Cities

Cities

I find cities very emotional places – I find it very difficult to be objective about why I love them. Everyone has a favourite place, a favourite city – I love Barcelona, New York, Manchester and even London, although more for the friends I have who live there than for the city itself.

I adore Glasgow and have spent a lot of time trying to work out why I find the place so bearable. I love it’s roughness and vitality and I find it’s intolerance of bullshit a relief given that the whole world of art, design and architecture has so much of it. It’s a good base emotionally and geographically, it has a stabilising effect in my life.

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

Art, design, and architecture, all underpinned by the creative process, have expressed cultural change throughout the ages, over thousands of years. We all belong to an old profession, arguably older than prostitution although some would say sharing much in common with it.

I along with Ross, Paul and Stuart at Graven Images, the design consultancy we formed when we left the School of Art, we made a conscious decision to stay in Glasgow and see if it was possible to work from the city – that was almost ten years ago, and yes it is possible, Glasgow can sustain us and there’s room for more like us.

Firstly, before I go on to talk about the city, I think it’s important to tell you a little about where I’m coming from, my viewpoint, which informs my understanding of art, design and architecture and the relationship they have with the city and Glasgow in particular.

Creative process

Central to my belief, and all we do at Graven Images, is a shared understanding of what we mean by the term, ‘design’. Most of the problems designers have, our current lack of power and achievement, stems from our inability to understand what we do and how we can use our skills to make the world a better place. We fail to explain this to the wider public, who are right to distrust us.

I believe that architects and fine artists are also designers as we share the same creative process before we are named after a specific specialist skill such as sculptor, architect, graphic designer.

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

The production of art sometimes involves more intuition and less analytical method than architecture and design, but not always. I firmly believe that artists, architects and designers would find it easier to explain to other people, our clients, what it is we do if we would only recognise the common ground we share rather than pigeon-holing ourselves according to our preferred specialism.

Design, as well as being a clearly understood and well documented process is a powerful tool for revealing change. The ‘creative process’ is also described as ‘the controlled evolution of ideas’, bringing order out of apparent chaos, creating cities out of a confusion of dust and ritual. The creative process helps us make sense out of the world around us and presents information in a structure which we can understand and manipulate. It makes magicians out of all of us and allows us to wield powers which can evoke change. We have the power to reveal only the things we wish the rest of the world to see.When you arrive in a new city it can seem apparently chaotic so we have to find ways of making sense of it, understanding it, how it works,how the different parts come together. One way is to devise a map which reveals the flow of traffic through the area – this is a structure which reveals one level of information showing order does exist in apparent chaos.

Cities

Design, art and architecture have reflected the ever changing culture of cities throughout the ages, Culture, or social glue, the stuff that binds us all together and makes society, changes all the time and constantly needs re-calibrated, so we should never, theoretically, be out of a job. It’s designers, artists and architects who describe this change, express it and celebrate it in more than one dimension, in time and space, we make change evident through manipulating all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight. We make the objects, the props against which people play out the drama of their everyday lives. We can make people behave in different ways by altering the props.

Cities are conglomerations, concentrations of lots of complex and conflicting signals. The ancient Egyptians, some three thousand years ago, knew how to manipulate people through encoding their environment with lots of signals. They manipulated people through all of the senses, through architecture and graphic communication, to reflect the benign and humane civilisations expressed in the cities of Thebes and Memphis. In sharp contrast Albert Speer used architecture, graphic design, garments and rituals to create an identity for Hitler’s Germany, re-creating Berlin according to classical mythological rules, a domineering, warlike, and monolithic Arian super-city.

Culture

However, in Glasgow, as in Thebes and Berlin, design can only express the culture that is already present. We can’t change culture, at least not quickly, we can only interpret it in new and ingenious ways, revealing things which were hidden and finding new ways of expressing old attitudes. This is what has brought about Glasgow’s so-called ‘renaissance’. The city hasn’t essentially changed, it’s just chosen to view itself from a different angle.

Glasgow

Glasgow realised that it had to project a positive image of itself if it was to finally come to terms with it’s heavy industrial past, it’s lost world status, and focus the energies of younger generations on new challenges which would create and sustain the city’s vigorous cultural energy. It knew this would create an atmosphere of confidence which would encourage people to take risks, to innovate, and this in turn would attract business, create wealth and ensure Glasgow remained an exciting and varied place to be.

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

Different kinds of cities express their culture, their personality, their attractiveness, in different ways. Glasgow is often described as a regional capital or second city unlike Edinburgh or London. They are First cities or Capital cities like Paris, Madrid and New York. They communicate their culture through the design and architecture of their national institutions. Through their pompous, rich heritage and history. Through their boulevards and monumental spaces, their skylines, seats of government and national, state resources, like the ballet, gallery and the opera.

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

As the manufacturing of products in Britain continues to decline, second cities are denied the traditional means of expressing their culture and identity through their products and services, except in the sense of industrial heritage, a museum and theme park existence where culture is cut short, frozen in time, an impotent servant of the tourist industry.

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

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

Designer, architects and artists have given moribund policy-makers and politicians, people with little creativity and certainly no strategic or creative process, the excuse to avoid creating economic and cultural strategy, preferring the confusion of chaos over order, allowing markets to find their own deteriorating levels of trade and cities to drift in leaderless miasma. What is Britain in the Nineties? We have a Ministry of Heritage instead of a Ministry of Culture. We live in a society which guards against newness and refuses to plan for innovation, variety, complexity and enrichment. Banality, shoddiness, predictability and myopia are the facts of life in Britain, in the Nineties.

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

Many attempts to economically ‘turn around’ post industrial second cities fail because people impose wholesale solutions on entire populations, on entire communities. Each city and each area in a city has it’s own personality which requires it’s own special solutions if we are to retain things which are different and special.

Glasgow’s previous ‘renaissance’ offer some guidance to designers. One definition of ‘renaissance’ is ‘the revival of classical influence in Europe’. In recent history Scotland has made a special contribution through the very original interpretations of classicism by Playfair and Adam. Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, Wiszniewski, Elder & Cannon, Page & Park and painter Stephen Campbell all brought something vigorous, new and valuable to the international classical vocabulary while enrichening and re-evaluating Glaswegian culture. Unfortunately, classicism failed to meet some of our society’s more practical requirements, particularly for housing.

Look at Glasgow in the sixties – Modernism offered a different kind of renaissance in Scotland. The civic death of classicism and rebirth of a new order, heralded by Mackintosh, or arguably by Thomson before him, signalled the beginning of a new century. The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality. An acknowledged track record in classicism, with the city boasting many beautiful buildings, encouraged the city to believe it could sustain a place in the brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

So as modernism gathered momentum Glasgow destroyed much of its classical heritage and tried to move forwards into the future. The Gorbals died a success and were demolished in the name of cleanliness, its people banished from the inner city in the name of Godliness, and condemned to suspended animation in the margins of civilisation, in Easterhouse (without shops or pubs or in the high rise in the Gorbals with no space for kids to play). To rehouse its population, Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe, driven by central government in London and by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates (Corbusier and sun-drenched perfect flat roofs). Glasgow, with its international socialism, fell prey to the banality of international modernism, which provided an instant, cost-effective solution to the city’s housing problems. Central government’s insatiable demands didn’t allow much time to reflect on whether or not this new environment should be humane as well as hygienic. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of environmental health.

Politicians and architects didn’t realise that Glasgow’s socialism was different from anyone else’s. Ironically, an architectural co-operative demonstrated that much of what we were destroying, our classical tenements, was useful and necessary to distinguish us from other cities – the gridiron plan of four-storey classical tenement buildings could economically be made sanitary and the city once more become solid and Glaswegian. But Assist Architectural Co-operative couldn’t save the city’s declining population, its manufacturing base or its publishing industries, which fell prey to economics and tactical politics. Glasgow came through its most dangerous rebirth in recent times and wasn’t about to risk another foray into the future again – unless it could dictate the terms of its own progress. It’s, therefore, not surprising that it’s the housing associations and co-operatives, not the private developers or local authorities, who are being most adventurous with the architecture of New Glasgow. The public sector are too scared they’ll fail again.

The city now has a clean, almost intact Victorian centre, some truly excellent social housing and some very well-educated design graduates. The city wrote the handbook on town planning and social housing so it rightly should boast some great schemes. But what of manufacturing, graphic design and art?

Once again designers are groping towards mass production, which carries with it all the glamour of big money, big numbers and global markets. This city has learned that quantity doesn’t come cheaply and mass production leaves little room for cultural expression, sometimes derogatorily referred to as mere “style”. It is now time for designers to express the rich cultural differences between Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales using their skills to reveal what’s especially valuable in our culture, what adds value to products and services and makes us distinct in a european and global marketplace.

Architecture, art and design don’t exist in a vacuum, but are influenced by and express culture, economics and politics. Glasgow and Scotland are learning to their cost the price of undervaluing the culture of a city and a nation. Glasgow and Scotland have particular qualities which can’t be measured by numbers alone, but need to be expressed and explained through the design process.

Instead of preaching utility and restraint, in the lip service of economic recovery and environmental conservation, we should celebrate and explore our culture differences through every conceivable form of art and design.

Design, art and architecture don’t exist in a vacuum, apart from everyday life. Many people understand the skill and intelligence required to ‘turn around’ a company, identifying and communicating it’s strengths and developing strategies which will minimise it’s weaknesses. It is a demanding, broad-based activity which has much less to do with logos and slogans and much more to do with understanding the underlying ideologies, the fundamental dynamics of what makes a place special and different from any other. Success has a lot to do with explaining and encouraging people to participate in the process, to believe in their city and have aspirations for it’s success. Cultural turnaround can’t simply be bought or brought into being through clever advertising, superficial design or gallery based art.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living. These differences are expressed through everyday rituals, through art, sport, buildings, environment, products and services. These differences are unique and precious and should be celebrated. They are more important (and more fragile) than the international diet of state culture: the ballet, opera. symphony orchestra, national theatre and gallery, because they give us the sense that we have a distinct, recognisable and hopefully desirable, identity.

In business, difference or personality, offer advantages in an increasingly competitive marketplace, giving and advantage which can’t be measured in monetary terms alone. In a federalised European marketplace differences allow us to be distinctive and competitive. In Britain, in the nineties, we need to move away from our increasingly centralised model where all things revolve around Westminster.

As creative people charged with the responsibility of interpreting the world around us, we must learn to identify, understand, value and communicate the essence of all our regional riches, our second cities, through product and service industries, architecture and the arts if we are to rebuild our economy and society in the new millennium.

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

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

If we can take the time to understand and explain the economic and social benefits of what we do to politicians and strategists, encouraging them to use design and creativity as the tool for economic regeneration, Glasgow and the rest of Britain could be quite a place – this is really important to me, it’s my sole mission in life and my reason for staying here.

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

I am really interested in what happens to Glaswegian culture. What happens if it is denied and means of physical, tangible expression through products and buildings, when the only products you can buy are Japanese and the only public buildings are designed by safe, star architects, when the only housing is Beezer Homes’ tudor vernacular. I am not a nationalist but it’s very difficult to be ‘Scottish in the nineties’ when all the props in the play are Japanese or dralon reproductions of Louis XIV’s boudoir.

I love having products of other cultures around me but would like to have the choice of English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh products and services too. Service industries need design as much as manufacturing as it is only through design and the arts that they become tangible and visible, through architecture, clothing and graphic communication.

Glasgow has moved a long way 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 has no outlet to express it’s old ideologies and channel the old pride in new constructive ways. To actively deny any country the right to manufacture is to deny it’s right to exist in the real world – it becomes invisible or frozen in time. Any country’s success as a civilised nation can be directly measured in the artifacts it leaves behind: I wonder what the archeologists of the future will make of ‘once great Britain’?

In recent years many ill conceived or underfunded accolades have been created to help distinguish our industrially emasculated cities. Many have attached ‘festivals’, and titles are awarded through competition: ‘European City of Culture’, The Garden Festival, Years of the Artist, new opera houses, conference centres, concert halls , and sports events including the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. All demand cities commit already over stretched resources to secure a chance of competing and winning.

Few of these themed events are truly innovative or even worth while, most are based on the displays of imperial power so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anachronistic re-workings of old ideals which lie comfortably with current political daydreams of going back to the future, back to basics, and quite simply backwards to the bad old days our parents and grandparents fought two world wars to change.

Glasgow has already been successful in winning the title of ‘European City of Culture’ in 1990 and the ‘Garden Festival’ in 1988 and is very aware that neither title offered long term, integrated remedies for a deeply traumatised society. These titles acted as useful markers, shorter term goals, which raised public awareness and recreated a sense of potency and pride in the city.

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

Stephano Marzano, in the Design Renaissance conference held in Glasgow at the end of 1993, said that, “Design is a political activity”. Glasgow knows that design, because of it’s analytical, creative process and ability to generate wealth creating products, can help identify the real problems which underpin the city today. Homelessness, unemployment, drug abuse and lack of cultural identity are all symptoms of more deeply rooted problems which tend to be treated in a tactical and superficial way by politicians.

The creative process can help solve some of these underlying problems. Through creating employment in new product and service industries, these have massive cultural benefits as well as economic ones. Through creating an accessible and attractive environment and educating, empowering and encouraging the public to take part in designing the future. Through showing people a new perspective on their world through art.

Glasgow must design it’s way out of it’s current problems through actively using creativity. When used to it’s full potential design is a powerful force for creating strategy, influencing the economy and revealing the very best of British culture in all it’s different regional and urban forms. I believe that in placing design at the top of the agenda Glasgow will enter the new millennium in the same powerful manner as it left the old.

Does Branding Matter?

As I’ve been charged with explaining the fundamentals of branding, let’s get two things straight—branding is the ‘emperor’s new clothes’, and, you have invited me here to tell you something that you already know.

Branding is a new name for a very old activity—that of human communication. To understand brands you must first of all understand how people communicate.

We communicate not only through spoken and written words and still and moving images, but through all of our senses; through touch, sound, temperature, movement, colour, smell and taste. This is called the sensorial vocabulary. (You know that you’ve entered a church, even if your eyes are closed, because …)

While we’re processing all of the information collected through our senses, we’re also making intuitive decisions predicated on our own values: is a thing made of stone or concrete; how heavy is it; how high is it; how big or small; where is it located; what’s it next to; is it glass or plastic, chrome or gold; if it’s a space—is it large or small, warm or cold; how much does it cost per square foot? This is called our cultural vocabulary.

The qualities and values that are important to us, may not be important to others, they vary from country to country and region to region, and sometimes even from street to street and door to door. This is why global organisations invest in big Human Factors departments in order to understand and meet the needs of their diverse target markets.

All of us collect and process vast amounts of complicated information all of the time we’re awake. We use this information to tell us how to act; who to trust, what to buy and where to go; its how we survive. We’re all experts at doing this because we’ve been doing it for thousands of years before the word ‘brand’ was ever invented.

The best way to understand how we now communicate using books, brands, buildings and all of the supposedly inanimate stuff around us, is to slow down and ask ourselves questions about why we’re doing something, exactly what we’re doing and how we feel or behave when we’re doing it; whether its choosing to walk down one street rather than another; buy one kind of washing powder rather than another, flick through a magazine then finding ourselves drawn to one story rather than another; or altering our voice, pace and demeanour when we enter a pub, or a church or our own front room. All of this will help us to understand exactly how our environment affects our behaviour. Brands are one of the ways in which designers manipulate our behaviour. Understanding how we react to brands is the first step in learning how to control brands.

Winston Churchill said; “First we shape our buildings, then they shape us”. Or in other words, we collude in the creation of our own environment. This is especially true of brands. Brands only become brands if we want them to. Brands demand our attention and support if they are to exist at all. And brands demand our collective recognition if they are to survive.

The word ‘brand’ was born when cattle in the great mid-West were burned with symbols that represented romantic sounding ranches like the ‘Lazy S’ or the ‘Broken O’. This simple exercise in remembering ‘who owned what’ happened at a time when manufacturing industries were gathering steam throughout the developing West.

People could now identify which ranch an animal came from, they also knew which ‘make’ of cigarettes they smoked and which kind whisky they drank. Brands became synonymous with ‘place of origin’; products like ‘Virginia tobacco’ become ‘Golden Virginia’; which was regarded as much more than an adequately good smoke; by unspoken consensus it inferred that the product was something that was somehow ‘rich’, ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’.

A brand, originally often crudely composed of letters, words and marks, came to represent much more than the sum of the its tangible parts; a whole corollary of intangible values were bundled along with it.

We’d invented an efficient, shorthand way of communicating lots of complicated ideas and values using an apparently simple system of letters, words and marks.

Today, the intangible parts of many brands have come to mean more that the tangible bits—Coca-Cola isn’t ‘It’ without the stuff that surrounds it—it’s only a drab-coloured, foul-tasting, fizzy liquid; the product has become a by-product. Likewise, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, the ‘It’ girl, is little more than an empty vessel without the added-values of her branded lifestyle. Other brands even replace generic terms and enter common speech, such as ‘Hoover’, ‘Bovril’, ‘Oxo’, ‘Rizla’, ‘Coke’ and ‘Sqezy’.

The rise of the brand as a system of communication was cataclysmic because most new products and services were made and sold in North America and Europe, where people shared much the same values and attitudes. And, because the system was flexible it meant that as ideas gradually changed and progressed, the brands imperceptibly, incrementally adapted to accommodate that change; think of the evolution of Ford, Guinness and Coca-Cola; brands that have been around for over a century. They were created at a time when brands represented ‘progress’ and all progress was good.

Despite anti-globalisation and anti-brand, anti-consumer feeling, ‘brands’ continue to be so successful for two big reasons; brands are flexible and fast. Firstly, brands aren’t absolute, we get to put our own spin on what they mean to us, and our cultural group. Secondly, we now have so little time left in our busy lives that brands allow us to say lots of things, quickly, and that can be really useful.

But don’t be fooled—brands aren’t simple systems of communication. As the saying goes, ‘we get from art what we take to it’, and so it holds for brands; we get from brands what we take to them.

Some of the best brands may appear to be simple but they have many layers of meaning, and entire departments within global corporations dedicated to re-investing them with new meanings; to cleverly and covertly prompt generations to think about what Citroen, Burberry, P&O Cruises or Maclean’s toothpaste could mean to them.

Such is our collusion in the creation of brands that this process is even regarded as a game by both producer and consumer—consider the ‘Guinness is good for you’, and, ‘Genius’ advertising campaigns, or those of Silk Cut, Benson & Hedges, Walker’s crisps, or even Pot Noodle, ‘the slag of snacks’.

The really clever brands aren’t even product or service specific, they can shift from their core area of operation and transfer their power into new areas: Tesco, M&S and Asda sell financial products and petrol, most broadsheet newspapers sell holidays, Harley Davidson earn more from selling swimsuits and aftershave than they ever did from selling bikes, and David Beckham earns more from sponsoring mobile phones and leisurewear that he does for playing football.

Businesses dealing with branded consumer goods spend much of their time tickling, twitching and winking at their would-be customers in order to get them to think about their products in new ways. It’s a subtle game, but we’re all experts at it, and sometimes unconscious participants in it.

Graphic brands are generally composed of letters, typography and marks. But it’s important to realise that language is more than words, it is an enabling mechanism that encourages people to behave in particular ways. The ‘It’ in, ‘Coke is it’, isn’t just any old ‘it’, it’s the exact groovy, hip, in-thing ‘it’ at any given time and for every social group, from skateboarders to stockbrokers. The context in which the words are presented, and style of the typography in which they are typeset, affects the meaning of ‘it’.

Typography is a container for language that changes its meaning. Just as water served in a crystal glass appears to be of different value than water served in a plastic cup—the setting of words in different typefaces has the same effect on language.

According to Umberto Eco, there are three classifications of marks, or ‘signs’; these are symbols, icons and indices.

Symbols literally symbolise the things they represent. They’re really useful when you’re trying to find the toilet but you don’t speak Chinese. You find them in airports but you can also find them on Mont Blanc pens and Apple Mac computers.

Icons are a mirror image of the thing your trying to communicate, they’re often representational or figurative in form, like the classical figure of Justice with her scales, or the mark that tells you where to dispose of your rubbish, or which port to plug the printer into.

Indices make the most powerful and memorable marks. They are usually surreal and enter our subconscious at a deep level. Think no further than Nike’s Swoosh.

Language, type and marks, together with still and moving images, form the basis of a structured system of graphic communication.

Less then 5% of the investment in a branded system is spent on the glamorous ‘creative’ stuff. The really creative bits are often hidden and include working with organisations to find the best possible structure for their communications, which often doesn’t mirror their legal or organisational structure. Over 95% of our time is occupied in the development and testing of robust and stable systems that allow businesses to communicate with their target markets in consistent and controlled ways. They often allow them to speak to different audiences, using many different ‘voices’, simultaneously.

The process of organising your corporate communications is an excellent way to rationalise and streamline your business processes. Design is essentially about control, and using the creative process to bring order to the world, and to your business. This is why re-branding is often in the business pages—not because of what it does to the outside of a petrol pump or a carrier bag, but because of what it does to the business behind the brand.

But, graphic designers don’t have a monopoly on communication. Objects, spaces and buildings communicate too.

How often do you receive brochures and leaflets about a banking service that portrays an organised, friendly and customer-focussed organisation? Only to turn up at the bank to find long queues, unfriendly and unhelpful staff and rampant bureaucracy, but always lots of posters that show the same (now) irritating graphics that persuaded you to go there in the first place? This isn’t just true of banks, but most service industries.

The Marketing departments and Facilities departments in most big businesses never meet, let alone discuss how they can work together to ensure they’re both on-message, and to deliver an integrated customer experience. And by this I don’t simply mean sticking a logo on the carpet—that’s probably the worst thing you could do.

At Graven Images we’re familiar with the problem of communicating across two and three dimensions, because we’ve always worked across traditional design disciplines and employ architects, interior designers and graphic designers.

We’ve even developed our own methodology that analyses and controls how messages are delivered in three dimensional spaces. We can then track the information delivered along a given route to ensure that visitor and customer experiences meet, or exceed expectations.

To recap, branding is about helping businesses communicate appropriate, consistent and controlled messages across two and three dimensions.

At the beginning of my presentation: I told you that you’d invited me here to tell you something that you already knew, and that remains the case, some of you maybe just weren’t aware of it.

And in answer to your original question, Does Branding Matter? Yes. It does. Whether you like it or not.

There are two big reasons to invest in design. Leon Allen, the man who worked for Nabisco and Procter & Gamble before buying Del Monte, Devro and Tetley Tea explains the first.

“Almost no-one really buys on price—they buy because they trust the brand, like the company or like the packaging.” Leon Allen.

The second reason is because the best designers are educated to analyse tangible and intangible data. To quickly unpick complex webs of communication. To structure information in ways that make it comprehensible, to you and your clients and customers, here and abroad. Designers can help you to control how specific messages are delivered, in two and three dimensions, and in still and moving media, time after time after time. And clear communication usually makes cash.

BBC

BSE labels (Louise Dysdale): nice white packages for everyday products (handcream, chocolate, etc) stuck to the wall each with a barcode with a cow in it – the label tells you which bits of cow are used in each product.

Design as conceptual and political activity, designers are not passive but play an active role in the interpretation of a brief.

Alcohol project (Amanda Turner): very strong anti-alcohol campaign (best here I thought) – three pieces – excellent poster (‘We all have our limits’) with whisky bottle marked with lines down its side, each line with words (first line – ‘Ahh that’s lovely’ down to ‘Ah’ll punch yir heed inn’ and domestic violence). Second piece, glass head filled with whisky with lines marked on forehead and cap placed on head. Line cap up with middle line, person is sober, line it up with bottom line, person is drunk, line it up with top line, person is steamin’ – really good. Also, piece with plate: first place (25 Dec) is whole, with black and white family picture on it, second plate is just a fragment of the first (1 Jan), third plate is the same plate glued back together but with a section missing (8 Jan). Very personal work because her own father is alcoholic.

Personal, powerful and political.

Dyslexia project (Matthew Wood): Nice project, he is dyslexic himself and has created some strong visual images to help people understand dyslexia and to use with dyslexic children. Thick pencil made out of thorny rose branch, line of four books, one shrinkwrapped in plastic, one with nails coming out of it, one with a bolt through it, one with a padlock on it. Not much to say about these but images speak for themselves.

Communication allows us to participate in society, typography is a ‘container for language’, an interesting exploration of what happens when language is ‘mis-communicated’.

Colour blindness project (Mark McLaren): again, images speak for themselves so not much explanation needed, but nice box of pencils with descriptions of how he (as colour blind person) sees the colours – definitely green, purple but could be red, blue but might be green – this sort of thing.

The world through blunted sight, a special perspective on the world through colour blind eyes – it’s a constructive way to reveal a problem which is difficult to understand.

Dog’s Dinner campaign (Harry Kinloch): strong, funny advertising campaign for dog food: Disgusting to us, delicious to them. Quirky because the people that he has photographed with the dogs are really disgusting looking.

Clever to use the traditionally negative aspects of a product to attract the customer, Humour is a powerful selling tool.

Your Business Image Counts

Our world is full of images, on television, in advertising and magazines. Images that blur the boundaries between what’s real and what’s false. Today, images are often more important than the things they describe; reality comes a poor second to illusion and fantasy. The image-making industries are flourishing and ‘image makers’, the people and organisations who create them, are worshipped as celebrities: fashion designers, photographers, ad men, models, actors, actresses, movie directors and media producers. Even Bill Gates, Greg Dyke, Rupert Murdoch and Alastair Campbell are familiar household names.

We consume images as readily as we breathe. We’re all susceptible to things that look good and to the values represented by a premium brand: Gucci, Prada, Gap, Ferrari, Rolex … Coke is it—or is it? What is it? Does the world’s biggest brand—this chemical-tasting brown drink, actually taste good? Do you feel able to judge?

We try to ignore the media that increasing crowds our space and we try to grow immune to the messages, because they’re stressful, or even hurtful. They’re usually selling us something, whether it’s soap powder, cigarettes, a new lifestyle or an old religion. But no matter how hard we try we never quite manage to avert our eyes because at a subconscious level we’re endlessly searching for more information, for more clues to help us understand the world and our relationship with it and with each other. As humans, we’re pre-programmed to try and make sense of it all, to find order amongst the chaos of information and to try and salvage some feeling of control over our lives. Visual language, ‘image’, is one of the many ways we communicate. We may listen to each other, to what we say and how we say it, but we also read each other: What’s she driving? What does it mean? What’s she wearing? What’s that perfume? What’s her accent? Where does she come from? Is she superior, inferior? What’s her hair like? What’s she into? Is she my kind of person?

We don’t just communicate through spoken and written language. We use all of our senses. We often say more through the objects we choose to surround ourselves with that we do with our words. In David Fincher’s film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character searches for his personality amongst the furnishings of his luxury apartment, asking, “What kind of dining-set defines me as a person?”

Objects and buildings are the props and backdrops against which we play out the drama of our everyday lives. In fact, the theatre is a good analogy when it comes to explaining what architects and designers do, because we all wear costumes, we all buy props; furniture, cars and household goods and we usually spend most of our resources creating our central backdrop, our homes. When we’re away from home we’re often just as selective when it comes to choosing the ‘right’ place in which to be seen; the right club or bar or restaurant. The truth is we’re all unconscious experts when it comes to rearranging our furniture to produce a particular effect or to elicit a desired response from our friends and colleagues.

Just consider for a moment the questions you ask yourself when you’re buying—a new kettle, for instance:

How much is it? Is it made of plastic? Does this mean it’s cheap or chic? Does it feel cheerful, or modern, or recyclable? Will it leak? What colour is it? Should it match my kitchen? Will plastic discolour? Will it scratch? How does it feel to hold? Does it feel light? Does this make it feel cheap? Does it feel nice? Is it textured? Does it feel stable? Is it functional and easy to use? Is it pleasurable to use? How well does it pour? Will the kids be able to use it? The metal one looks hi-tech but will it be too heavy? Does this mean it’s more expensive? Better quality? Will it make my kitchen look low-tech and old fashioned? How do I know when the water’s boiled? What sound does it make? Will it whistle like a bird or toot like a train? Will it be a talking point? Is it silly? Will people laugh at me? What sound should it make? Is it fashionable? Do I like it? Can I afford it? Can I afford not to have it? And so it goes on—just listen to yourself next time your about to buy something, anything!

We learn so much more about our motivation for liking or disliking images and objects when we slow down and question how we respond to them. But only once we’ve learned to unpick our thoughts can we really climb into the driving seat.

Most of us feel out of our depth when it comes to understanding and controlling our image. Sometimes I wonder how we ever get dressed in the morning when we have to agonise over what to wear and what people will think of our choices. We all dread miscommunicating and being misunderstood and we all dread being out of control.

Few of us are taught to understand and manipulate our image in order to make people react in controlled and predictable ways. But that’s just what designers do, because design is isn’t really about decorating or styling or making things pretty and fashionable, it’s about being in control.

Designers are only the most recent addition to a long list of ‘ancient controllers’ including scribes, architects, artists, kings, queens, priests and magicians who have helped to shape environments and influence how the people who live in them think and act. All have controlled the creation of cities and civilisations from a confusion of dust and rituals, responding to our ancient fear of chaos and disorder. The pyramids, sports cars, suits and household goods all help us to form a tangible image of who we are, where we come from and what we believe in. Together they form an eloquent world without words.

Image really does matter. But the most important thing is to be in control of it, not controlled by it. And in order to control your business image you must first define what you are, what you do, what you believe in and what your customers want. Then you can begin to assemble the appropriate stage set, props and costumes to ensure you communicate clearly with your employees, clients or customers.

Graven Images

Creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, it is the civilising force and the thing that separates us all of us from animals. But the practice of ‘Design’, as we know it only appeared in the 1830s. ‘Design’ was created by industry in order to meet the needs of the first industrial revolution. The Glasgow School of Art is the second oldest undergraduate school of art and design in the world, founded in 1844, seven years after The Royal College of Art in London which is now a postgraduate institution. This is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to remain in Scotland—because I believe we have always valued the importance of creativity in our culture and economy. Graven Images is a ‘creative industry’, part of the new ‘knowledge economy’. If you doubt me it’s worth remembering that 40% of all patents granted in the last 50 years are British and most of these were granted to Scots. Scotland was, and remains, at the centre of the new creative economy. We like being in Scotland.

Explain what Graven Images does: JK graphic designer and Creative Director of GI. Founded in Glasgow in 1985. Interdisciplinary, international. We’ve got 19 people working in 3 broad areas: graphic design, interior design and exhibition design. We keep the core of our company small and extent our capability by working in partnership with other specialists; musicians, film-makers, technicians and artists.

Graven Images’ identity exists only through our work, and our networks (and writing).

The identity of a company exists firstly through the people who work there. The personality of a company is communicated by their vision, their values, words and actions. As designers, what we do is understand the vision and values of a company and then crystallise these in objects and architecture, usually in print, or as an environment. We provide the props and the backdrops that allow people to perform, to play out the rituals of their daily business—every business is different but it might be hard to distinguish one from the other without the help of graphic identities.

The best way to understand graphic design; typefaces and symbols, is by thinking of typefaces as ‘faces’, or ‘containers for language’, that change its value and meaning. We all look different, and each typeface is different. We use type to say something about ourselves when there’s no one there to say it for us—business cards and letterheads act as an extension of ourselves and our companies. Before we had invented the technology to create books, we carried information and stories around within ourselves, but when books were created they, like us, were visceral; bound in skin, with a spine and containing typefaces.

Objects and architecture also act as extensions of ourselves and our beliefs and we can use them to help others understand what we stand for. Buildings also communicate, think about what happens when you enter a church …

Design isn’t just about style or taste or fashion. It’s a new word for a very old practice, that of controlling the evolution of ideas and of creating the world around us. Every human being is creative, designers are just taught to be professionally creative and we underpin our intuition with all sorts of methodologies that help us predict and control our work. At Graven Images we often work with universities who help us understand more about how we work and help us to control, minimise and manage the risk associate with innovation.

We’re currently developing a research centre in Ayrshire because; connections, quality of environment/benefits international clients and contrast with city. Creative industries/knowledge economy and digital communications mean you can work where ever there are connections. This is the future for Scotland.

If I leave you with one thought, please just remember that every discerning shopper is a designer in the making.

Thank you.

Arts, People, Spaces, Inroductions—Charles Esche

‘Culture’ is a difficult subject to talk about because we are all part of it and can never stand apart from it in order to get a better view. Academics constantly fight over it’s definition, but the best definition of culture I’ve come across is ‘social glue’, the stuff that binds us together and makes us into ‘society’.

Culture is highly qualitative in nature and cannot be fully measured, it can only be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. Creativity and the arts are vital in explaining our culture and in helping us to understand the nature of our cultural situation. Because life is constantly changing our culture must be constantly re-defined and re-explained.

Contemporary arts spaces such as Tramway play a vital role within our society as they try not to pre-determine the outcome of a project. Instead they provide space and support to allow new, multi-dimensional creative expressions of culture to occur. They are catalytic spaces which allow the future to form in a new dimension.

Our speaker this morning is Charles Esche who moved from Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge in 1993 to become Visual Arts Programmer at Tramway in Glasgow.

Charles has curated many, many exhibitions and written many catalogue essays and interviews. His curation includes Christine Borland, Christian Boltanski’s Lost and the group show Excavating Ruins which included work by Tony Cragg, Stephen Willats, Art in Ruins and Avis Newman. Charles is a reviewer for may art journals including Artefactum and Portfolio and is a visiting lecturer at many art institutions in Britain, Finland and Japan.

Arne Jacobson Centenary

Arne Jacobson Centenary (of his birth) Evergreens and Nevergreens created by Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen.

In Scotland we’re used to being compared to Denmark. We share many characteristics, including having populations of just over 5 million people and we enjoy similar, northenly locations.

We also have in common, a rich, world-class heritage in design and architecture, which may be a result of our geography. Our rather voyeuristic positions might be said to give creative people the space and distance to be truly original; to benefit from being close to the bulk of Europe, but not overwhelmed by its gravitational pull. I believe that this gives rise to work that is distinctive and extraordinarily rich.

Evergreens and Nevergreens is a special exhibition about the work of this very special Danish man.

Arne Jacobson had extraordinary abilty to work across traditional specialisms rather than confine himself to any one. He disdained being called a designer as he felt that the word failed to describe all that he did. He was born one hundred years ago, the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the Willow Tearooms for Mrs Cranston. Like Mackintosh, Arne Jacobson was comfortable designing a spectrum of objects ranging from buildings to teaspoons and taps, and many of his artifacts share the same monumental purety, beauty and attention to detail.

Jacobson was also an accomplished watercolourist and botanist but unlike Mackintosh, he trancended a craft approach to his work and embraced the manufacturing industries. He did this without losing any of the soft, satisfying perfection, that has become the hallmark of his work. Perhaps it’s just this undefinable quality that ensures his work endures, becoming an icon for other cultures and new generations—it was on his chair that Christine Keeler sat, Jacobson was an icon for the modern era, and his work simply gets better with age.

On behalf of The Lighthouse I welcome you all here tonight. We are absolutely thrilled to host this wonderful exhibition, created by the Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen, during Arne Jacobson’s centenary year. I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this possible.

Before I introduce this evening’s speakers I’d like to ask you to be careful not to trip on the floor tiles and to be careful with your drinks.

I would now like to introduce Kim Casparen, Director of the Danish Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to say a few words, followed by Poul Kristensen, Managing Director and Head of Marketing for Bo Concept—Poul has kindly sponsored this evening’s reception. Bo Concept are a Danish Furniture company and they are about to open their first Glasgow store in Princess Square, so please go along and buy some treasures for your home.

1868-1928

AICA @ RCA conference

Tony kindly invited me to talk about current change in culture and technology within design and the arts. I’ll do that as best I can and while I’m doing it I’ll show some images of our work.

Graven Images is the company I share with my partner and co Director, Ross Hunter, an architect. We’re based in Glasgow, Scotland, which is about 400 miles or one hour North of London by plane. We founded the company after I graduated from Glasgow School of Art and Ross from the Mackintosh School of Architecture back in 1985. We have sixteen full-time employees, mostly architects, interior and graphic designers and we collaborate with a host of other creative people, artists, filmmakers, musicians and other academics who help us realise specific projects.

All of our work is for commercial clients from both the public and private sectors. It falls into roughly three areas; interiors for workplace, retail and leisure sectors, international travelling exhibitions and corporate graphic design. Most of our work is centred in the UK, around 70% in London and the rest a mixture from Europe and abroad—we do have North American clients (and direct flights from Glasgow International Airport). Almost everyone in the West of Scotland has at least one relation in North America, so our connection with you is very strong.

Now

Now is a good time to talk about change because technology and its ensuing cultural upheaval are all around us; it’s as if we’re living in the eye of the tornado. History tells us that times of change usually present many great opportunities for creative people. Today, we’re arguably living through more change that at any other point in the history of civilisation. We can make almost anything we can dream of, we can create new tools that help us design with atomic depth, global scale and superhuman speed—and education is the key to unlocking the potential of our awesome, ever-expanding capabilities. Because education provides us with a process: a framework that allows us to have some control over our ability to shape the future.

I come from a traditional design background. I was originally educated as a graphic designer specialising in film animation, then I became immersed in theory, then I was seduced by architecture and then began making objects. Now I do all of these things, and write. I don’t really care how I’m labelled or in what discipline I ply my trade, I find that with a little thought and some work I can transfer the creative process that underpins my work from one discipline to another. This is just as well because graphic design as I first knew it bears little relation to how it is practised today, and I’ve no idea what it will look like tomorrow.

Maybe I should give some context:

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

Creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, it is the civilising force and the thing that separates us from animals. But, ‘design’, as we know it, only appeared in the 1830s. ‘Design’ was created by industry in order to meet the needs of industry. For our sins, the oldest schools of design in the world are here in the UK. The Glasgow School of Art is the second oldest school, founded in 1844, only seven years after The Royal College of Art.

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

But, it’s worth examining Design’s distinguished if rather short history because it describes the progress of the last 170 years. It encompasses the mechanisation of craft traditions, the Modernisation of the West, the growth of the motorcar and proliferation of electrical appliances, television, radio, sanitary and social housing, branding, advertising and global communications. Design, more than everything else in the world, struggles to keep pace with the rate of progress. Design strives to capture and contain change, to crystallise it and transform it into meaningful or usable things. Design helps to create the illusion that we can control progress. In fact it only humanises it by giving it some weight, a sound or a familiar shape. Maybe, it gives it a typeface or a handle or turns it into a ritual that helps to make our uncertain future appear a little less blatantly terrifying.

The most cataclysmic changes in the way creative people work have occurred in the last ten years, and they show no signs of slowing down. The current digital revolution came upon all of us so quickly that many of us were forced to change the way we worked overnight, or wither away.

Having spent all of my professional life 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. The graphics studio changed shape overnight; 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 studio the architects and interior designers lost all but one of their drawing boards, complete with their parallel motions. They also lost Rotring technical pens and endless bottles of black ink. French curves and adjustable set-squares were next to go. Apple Macs began to appear in our studio, so, we dismantled the process camera that had been an integral part of graphic production (and had originally been craned into position). We took it apart bit-by-bit and threw it out with the trash—one day it had been worth twenty-five thousand dollars, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worthless—we couldn’t even give it away. Today the studio looks less cluttered. I use electronic mail, a mobile phone and a laptop which conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed. However, a few important things remain—like my sketch books and pencils.

Change is the most real, meaningful and overwhelming fact of my life as a designer. I spend my time trying to understand how it affects my clients and their businesses but it’s almost impossible to keep pace. No one knows what Design will be tomorrow, least of all me.

For fifteen 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, slipping easily between two and three dimensions. It’s certainly eased our transformation from a traditional design consultancy into ‘new creative industry’ and the people we employ 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.

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 employ graduates from the arts, humanities and business schools as I am to employ graduates from design or the fine arts. I’m also much more likely to employ people with specific skills on a job-by-job basis or to forge informal partnerships with people and organisations that complement my own. I form companies and joint ventures to do specific projects but keep my core business small, light and flexible—because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

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’s 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.

Education

The speed of change makes it almost impossible for educators to predict what the world will require of their students. Therefore I believe it’s useful to provide a broad education coupled with specific specialist areas of study—this probably sounds familiar and it seems to work.

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

Graduates must also be flexible because the chances are that they’ll work in many fields other than those that they originally specialised in. As creative people from many different disciplines work across common software platforms it’s increasingly necessary for graduates to work across traditional disciplines. Therefore an appreciation of how others work is practically useful. I especially enjoy working with people who have the energy and the confidence to challenge each other, their clients and superiors, and generally keep life interesting for all of us. We’ve all got to be energetic and wide awake and prepared to challenge or discard old ways of doing things—graduates can help us do this by being inquisitive, open-minded and strong.

However, I do find that graduates who have real competence in at least one technical skill are more secure and sure of themselves, and it doesn’t really matter what that skill is. Being really good at something, knowing something really well, makes you value the complexity of all that you don’t know. This encourages humility, which I believe is a good quality in a fuzzy world that doesn’t stand still long enough to have immutable rights or wrongs; a world that creates more information that any one of us can ever know.

When I talk about technical skills I’m talking about more than software training. Software training provides ‘tools’ for creative people but it’s no substitute for learning core skills such as reading, writing, drawing, analysing and understanding; these skills help us to control our creativity rather than just play with it. Vocational training is not education. Creative businesses demand confident, intelligent and educated graduates with strong opinions and a structured process that underpins their intuition and their work.

In Graven Images we continue to use the core skills we were given in art school in new ways. We’re currently building a research centre because we’ve recognised that as our clients and their budgets grow so too does the risk associated with an intuitive response to their design problems. We’re developing new ways of understanding and validating our work because this helps to accurately define problems, measure risks and ultimately give us more control over our intuition.

We’re also reinvesting in what we’ve identified as expert skills, such as in our ability to communicate with type, because for the time being, text-based knowledge remains the core of our communications system in both the real and virtual worlds, and English the international language of choice.

I find it worrying that many graduates can’t spell or write in sentences or don’t know how to set type that actually communicates. I believe the ability to communicate in spoken and written language is becoming increasingly valuable. I continue to exploit my graphic heritage through writing, and publishing, broadcasting, because I can, and because my education has helped me flourish in a changing world.

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 to endlessly find fee paying clients, instead, we become our own client, turning our creativity: the richest and most abundant natural asset, into a tangible, lucrative commodity—we have become a primary industry.

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

Speed

As educators, change provides us with many rich opportunities, and for the first time in history, technology provides us with the means to move quickly in order to exploit them. It helps us, in the UK, to transcend our sometimes overwhelming links with heavy industrial history and move more lightly ahead.

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

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

This time round graduates were equipped with the skills they needed to enter industry and win jobs. Young people were educated to become employees.

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

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

Creative education has rarely kept pace with change and it never will unless it stops merely reacting to the needs of old fashioned, monolithic industries. As well as providing useful graduates who can become both employees and employers. Art schools can literally return to their roots and work with industry to help predict and shape the future, to guide industry through change by demonstrating the benefits it brings. Change terrifies industry but it’s the lifeblood of creativity, innovation and the arts.

While UK 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 UK Business is to inherit its share of creative action.

The US and the UK are widely acknowledged as the world’s great reservoirs of creativity and innovation. However, I believe we’re all living on a creative legacy that desperately needs replenishing because it’s in danger of becoming depleted.

In the UK 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.

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.

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 rest of us who need it most, education must become fast and virtual, too. Because we all need creative education, we need it everywhere as never before: and we need it all of the time, 24 hours a day.

Janice Creative Process

Ross Hunter and I formed Graven Images Limited when we left Glasgow School of Art almost ten years ago. Forming the company was an alternative to going on an industrial placement while on the MA Design course. We had both been offered employment elsewhere but decided to see if we could make a go of it in Glasgow as we had nothing to lose and it was an opportunity to see if a multi-disciplinary, European design consultancy could work. It did and we brought in other people to work with. We have graphic designers, interior designers and an architect all working together.

Central to my belief, and all we do at Graven Images, is a shared understanding of what we mean by the term ‘design’. Most of the problems designers have, our current lack of power and achievement, stems from our inability to understand what we do and how we can help make the world a better place. We, as designers, fail to explain this to the wider public, who are subsequently right to distrust us.

I believe that architects and fine artists are also designers as we share the same creative process before we are named after a specific specialist skill such as sculptor, architect, graphic designer.

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

The production of art sometimes involves more intuition and less analytical method than architecture and design, but not always. I firmly believe that artists, architects and designers would find it easier to explain to other people, our clients, what it is we do if we would only recognise the common ground we share rather than pigeon-holing ourselves according to our preferred specialism.

Design, as well as being a clearly understood and well documented process is a powerful tool for revealing change. The ‘creative process’ is also described as ‘the controlled evolution of ideas’, bringing order out of apparent chaos, creating cities out of a confusion of dust and ritual. The creative process helps us make sense out of the world around us and presents information in a structure which we can understand and manipulate. It makes magicians out of all of us and allows us to wield powers which can evoke change. We have the power to reveal only the things we wish the rest of the world to see. I think it’s really important that designers understand that design is a political activity and that we can create wealth and enhance peoples lives.

Scotland is a poor country and it desperately needs to manufacture …  director, Graven Images: “A big part of being successful is to remind yourself of what you’re best at and what makes you happiest.”

11 Downing Street

1 1986 @ GSA instead of industrial placement – a happy accident and nothing to lose!

– creative collaboration across disciplines, ” European”, and now very fashionable, from base in Glasgow

– belief that all creative process is common and shared – technical specialisms set us apart

– now £1M/year turnover and 17 people

2 we have architects, interior and graphic designers and work in collaboration with musicians, film-makers and other specialists

– clients in UK and abroad including DTI, British Council, IBM, Babtie Group and Royal Mail

– corporate graphics, publications, signage, retail and workplace interiors, pubs, clubs, restaurants and international exhibitions

3 what we do – design is about shaping and controlling experience. We help our clients to control their transactions with their own customers and clients.

Design operates at the crossroads between art and commerce, underpinning intuition with methodology in order to give culture a tangible shape that can be turned into business (next century creativity will be everything).

4 The interiors, objects and publications we collectively create form the backdrop, props and dialogue in our “national theatre”. All industries are cultural industries and every nation will judge us on the quality of our performance!

– Glasgow – memory of excellence and determination to be great again – bias towards risk and innovation, dangerous opportunities. There are no cosy niches.

5 GIL’s future is in consolodating “core” expertise but also exploiting it to form new businesses with partners who have complimentary skills and shared values.

– restaurant with Nick Nairn

– long relationship with education

– broadcasting

– writing and publications

6 4 ideas (based on an agricultural paradigm!)

– business parenting

– business breeding

– valuing mongrels

– looking for lost lambs

7 practise good parenting

– get graduates and turn naivety and idealism into new businesses – they’ve nothing to lose and have great clarity of vision

– give them help and support to aid them in the transition to commercial reality

– every business is different – can’t “teach” business but you can explain principles

8 breed businesses

– get people from disparate areas of arts and sciences to come together and talk because this breeds collaboration and businesses

– reduce cost of business travel (£300 return Glasgow to London)

9 value mongrels

sciences and arts are converging at alarming speed – they’re sharing tools: common software and hardware

– old categorisation of areas of expertise must change – this starts in education but must reach high street lenders: they must be taught to recognise and support mongrels.

– GIL had to become property developers in order to create capital to run the business.

10 look for lost lambs

Move the focus of the media away from London. People need to know what we do – we work, and spend, hard to ensure we’re visible but others can’t afford to.

London-based media repeatedly creates the false impression that nothing of worth happens north of Watford. This has a very real effect on our ability to attract investment and I’m convinced it has slowed business growth in the North.

– you believe what you see and read – if it’s not on the telly or in the press then it’s not happening.

Urban Living—What makes good design in cities?

Urban Living—What makes good design in cities (in the present day)?

Rather than using slides to illustrate my words I’m going to show a ten minute slice of Glasgow, a random ten minute walk from my studio to my lawyers and then to lunch. It’s a route I’ve walked hundreds of times that never bores me because there’s a robustness and complexity and change-ability about it that keeps it interesting. This, for me, is a good place to ask the question:

What is good design in urban settings, in the present day?

It’s a strange question to be asked; “what makes good design in cities”—“in the present day”—as if I could ever find the answer to such a question.

Previous generations would have confidently and answered this question, sure that theirs was the only right answer.

The Victorians answered this question by destroying medieval Glasgow. They completely re-planned and reconstructed the city according to their need for power and desire for wealth, all carefully disguised as social ‘improvement’. The Victorians erased everything that had gone before them, leaving behind only two medieval buildings: the cathedral and the Provand’s Lordship.

Modernism too, swept through Europe and took some of Glasgow with it, demanding that the city now conform to a new ideal. But Glasgow’s horizontal rain dissolved the Modern experiment before it gathered the momentum—there wasn’t much call for Brise Soleil in the land of rickets. But Modernism’s failure to modernise Glasgow and turn it into a Birmingham or a Liverpool sent the planners and improvers scurrying back to the safety of sandstone and monolithic legacy of Victoriana that endures today.

Personally, I take the question, “What is good design in urban settings, in the present day”, as a warning.

As any of you who live in cities know, good urban design is much more than great architecture or signage and sewage systems. It’s much more than affordable transportation that actually takes you where you want to go. It’s even more than the service and product industries that many of us help create through our architectural, interior, product, graphic and interactive design.

But I do think, “what makes good design in cities, in the present day”, is a good question to ask because it’s only now, today, that it’s become acceptable not to have the answer to such a question. This says how much the role of the architect or the designer has changed in the last twenty-five years. I sincerely hope that design has moved to a less arrogant and more useful position, one where it can play a really useful role as part of a team in helping to create great places to live.

We now know that successful, thriving cities are complex and fragile environments that can be easily destroyed. They’re much more than the sum of their physical parts, much more than what we can touch and see.

I think that the things that make Glasgow work well as a city are the same things that make Manchester and Dublin work well: a happy mixture of people in secure jobs who live out the larger part of their lives in the city and energised by a thriving community. Above all else cities need active people. They must also have:

Individuality—Cities need to be allowed to become themselves. To do this they need planner, politician, strategists and people who are brave enough to risk being different. Cities that manage to keep their local pubs and not automatically build another Modern Art Gallery just because it’s what the best-dressed cities are wearing this year. Cities also must have:

Ambiguity—A good city should be complex enough to make you work hard to get under its skin. It’s got to have more than a good shopping street to be a success. It must have enough content to be different things to different people on different days of the week. It might have the most exclusive shopping this side of London, but swathes of the city are given over to peddling second-hand underwear and false teeth; it may have an international legacy in art and architecture, and in football. They should also have:

Depth—So they reveals more of themselves to you over time. You should be able to live in a city for a lifetime and never fully comprehend it – it should hold you, enthrall you and make you sad to leave it. It should be capable of making you feel at home and yet you should still find parts of it where you’re made to feel like a complete stranger. Like a classic text a city must have the depth to satisfy. You will be able to randomly dip into its pages and find surprises and treasures, or read one page every day for the rest of your life and still feel satisfied. But great cities also must have:

Conflict—A good city should force you to touch someone, have an argument with someone and provide you with a civilised means of interaction and escape. To do this cities must be dense, with alleyways, public spaces, public toilets, parks, churches and other clubs. Density is the precondition for bumping into someone in the first place. You must feel able to talk to strangers without having to do it on the telephone. But cities must also have:

Cohesion—They must have a physical consistency, textures and materials that make them homogeneous. They must be one city not a collection of separate parts. Transportation is an important part of this. You should be able to walk from one part to another, and run, and cycle, and use a car, or a bus or a train. How a city talks about itself: its centre and East End and West End, Rive Gauche, Southside or riverside reveals to you its different faces, its perceptions of itself. Cities are living things and like us they have a:

Memory—The collective memory of a city betrays its history, depth, cohesion, conflict and ambiguity. Memories of industrial might or educational excellence or scientific discovery live on in the hearts and minds of subsequent generations while architecture marks tragedies, victories or merely bears witness to the passing of time. Memories provide clues that help us to fix a steady course for the future. In fact memories often have as much to do with future aspirations as with the past events. For its our aspirations that really matter.

Aspiration—drives change. If a city is static it becomes Brugge; a shopping enclave surrounded by canals; a city crystallised in time and trapped by tourism.

Whole cities are much too complex to design. I wish people would stop trying to regard them as large corporate organisations, branding them and giving them logotypes and straplines. Good design in urban settings means wielding the power of change with a light touch, resisting the temptation to replace much with little, much you can see, touch or define with the little you can. It’s very easy to upset the delicate urban ecosystem. Good design in urban settings means protecting the special places that give cities their unique personalities, their idiosyncrasies, their beauty and their ugliness.