observational behaviour have been removed. Because culture is largely intangible it can not be measured, it can only be interpreted. Cultural traits are qualitative by nature, and as such need to be decoded, interpreted and explained in order that it may be understood. Van Mannen (1984) and Schein (1986) argue that culture should be seen as a set of solutions to the key problem of survival that all organisations have to grapple with; the problem of establishing and maintaining equilibrium between its internal integration and its external survival.

This makes very difficult for the corporate identity consultant because if the client organisation already achieving its objectives it makes it vertually is impossible for this organisation to truthfully explain its own ideologies. The reason for this is due to the fact that when problems are solved they not kept in our immediate consciousness. Instead they pushed back into the individual and corporate subconscious. If the equilibrium problem has been solved there is no need to worry about it or analysis it. It becomes entirely intuitive. Deal & Kennedy (1982) identity four occasions when the establishment of a corporate identity is especially vital:-

(a) when there are major external environmental

changes happening

(b) when organisations find themselves in a highly

competitive market conditions

(c) when the organisation is considered to be

either mediocre or poor

(d) when the organisation is on the threshold of

becoming much larger in size

All of these instances are examples of imbalance between the organisations need for internal integration and external survival.

Anthropologists have known for decades that the culture of an organisation is the linchpin of survival of both individuals and organisations themselves. The core of any culture is its ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which impel people and organisations into action. 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. Pettigrew (1979) there are five sequential layers through which one has to penetrate before an understanding of the corporate ideologies are reached; language, semiotics, myths, beliefs and rituals.

Language

Language is more than vocabulary, it is an enabling mechanism which explains why and how people behave. The following are examples of this perspective of culture:-

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Semiotics

The language of signs has been described by Eco (1984) as comprising of three main categories of signs; symbols, ikons and indexes. This is an important distinction because creators of corporate identities should be fully aware of the different type of usage and impact the three forms of signs can have.

Symbols

These are abstract manifestations of a particular reality one is trying to create. It is most useful when used in an international context when written language would not be universially understood.

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Ikons

Normally these are representational and figurative in from. They tend to literally be a mirror image of the concept being promoted. There particular power is that they can be easily recalled to memory by visualisation.

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Indexes

These are devices which engage in enigmatic surrealism. They are the most powerful because they have the potential to penetrate our consciousness.

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Myths

Levis-Strauss (1945) declared that a myth is a universal primitive non-rational logic. Behind the stories embedded in myths are messages wrapped up in code. Myths are especially powerful because they do not have to be true to be believed. This is not lost by politions and powerful throughout the ages. Much of modern western medical clinical treatment works because the patient has an implicit belief that the medic really does know what he is doing. Indeed shareholders and employees often think that corporation presidents do have a detailed understanding of how their firm works. Linbolm (1970) was probably closer to the truth when he described management as the science of muddling through. Here are few examples how myths have been establish and manipulated in corporate identity.

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Rituals

Rituals are a necessary part of all human existence because they perform the vital role of dramatising order. As humans we can not easily tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty for extended periods of time so we have create systems of behaviour which will deliver an environment which provides predictability and stability. Although rituals are potent they are are usually enshrined in invisible social boundaries which often can only be discovered by the outsider when are violated. The use of ritual has been manipulated by corporate identities in the following ways:-

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Since the period of the industrial revelution national and world economies have moved into a period which the the majority of economic activity is coming from the service sector. Opportunities for effective corporate identity creation are espcially important for such organisations. These organisation often obtain and sustain their businesses by relationship marketing. Banks and insurance companies operate on the basis of sustaining trust. Trust is highly intangible. To make it more concrete an appropriate corpoarte identity is vital part of their business strategy. It is perhaps interesting to note that BCCI also incorporated the image of the comb of the honey bee in their corporate identity.

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As the BCCI case demonstrates reputation is lake vaginity; time consuming and difficult to obtain but very easy to lose.

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Why corporate identity needs to design rather agency driven

–

Olins (1979)

“The corporate identity practiser shuffles uneasily from foot to foot in a kind of half light somewhere between the advertising agency, the PR man, the management consultant and the architect”

Stop shuffling and start designing!

The CID can be communicated in three main ways:-

What it looks like [design]

What it says [advertising and PR]

What it does [its actual behaviour]

The role the design industry has to offer in delivering promises to clients

Corporate ID consultants have confused the features of CID with the benefits to specific clients.

Evaluation of the effectiveness of corporate identity in major international corporations

BT Dutch PTT

Shell Q8,Exxon

Mercedes Benz

Insurance companies and banks

Education Creative Industries

A new kind of creative industry

It’s appropriate that we’re in Dundee talking about the new creative industries. One of the city’s most famous old creative industries, weaving, was based on machinery that used cards punched with binary code, the forerunner of digital. And digital is the technology that underpins much of this new industrial revolution.

Having spent the last fifteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when phototypesetting disappeared. Overnight 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. Then Apple Macs began to appear in the studio, so, we dismantled our process camera. It had been an integral part of the graphic design studio and had originally been craned into position. But we took it apart bit by bit and threw it in a skip—one day it had been worth fifteen thousand pounds, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worth nothing—we couldn’t even give it away. Today the studio looks less cluttered but some important things remain—I still write in my day book rather than use a use an electronic assistant and I still use a sketch book. Other things, too, have changed: mostly I write electronic mail, use a mobile phone and my laptop which together help me work in corners of my life I never before knew existed.

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 slim, light, flexible and adaptable—because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

We now use our core skills in new ways. We’ve kept our expertise in particular areas, such as in setting type correctly—for the benefit of those clients who appreciate a well-turned line and are willing to pay for our experience. It worries me that as text-based knowledge remains, for the time being, at the core of our communications system both in the real world and on-line, and English the international language of choice. It worries me because we’ve forgotten how to spell, how to write in sentences and that we’ve put aside 3,000 years of typographic heritage. So, in Graven Images we continue to exploit our heritage, our skills. We now write, and publish and broadcast and curate exhibitions and develop critical debate about creativity and how it affects us, because we can and because the education we were given helps us to 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 long.

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

I’m also grateful for the teachers who taught me to be persistent because change is as exhausting as it is rewarding. Change means endless, costly software updates and the constant replacement of hardware, network failures, technical gliches, and interface problems with clients and subcontractors. Change means that we have to continually re-educate ourselves and our employees and our clients. Change is expensive because it takes time, and time used to be the only thing we had to sell. Now we also create content for other media: books, exhibitions or television programmes that, with the help of new technologies, can be cheaply distributed and sold, over and over again. This means we don’t have endlessly find fee paying clients, instead, we become our own client, turning our creativity into a tangible, lucrative asset, we have become a primary industry.

With all of this change happening around us, we would have been very stupid not to spend some time trying to understand the reasons behind it, and the implications for our business and our future—did we even have a future and would it be called ‘design’? We struggled to understand what the government and strategists meant by the ‘creative industries’, was it a pejorative term and did it have a bearing on the way we should go about our business?

The new creative industries

In their 1998 Mapping Document the Creative Industries Task Force describes ‘creative industries’ as; “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. They include: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio.

The ‘creative industries’ is not a definition as such, for if intellectual property were the common denominator then the pharmaceutical industries would be included in the list. They, like many creative industries, invest heavily in research and development at the beginning of a project and then reap the benefits in years to come through selling licenses to produce their product.

I believe that creativity is in everything we make and do, it’s an intrinsic part of being human and a vital part in every successful industry, not an exclusive part of what are now described as the ‘creative industries’. Most things that work well and give pleasure have been deliberately designed with more than a modest measure of creativity.

In many ways the lack of an absolute definition of the creative industries probably betrays the real state of industrial creativity, which although it has been around for a very long time is a little understood phenomena. But the emergence of a loose term to describe what I do certainly raises interesting and overdue questions, such as; “what does my business have in common with an antique dealership? Or, what for that matter could the antiques market and the interactive leisure software industry possibly have in common?” What the Creative Industries Mapping Document most usefully reveals is that the world as we thought we knew it is changing, and gathering momentum more quickly than we can comprehend. This makes life hard for all of us, in the creative industries and in the business of education, because it’s difficult to plan ahead when you don’t know what to plan for.

But there are ways to gain a clearer picture of the future, and that’s by looking at the past, because some aspects of the creative industries are comfortably familiar.

For a start, I don’t think there’s anything especially new about the idea of bringing together ‘creativity’ and ‘industry’. Industry and creativity have been happily co-existing for years. How else could we have civilised ourselves, built cities and filled them with so many amazing products? So there must be some clues in the past that can help us deal with the problems of the future.

Yet, at the same time, I don’t believe that this latest manifestation of ‘industrial creativity’ is just political spin or the emperor’s new clothes. We are in fact living and working in profoundly different ways compared to how we went about our business five, three, or even two years ago. It’s as if progress is rushing ahead, but surely this too must have happened before?

Technological change

Cataclysmic technological change has occurred twice in the past 250 years at a scale that’s in any way comparable to what we’re living through today. What many believe to be the first industrial revolution took place between 1760 and 1850 causing upheaval but giving us widespread innovations ranging from the mechanisation of hand skills, such as weaving, to the production of iron and steam engines. Its effects ricocheted around the globe, heralding a new social order and a new ‘world order’ with Great Britain, and the industrial north, at the heart of the Empire.

In this first Industrial Revolution the old creative industries broke with history and the craft traditions that had always underpinned the production of goods. With the help of new mechanical machines we began to make vast amounts of every imaginable kind of thing. But in order to make these new goods functional and attractive, educational institutions and schools of ‘applied art’, science and ‘industrial design’ emerged, in direct response to the new technologies. Their job was to ensure that the deluge of new manufactured goods was of the highest aesthetic and functional quality.

The first of these new educational institutions was a school of industrial design founded in London in 1837. It was originally designed to serve as a resource for manufacturing industry, containing reference material of many different styles and periods. In 1852 it moved from its original home in Somerset Place to Marlborough House and was renamed Central School of Practical Art before moving to new buildings in Exhibition Road in 1863. It was then renamed the Victoria & Albert Museum by Queen Victoria in 1896 before eventually, in 1909, becoming an art museum that embraced the Royal College of Art.

Hot on its heels, and 400 miles further north, was the second oldest school of design and art. The Glasgow school originated as the Glasgow School of Design in 1844, but with funding from the Haldane Trust it was able to initiate teaching in the fine arts, and by 1892 was known as the Glasgow School of Art. While the RCA and it’s adjoining museum were enjoying royal patronage the Glasgow school was busy educating the people who would shape the iconic locomotives, ships and heavy industrial products that would extend the influence of the Great British Empire. This earned Glasgow the title of ‘the finest Victorian city in the Empire’ and Scotland and the industrial North became the ‘workshop of the World’.

The time that elapsed from the moment when the first acrid brown shoots of the first industrial revolution emerged in 1760, to the foundation of the first school of industrial creativity, 77 grimy years had passed.

By the time education had caught up with the seemingly relentless pace of industrial progress, and its resulting social change, a second wave of industrial revolution was already upon us. Between 1890 and 1930 Scotland once again played a significant role in shaping the modern era with the help of Bell and Mackintosh, and Logie Baird was on his way. The RCA and Glasgow School of Art were by now fully formed, internationally respected institutions, well able to work alongside scientific universities and new technical colleges to understand, interpret, plan and exploit the benefits of widespread telecommunications and internal combustion engines. 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 with which strategists could 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 anyone but 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 grows and 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, increasing numbers of 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.

So what next?

For 15 years I’ve been working as a designer in a consultancy with one very important difference. We’ve always worked across traditional creative disciplines, as well as within them. What seemed sensible to us has in fact turned out to be one of our greatest strengths; our ability to understand and manage the process of creating diverse things. It’s certainly eased our transformation from a traditional design consultancy into ‘new creative industry’ and the people we look to employ or work with are people similarly inclined. They can read and write and are sociable, capable of challenging us, and have a broad range of interests. They’ve probably had the benefit of further education and are able to transferring their knowledge to new areas, and they’re willing to continue to change and to learn throughout their lives.

I believe that no one will be able to compete in the knowledge economy without being literate and modestly numerate. But there is an immediate need for a new kind of creative curriculum, one that unites the arts and science in the common purpose of creativity. This curriculum must also help people to be flexible and to work in teams, solve problems, innovate and take risks.

The traditional bastions of creativity, art and design remain of value in themselves, but their value is limited, especially if they become only self-referring departments. Specialisation has already relegated art to the level of entertainment; a mere party trick. Likewise, observational drawing and other drawn communication, without the benefit of analytical methods and research, is of no more value than learning to balance a ball on your nose—it’s a handy conversation piece.

Two weeks ago I was talking with Simon Waterfall, creative director the international website design company, Deepend. I was explaining how hard it was for us to find people with the right skills. I assumed it was because I was based in Glasgow, but I was wrong. Simon has offices all over the world and he has exactly the same problems. He recently opened an office in Bangalore to get skilled technical graduates he couldn’t get in the UK, and he is still desperately searching for creative people. (We always think that the grass is greener, but it’s not always the case.) When he opened his New York office he advertised for designers and received over seven hundred job applications. After weeks of interviewing he could employ only four people. Like me, he believes the situation is now critical.

I welcome the term, creative industries, because it allows me to talk about creativity rather than the old vocations ‘art’ or ‘design’, and because it allows all of us all to talk about creative and analytical skills in every aspect of every subject from algebra to zoology. When students leave the art class and go on to further education their understanding of their subject should be equivalent in depth, analytical method and importance to that of mathematics and science.

Already, the Singapore government is committed to expanding the teaching of creativity to occupy fully one third of the curriculum by 2020. But where will we be in 2020? Hopefully, not in Singapore.

Speed and invisibility are key characteristics of this third revolution. In order to keep pace with it, and to reach the people who need it most, education must become fast and virtual, too. Because we all need education, we need it everywhere as never before; we need it all of the time, 24 hours a day.

Leveraging Creativity

Government Policy

Welcome to this workshop session that will explore ways in which government policy can help ‘leverage’ creativity.

Before we begin, I’ll say a few words of introduction that will explain my viewpoint. I’m Janice Kirkpatrick, I’m am a founding Director of an interdisciplinary, international design consultancy based in Glasgow, Scotland.

I’m also a Director of Glasgow School of Art, a Director of The Lighthouse: Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City and a Trustee of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. The UK’s only endowment charged with the task of supporting and encouraging creative people to fulfil their potential so that we can all benefit, economically, socially and culturally.

Can governments allocate sufficient resources and expertise to incubate and groom new creative talent?

I’ve been invited here today by the UK Department of Culture Media & Sport, as a member of the Ministerial Creative Industries Strategy Group. I welcome, and am grateful for this opportunity because I strongly believe that if our economies are to thrive we must quickly find ways of encouraging the creation of, and support for, entirely new kinds of business.

Having spent almost sixteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when my graphics studio changed shape overnight; phototypesetting disappeared, my interior designers and architects lost most of their drawing boards, and Apple Macintosh computers began to appear. Design was not the only industry to change, all of the industries around me have changed; change touches all of us and it continues to lead us, ever more quickly into a exciting, if rather confusing future.

How can governments create an environment that encourages people to value and take ownership of ideas?

Digital technology finds me working in new ways, at odd times and strange places, and with strangers. Today I’m just as likely to employ graduates from the arts, the fine arts, humanities and business schools as I am to employ graduates from architecture or design. But, every day it gets harder and harder to find high quality people to employ. I need people with specialist and communications skills, people who are team players and who have flexible attitudes to work and life long learning. People with the experience and confidence to identify and value the necessity to take risks, because all innovation is risky business.

Do governments need to change in order to reflect our changing world?

In order to extend the capability of my company, and to ensure that we’re at the leading edge, I employ specialists such as film-makers, financial or software experts, even chefs. Often they’re employed on a job-by-job basis. I also forge informal partnerships with people and organisations that complement my own. I form joint venture companies for specific projects but I keep my core business slim, light, flexible and adaptable—because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow; and the same is true of my clients. Their future is also uncertain. They’re also interested in extending their capabilities through working with me. They judge my value by the services I offer in-house, by the quality of my knowledge and my experience, but they also judge me by the quality and depth of my business relationships and my contacts; these are additional resources that they can access through me. My clients are even becoming my business partners.

How can governments provide citizens with widespread access to the teaching of thinking skills?

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, my clients would have presented me with a brief, now I compose the brief in partnership with them. Today, my clients demand everything of us; strategy and research, risk assessments, evaluation, business advice, even education. Time spent actually designing things is the exception; sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to make something: a brand, a book or a bit of a building. People want to pay for my ability to think creatively and productively about their businesses and I, surprisingly, find it straightforward to transfer my professional process (that of controlling the evolution of ideas), from the studio to the boardroom.

Increasingly, I’m expected to work with clients in a strategic role, where once we would have been expected to simply work for them. Increasingly our clients lack the experience, knowledge and skill and they rely on us to advise them.

How can governments build linkages between (themselves and) industry, the creative industries and the educational system?

In order to meet our clients’ expectations we continually re-educate ourselves, our employees and our clients. We invest in endless costly software updates, the constant replacement of hardware and systems, and in research, education and training. We also learn from our clients and gain detailed knowledge of their businesses. Sometimes we understand more about their businesses than they themselves do; this knowledge is of premium value and strengthens our relationship with them; we reinvest it in their businesses, or we use it to develop new partnerships and businesses of our own.

How can governments introduce incentive schemes for companies to adopt innovative and creative practices?

This massive change in the way we operate is costly for us because it takes time, and until recently, time was the only thing we had to sell.

Today we’re paid to ‘think’ as well as to ‘make’. We use our skills to create new ‘knowledge’: new products, new processes and services by working in partnership with organisations who have assets, values and visions that complement our own.

How can governments build links between (themselves and) industry, the creative industries and the educational system?

It seems that at last Art, Architecture and Design are realising their potential; they’re moving away from being secondary, service industries to become primary industries; generating new wealth through creating something from nothing. This presents Education and Industry with unprecedented challenges, including preparing school children and graduates to become employers rather than employees.

Which leads me to the so-called ‘Creative Industries’. I have to ask which industry are we talking about, because Art, Architecture and Design no longer exist in isolation. In their 1998 Mapping Document the Creative Industries Task Force describes ‘creative industries’ as: “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. They include: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio. But they also, vitally, include the sciences, and partnerships between the arts and sciences.

How can governments increase the emphasis on creativity in order that we can ‘create a way forward’?

While the traditional bastions of creativity; art and design remain of value in themselves, their value is limited if they are allowed to exist only as self-referring ‘departments’. I welcome the term, ‘creative industries’, because it allows us to focus on the creative process that’s common in all we do; in both the arts and sciences, in every aspect of every subject from advertising to zoology. It also allows us to understand and value organisational, as well as individual creativity because it’s creative teams rather than individuals who will create much of tomorrow’s world.

Can governments reward innovation and encourage the protection and exploitation of intellectual property rights?

Today, I believe we share the same problems as our clients, industry in general and our governments. We are all confronted with unfamiliar opportunities and problems that need to be defined, understood, exploited or solved. We therefore need to produce creative professionals in all field of practise who can comfortably operate outside their specialisms and who can see the connections across apparently unrelated disciplines. They must have sound analytical and managerial skills, value intuition, know when to take risks and feel comfortable working as part of a multi-disciplinary team that aims to crystallise and commodify new knowledge.

The government of Singapore is already committed to expanding the teaching of creativity to occupy fully one third of the curriculum by 2020. But where will we be in 2020? Hopefully, not in Singapore. This is a tall order, but speed is a key characteristic of this third industrial revolution. In order to keep pace with it, we need people who’re educated and encouraged to create and innovate and we need them now, today, not in ten years time.

I welcome the opportunity to see if in the next 90 minutes we can come up with some processes that will help leverage creativity not just for the benefit of the economy but also for the benefit of our culture and society.

In 1997, America produced $414bn worth of books, films, music, TV programmes and other copyrighted cultural products. They became America’s number one export, outselling clothes, chemicals, cars, planes and even computers. In 1998 the UK Ministerial Creative Industries Strategy Group was formed because we know that the creative industries are an important sector in the UK economy. In 2001 they accounted for £112.5 billion pounds of revenue, employed 1.3 million people, contributed £10.3 billion to the UK balance of trade, made up 5% of our Gross Domestic Product and continue to grow two to three times faster than the rest of the economy.

Notes for Design In Business Week

Notes for Design In Business Week 27 Oct 2000

Tomorrow will be different—the future of design in business

The backdrop to my presentation is taken from the hoarding surrounding the site of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. The drawings are of school children by school children. Not only do they remind me who inherits the world we make, they remind me that design is a political activity. If ever Business needed evidence of the power of design they need look no further than the school playground.

I am convinced that the future of ‘design in business’ will be a good one. But only if we invest in design research and creative education that deepens our understanding, our knowledge and our ability to control and exploit the rich opportunities presented by the ‘knowledge revolution’.

While creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, ‘design’, as we know it, only appeared in the 1830s. And if design’s short history tells us anything of value, it clearly demonstrates that Business must be prepared if it is to responsibly exploit the potential wealth brought about by industrial revolution. And preparation means education.

Cataclysmic technological change has occurred twice in the past 250 years.

In what many believe to be the first industrial revolution, the old creative industries broke with their craft traditions and entered the Machine Age. New schools of ‘applied art’ invented the idea of the ‘industrial designer’, who exploited technology and ensured that products were aesthetically pleasing and functional—that products were wilfully designed to stimulate new markets and satisfied customers. From the first acrid brown shoots of industrial revolution in 1760, to the foundation of the first school of industrial design, took 77 grimy years.

But by the time education had caught up with the increasing pace of industrial progress, a second revolution had arrived and its results were quite literally, electrifying. This time designers were ready to exploit scientific discoveries with brands, structural concrete, cars, cookers and Crimplene frocks while young people were educated to look forward to a lifetime’s employment in industry.

Much has changed in the 170 years since ‘design’ was invented. That tomorrow will be different goes without saying. Because of the speed of change, even today is different; we go to sleep in a different world from the one we woke up in. Three years is a very long time in the digital age.

It was the speed of this third industrial revolution that caught many of us out. But designers saw it coming when phototypesetting hit the skip and the Apple Mac replaced the drawing board. But 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 designers believe it so richly deserve.

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.

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.

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.

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 design is much more than just another industry, it’s an integral part of almost every successful industry. Design will continue to mean different things to different people, in different industries, often becoming subsumed within the broader term ‘creativity’. Designers will increasingly reflect the inter-disciplinary working practices adopted by the new creative industries—often working in partnership with people and organisations whose values they share and whose skills are complementary to their own. Design will mutate, evolve and endure.

Just as we’ve lost our corner shops and local brands, in the future it will be increasingly difficult for brands that aren’t global to survive, likewise, the people who create them. But brand-builders and global business must look beyond market domination and the demands of shareholders and recognise the value of the new global language they’ve created.

Thankfully, these drawings show us that no one is “just Nike”, each child remains a recognisable individual and a promiscuous brand consumer. Thanks to brands we all communicate in new ways which opens up big creative opportunities and challenges for responsible designers and businesses. I believe customers are smart enough to know rubbish when they see it, hear it and feel it.

170 years ago ‘design’ was borne of ‘business’; it was created to meet the needs of industry. Today industry and design need each other as never before, so let’s spend the next three years building on our long relationship and get design further into business, business further into design and creativity into the heart of education and the British economy. Because in tomorrow’s world creativity will be our greatest natural resource, our primary industry and our richest national asset.

Design Matters

I formed Graven Images Limited, with two fellow students, while still in the School of Art. We came from different backgrounds, Ross from Architecture, Adele from Embroidered and Woven Textiles and me from Graphic Design, where I specialised in film and television. Ross and I already had the option of full-time employment in Los Angeles and London but decided to try and do something more interesting in Glasgow before getting a mortgage and a lifestyle we’d be reluctant to lose.

Starting a business was a relatively easy decision to make as we had no money and no commitments. We were both naive enough to believe we could pick up the threads of Glasgow’s design heritage and once again bring a European style of working to the city. We hoped we’d encourage other graduates to do the same and decided to give the project three years.

We’ve now been going for seven and a half years, although Adele left after the first year, and have settled with twelve staff, eight of whom are designers and seven of those are graduates. We are a multidisciplinary design consultancy and undertake a broad spectrum of work from architectural projects, interiors, products and graphics to exhibitions and television related work.

We have no formal structure within the office but tend to have informal teams which change according to the task at hand. Different personalities and skills are suited for different projects but we all offer criticism and informally contribute to each others work and learn from one another.

All designers are trained managers and expected to liaise with clients and sub-contractors, all designers are responsible for cost control and are supported by administrative and accounting staff. All designers are literate, numerate and Apple Mac literate. We all have to understand the technology related to any technical process we may use in order to exploit its potential.

I would like to put forward a definition of design which works. It came about through a series of joint lectures in conjunction with Dr Andy Lowe from the Department of International Marketing at the University of Strathclyde who undertakes research in the qualitative methodologies which underpin the design process.

Design Orders Chaos

What is Design? Design is about the controlled evolution of ideas.

The practice of design in all of its different disciplines is underpinned by a system which ensures the controlled evolution of ideas, what’s commonly known as ‘design process’. Peter Gorb, in a Design Council publication , defines design as “… the planning process for artifacts”. I would go further in that I believe that design is ‘the ultimate planning process’. Design is an analytical, rational process in which the production of artifacts may or may not play a part.

Design is about control. Fine art is also concerned with control, or as with design, a conscious lack of it. Fine art, design and architecture use technology and increasingly the same technology.

New York

The process of designing something requires that we control the evolution of ideas, creating order out of chaos, and presenting information in a structure which is meaningful. Design and fine art are also concerned with the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas.

Designers and artists must be inventive and structured in their process, which is essentially inductive or logical. Identifying the fundamental and dynamic forces within an area of investigation and apparently bringing order out of chaos in a form which can be finally communicated.

It might be communicated as a clearly articulated problem or a problem resolved.

Map Slide

In the case of design or architecture a problem clearly articulated might also be communicated in the form of a brief. In the case of art it might be a piece of art which itself poses a question or is inconclusive.

Word Slide

Designers and fine artists communicate through a common language. This language isn’t concerned exclusively with the visual but with all of the human senses and utilises language, semiotics, myths, rituals and values in order to articulate culture. I call this language sensorial language.

Brochures + The Lounge

The tangible aspects of this language, those we can touch and see, might include written language and printed material, moving and still images, products and other artifacts, interiors spaces and architecture.

Clinio Castelli

The intangible aspects of this language, those we can’t touch or see, which are less obvious but much more potent, are smell, taste, sound and temperature. They frequently produce subliminal responses.

Artists, designers and architects are all educated to interpret and communicate various aspects of human culture and need.

In order to understand the importance of our role in the world and how universal and potent our language is we have first of all to understand the nature of culture.

Culture

Culture is one of those words which everyone uses but is rarely understood. Even academics have great difficulty in coming to terms with its definition. Because culture is largely intangible it can’t be measured, it can only be interpreted. Cultural traits are qualitative by nature, and as such need to be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. It is argued that culture should be seen as a set of solutions to the key problems of survival.

The core of any culture is its ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which impel people into action. 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 has to penetrate before an understanding of ideologies can be reached: language, semiotics, myths, rituals and values.

Language

Language is more than vocabulary, it is an enabling mechanism which explains why and how people behave.

Coke + The Herald

Semiotics

The language of signs has been described by Umberto Eco as comprising three main categories of sign: symbol, icon and index. This is an important distinction for all of us who use visual and sensorial language and we should be aware of the impact these three forms of sign can have.

Symbols

BR + Mercedes

These are abstract manifestations of a particular reality one may be trying to communicate. They are most useful in an international context when written language would not be understood.

Icons

Prudential + Herald

Normally these are representational and figurative in form. They tend to literally be a mirror image of the concept being communicated. Their particular power means that they can be easily remembered.

Indices

Mont Blanc + Tunnel

These are devices which engage in enigmatic surrealism. They are the most powerful of all the signs because they have the potential to penetrate our consciousness.

Myths

BCCI + Jaguar + BR

Claude Levi-Strauss (1945) declared that a myth is a universal primitive non-rational logic. Behind the stories embedded in myths are messages wrapped up in code. Myths are especially powerful because they don’t have to be true to be believed—Twin Peaks falls into this category. This is not lost by politicians, David Lynch or the music industry and has remained a powerful idea throughout the ages. Much medical clinical treatment works because the patient has the implicit belief that the doctor knows what he’s doing. Likewise industry and the economy base much of their speculation on myth—De Lorean sports cars in Ireland funded by the British taxpayers/ Jaguar (would have gone out of business on bumeric basis alone) and the flagging British car industry.

Rituals

Rituals are a necessary part of all human existence because they perform the vital role of dramatising order.

As humans we can not easily tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty for prolonged periods of time so we create systems of behaviour which will deliver an environment which provides predictability and stability.

Although rituals are potent they are usually enshrined in invisible social boundaries which are often only revealed to the outsider when they are violated.

Royalton

The hotel is a good example of how behaviour is ritualised. The hotel business is really an extension of show business. It gives big set piece performances in its restaurants three times a day and has a continuous performance in the front lobby. Architecture, design and art provide the theatrical backdrop for these performances and influence and control their shape.

Lobby + Dining Room

Values

All relationships are about values, business is about values. Values are concerned with the fundamental driving forces which impel people into action. All business relationships are value driven and research clearly shows that people do business with those they like rather than with those who only offer economic or technical effectiveness.

Heraldic (loyalty/history) + Railfreight

Designers, artists and architects control their creative output through the design process. Our education provides us with a mixture of analytical methodologies (a bit of philosophy, a bit of anthropology, a bit of psychology etc) all informing and enhancing our intuition.

The education of designers and architects has more emphasis on analytical method, the education of artists has perhaps more emphasis on intuition and less tightly structured research. All are inextricably linked through the sensorial language we use and the Mac-based technology we use.

Design in a multi-disciplinary activity

We must understand and communicate what it is we all do—develop, share and value our knowledge or other academics and professionals will take it from us.

As we move away from numerical and quantitative methods, towards interpretive, qualitative methods of evaluating the environment around us, we open up a myriad possibilities of understanding and enjoying the world, and making money through our pooled knowledge. We now have property, product and publishing.

Starck + Loewy + Mackintosh

New technology offers opportunities to work together across disciplines and continents—technical restraints seem paltry faced with the awesome task of designing and expressing a totally new reality, virtual reality, with all its problems such as how to deal with new perceptions of time. We are well equipped to interpret and design this new world.

This must encourage us to explore and promote our common process and dwell less on individual, technical and vocational activities.

If we continue to squander our energy pidgeonholing design into it’s technical specialisms. Separating out research and management components and marketing them all as separate little courses for short term financial gain, we will find that the core of our activity, the really powerful bit; the design process, has been hijacked by marketing and business studies, the sciences and social sciences. We will be confined to the role of social decorators.

The task ahead of all of us is truly gargantuan. Not only must we set our educational systems in order but also learn to communicate our expertise to the wider population. That they might consider value in terms other than the financial when making choices. We must also become an eloquent force in the media and local and national politics if we are to have all our good work put to its proper use—to bring about a sensorially literate society of caring and intelligent people who are equipped with the tools which allow them to understand and value the world around them.

Ignore Design at Your Peril

I fully support the DBA in it’s encouragement of ‘effective’ design. I passionately support any initiative to explain the value of design, what it is and what it does, because ‘design’, ‘creativity’, ‘the controlled evolution of ideas’, call it what you will, touches each one of us every day and adds value to our lives.

In the Design Renaissance conference in Glasgow last year, Stephano Marzano pointed out, “Design is a political activity …”. It was a sharp reminder to us of the manipulative power we wield as designers and the responsibility we carry on behalf of the population to ensure our outcomes are functionally, socially, economically, environmentally and culturally honourable.

Design is a service industry and we must never forget that we must make great efforts to explain to the public and industry what it is that we do. Design is also an effective tool for economic and social change; it can create new ways of living and making money. It can create desire and satisfy craving. Each completed, new piece of work has the potential to act as an example to others, raising aspirations and awareness, opening new worlds and opportunities for ourselves and others.

Design in Britain in the ’90s is not a professional activity, it is open warfare, full of phyrric victories and battles hard won. Why should industry pay for design expertise when the public are sensorially and visually disenfranchised. Deliberately prevented from acquiring education which would empower them to participate in the world around them? If you don’t know what a better world looks and feels like how can you possibly ask for one?

To be an effective designer you must first be a good communicator. You must engender trust, be a good listener and a social archeologist. You must be capable of penetrating walls, smoke screens and agendas, piecing together clues from fragments of language and emotion, underpinning your own heightened intuition with an armoury of analytical methodologies then articulating your conclusion as an object, space or text, a book or a bed.

Each one of us brings our own cultural baggage, our own way of interpreting the world and the brief, which enriches the end result and makes it special and distinctive. I am one of a team of designers working from a base in Glasgow which has it’s own experiences and priorities.

But how do you judge effective design? How good is a book or a bed? What is the best chair in the world? Is it the one that costs the least, sells the most, looks the best, uses the most environmentally sustainable materials or is ergonomically satisfying?

Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum, buildings and objects require processes and people to bring them to life: manufacturers, retailers, distributors, publishers and even banks … Whilst designed objects generate economic activity and wealth they also perform a more valuable long term role in articulating what’s special about our culture. We don’t actually need chairs in order to sit, we can sit on a box. Chairs allow us to sit in a particular way which distinguishes us from other people. Differences should be celebrated and history has taught us to be wary of homogeneous, international style. We need to re-evaluate Great Britain and recognise what’s special about it if we are to produce distinctive goods and services which can compete in a federalised Europe or a global marketplace.

Schools of art and design are notorious for plundering the past or looking to other cultures for direction, ensuring we will always imitate and rarely innovate. Britain is currently condemned to importing effectively designed goods from other cultures and times to act as props against which we all play out the theatre of our every day lives. I am not a nationalist but it’s very difficult to be Scottish when all the props in the play are Japanese, Taiwanese or Dralon reproductions of Louis XIV’s boudoir.

I enjoy very much having products of other cultures around me but would like to have the choice of using English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh products too. I don’t mean products which look as if they’ve been used on the set of Brigadoon, but well conceived products which reflect Britain as an international player in a global marketplace. Design, after all, is an international activity and the creative process is universal.

Glasgow has moved from being ‘The Workshop of the World’, to the ‘Service Capital of Scotland’. Thirty years on Glasgow still feels sore about not being able to make things. It needs to see tangible evidence of it’s own productivity. Service industries need design as much as manufacturing, as it is only through design that they become tangible and visible, through the buildings they inhabit, the clothes their employees wear and the way they communicate through their stationery and graphic design.

To actively deny a country the right to manufacture is to deny it’s right to exist.

So how do we communicate the real value of design to the public, clients and British industry?

Design must be viewed as the essential ingredient in business and culture which allows us to control the way we choose to live and work. To evaluate the performance of a designed product or process on the basis of economic effectiveness alone is insufficient. Design is a multi-layered, political activity the implications of which go far beyond environmental sustainability. Design must be evaluated in the broadest possible sense if we are to really change Britain’s fortunes in the new millennium.

The measure of a nations civilisation will be read in the artifacts it leaves behind. I wonder what the archeologists of the future will make of Once Great Britain?

Graven Images is a multidisciplinery design consultancy, but instead of showing you a complete project from beginning to end I’ve chosen to show a maverick, ongoing project which is the result of collaboration between Graven Images and Nice House, a retailer, contractor and distributor in Glasgow. It’s called Home Produce and is a growing series of domestic products, the bulk of which are derived from locally available, sustainable sources, local skills and designers. It came about through a need to source products for our own interior work and has grown to examine setting up small scale, local manufacturing to support Housing Associations with a requirement for a large number of furnished properties throughout the City.

There are 40 Housing Associations in Glasgow who are responsible for producing some of the best architecture in the City. They also run design education programmes for committee members responsible for commissioning design and architecture. They control a spend of millions every year and many are committed to supporting excellence in design and promoting the well-being of their communities through creating employment as well as supplying good quality housing.

Creativity and the Rural Economy

In 2001 the creative industries accounted for £112.5 billion of revenue, employed 1.3 million people, contributed £10.3 billion to the UK balance of trade, made up 5% of our Gross Domestic Product and continue to grow two to three times faster than the rest of the economy.

Yesterday SE published their figures for the last financial year. They showed that the Scottish economy grew by just 0.6%, one third the rate of the rest of the UK and a quarter of the rate of the rest of the world as a whole. With the exception of Japan, Malta, Turkey, Argentina and Mexico we have one of the lowest growth rates in Europe and one of the worst in the developed world.

Let’’s consider what this means. We know that the creative industries are an important sector in the UK economy. They are “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity … and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”.

Of all the patents granted throughout the world for new inventions in the last 50 years, 40% have been to inventors from the UK, and this trend is continuing. Most of the innovation behind the technologies that dominate modern life are Scottish; the telephone, television and fax, and many aspects of the new biotech sciences.

We are the world’s great research and development department; the seat of distinguished universities and depositories of knowledge, the creator of new communications technologies. Therefore it’s strange that in this 3rd industrial revolution, one predicated on knowledge and underpinned by digital technology we are the losers. We have an uncanny knack of failing to convert creativity into cash and instead contrive to keep academia and business apart; academia confined within the stone quadrangles of ancient universities, condemned to an existence where success is too often measured by the quantity of published material rather than by it’s useful contribution to our culture and economy; our businesses meanwhile are coralled in ghettoes called “parks” or within corporate palaces in our central business districts. There’s little encouragement for a business to invest in R&D, or little left to invest after government takes its cut.

One thing’s for sure; we will continue to be the creativity behind the world’s biggest brands unless we find ways to work with academia to ensure we create new kinds of products, services and businesses. And there’s no rule that says we have to work in cities. On both counts I thank Auchencruive for hosting this evening’s Club.

Since government began to quantify the creative industries sector back in 1998, economic strategy has also been one of focussing on urban centres. But, as Robert Burns (our original creative industrialist) continues to show us, creativity also happens outside cities. Digital communication makes a virtue out of Scottish geography and arguably there’s never been a better time to re-examine how we develop our rural economy.

There are already many good reasons to locate creative industries in rural locations:

Better quality of life (access to world-class amenities)

Lower overheads

Excellent infrastructure and communications, including road and air links with major cities

Closeness to world-class centres of reseach: Roslyn, Hannah, SAC and an increasing number of new research facilities

Contrasting environments

Opportunity for new/different models of creative organisations, including new hybrid urban/rural protoypes

We’ve had a studio in central Glasgow for 16 years. It’s great but now we’re creating a reseach centre in deepest Ayrshire. We have a wider range of employees than we originally had, all with different priorities. We need more space, quiet space and flexible space and that’s expensive in Glasgow. It takes less that an hour to commute to from one location to the next and we have access to another international airport and great business facilities Royal Troon and Turnberry that broaden our appeal to overseas clients (and UK ones) … and we’re not alone in our thinking. There are a growing number of creative business here already.

I’d welcome a Scottish revaluation of the creative industries sector that looks are our special institutions, our key creative businesses and our geography. I’d welcome a revaluation that doesn’t just follow the simple London model of clustering businesses in urban areas. And I’d welcome any encouragement for creative businesses to team with acknowledged centres of research.

Given Scotland’s current economic performance and the £8.3m funding left of the original 3 year/£25m funding allocated by SE to the fasting growing sector of the UK economy, we’ve nothing to lose and an awful lot to gain.