People Make Cities: What makes a successful city?

What makes a successful city?

The old urbanist Lewis Mumford says “perhaps the best definition of the city, in its highest aspects, is to say that it is a place designed to offer the widest facilities for significant conversation.”

Conversation… That might be the essence of the city.

Conversations might take place electronically of course but texting is hardly conversation. They happen on street corners, at water coolers, in queues at the post office, on the bus but the best conversations are over a coffee, or a pint, or lunch and as a society we have become very sophisticated at creating settings that help us meet and speak to each other.

The late David Williamson of Matthew Algie, Glasgow’s great old coffee roasters, used to say of Tinderbox “nobody ever goes into a coffee shop because they really need a coffee – the coffee is just an excuse for something else – a date, somewhere to read the paper, wait for a train, do some emails, get out of the rain or the cold, have a conversation.”

Aristotle said “Man is by nature a social animal.” I prefer the intent behind Jimmy Reid’s alternative that “man is social being”.

One of the marks of a good city is the success with which it creates opportunities for people to have conversations with each other.

Conversations are best in the right place and cities offer the theatrical sets and backdrops that dramatise these close interactions.

You can do it in the back of a taxi but it’s the small scale social spaces that occupy the very special zone between the private space of the home an the civic space of streets, squares and plazas.

I imagine that all planners, architects and urbanists recognise Nolli’s plan of Rome. But I’m guessing that quite a few here aren’t familiar so I’ll indulge myself in something that was for me an important influence.

In my first year of architecture at the Mac I was part of a group project that elected to make a Nolli plan of Maryhill Road. Apart from the obvious public spaces on that street like the Community Central Halls and Queens Cross Church, we decided to include all of the pubs, cafes and chip shops as well. And it was quite a challenge because we had to go in to ALL of them and make a quick survey. Now, it would have been rude to go into a bar without buying a drink, so that’s what we did, from 10.00am sharp. I’m not sure how many of you will be familiar with such establishments as The Viking, the Caber Feidh…

I wish I still had the drawing but the point is that it was a brilliant way for us, as callow students to get to know the place beyond the skin-deep impression of streets and buildings.

In later years we designed lots of bars, and coffee shops, some nightclubs, hotels, airport lounges, meeting rooms, tea points, staff restaurants and pretty much everything else in between. We realised that these small-scale stage sets are the places that directly connect the real people that inhabit a city to each other and to the BIG architecture that gives a city its architectural form.

We talk a lot about social spaces and as a business we became good at creating spaces where people are happy to spend time, talking with each other, people watching, revelling in just being there.

Glasgow was a late-comer to the party that cut and pasted high street brands throughout the country. But eventually we got all of the objectionable Wutherspoons, Slug and Lettuces, Yates’s Wine Lodges, Walkabouts, and more recently 5 Guys and Byron’s that exist everywhere else. The property and investment people probably think that Glasgow has been extremely successful in attracting “retail brands”. We often hear that this is the second or third biggest retail destination outside London. Is it anything to be proud of?

The places where we meet are essential parts of the cultural fabric of our cities. People sometimes think that the culture is only what happens after the pre-theatre menu but for me the social spaces are the theatre. In our culture these little public spaces are how we welcome our visitors, how we celebrate and pass the time with each other.

I’ll go back to that key word in the title of this seminar – what makes a successful city…Success… Interesting that you wouldn’t choose to just ask the question “what makes a good city”? Implicit in the choice of the word success is the idea of competition. Some cities are successful and others are not – so how do you measure that?

I don’t really approve of the idea that you have to put a number against everything in order to figure out who is the winner. But I understand the reality that nowadays cities are, if not movable, at least flexible and changeable and very much in competition with each other for the spoils of investment, tourism and the taxes of their citizens.

Cities are made of people… (we know that because People make Glasgow.)

Where people meet, they will do business…that’s why cities grew up around the busiest crossroads, harbours and river crossings.

The function of a city is to create close face-to-face connections between as many people as possible.

How do you get to know a city? Not one thing, lots of overlapping experiences and moreover memorable interactions with other people. Busy is good and dense is good. Density creates conflict and energy (the roar of the crowd) and from that comes creativity.

• Communication
• Accessibility
• Safety

The role of architecture and design: You can’t build a city without design – it’s the process by which we plan what we are going to build but architects and designers should also be good guardians of quality and continuity.

Commitment to quality. Care, effort. Self-awareness. Didactic, owns the narrative, tells the stories.

The role of brand and distinctiveness: To be successful a city has to be distinct. The recognition of that distinctiveness is what has become known as its “brand”.

Here’s a checklist of some of the variables: Pick and mix… from American Place Branding guru Bill Baker:

• Architecture and design
• Attractions
• Celebrity and fame
• Climate
• Cuisine
• Culture
• Emotional benefits and feelings
• Ethnicity
• Events
• History
• Industry and local products
• Influence and power
• Landmarks and icons
• Legends and myths
• Location and access
• Natural environment
• Nightlife
• People
• Personality and values
• Physical attributes
• Social benefits
• Sport

In order to resist being subsumed in global homogeneity cities need to work hard to recognise and celebrate their uniqueness.

The thing that’s clear to me though is that you don’t have to tick all of these boxes. Even a small amount of a very strong tasting ingredient can dominate – and that could be positive or negative. How many Charles Rennie Mackintosh buildings are there in Glasgow? 5? 6? How many buildings by Gaudi are there in Barcelona? How many Beefeaters standing around in London? How many body snatchers in ancient Edinburgh?

Competition

Cities are in competition… locally and internationally. Perhaps competition is good after all. Civic competition is given spice by the close personal associations that we all have with our places – the cities that we chose to inhabit and those that we choose to visit, become strongly associated with our personal identities. We see it in our choice of football teams and by that measure alone Manchester must be one of the most successful, with 2 eponymous teams, perhaps closely followed by Milan and Dundee. Funny that there isn’t a “London United” or a “Glasgow United”.

Places should not be homogenous. We need not be flattered by the addition of a Carluccio’s. It’s no more than corporate imperialism.

“The level of esteem that a city’s name evokes has a direct impact on the health of its tourism, economic development, prestige and respect.” Often this is uncontrolled, random, unmanaged…

The branding experts always say that perception and reality should be in alignment but actually for real success reality has to exceed perception. I still found Venice, Rome, Berlin, Now York, Shanghai, Kolkata, better and more amazing that I had expected.

Distinct location, geography, economy, climate, history, culture, religion, architecture produces the city’s actual character… and all of this is usually expressed through the people that you meet there.

“70 – 80% of all American cities have NO dominant image at all in the public mind. Thus finding a core differentiating asset…becomes even more important”

Being different:

• The people
• Physical attributes
• Tangible benefits
• Intangibles

“Place branding is a team sport, best played by people of all age and interests with a healthy dose of what’s best for the common good – and with an out of town coach…”

Internal pride from external approval

“Cities often have a reality problem that city leaders prefer not to recognise”

Simon Anholt

• The nature of perception and reality
• The relationship between objects and their meanings
• Mass psychology

“Every place on earth wants to do something to manage its international reputation”

Is it all just about a few simple clichés?

• Edinburgh: You’ll have had your tea
• Liverpool: you do do design do you?

Mental pictures…

• Cape town
• Beiruit
• Berlin
• Wolverhampton
• Detroit

Those fundamental stereotypes may be unfair but fundamentally affect our behaviour towards people, places and products… at least until you have to opportunity to experience them, to visit the place, to meet the people first hand. Then you can make up your own mind.

Unforeseen beauty, kindness, empathy, drama.

The discipline of strategic branding has at least taught us that consistency is important.

The stakeholders have to be co-ordinated – impossible to co-ordinate everyone but at least the city agencies should be on the same page.

In spite of all that thoughtfulness there’s an Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, a Statue of Liberty in Tokyo, a Parthenon in Nashville, and in China, if you know where to look there’s an Stonehenge, A Washington Capitol, an Arc de Triomphe.

Politicians and leadership:

• Energetic and committed
• Autonomous
• Supported by electorate and executive team
• Supportive and effective service providers

Cities that can change:

Is this a successful City?

• Remote?
• Under-populated?
• Unhealthy?
• Poorly educated?
• Economically moribund?
• Lousy internet?

YET it is good to be here. We remember what it was to be great and that is sustaining. There is hope…

Universal services are usually provided by the civic government. They start out private and exotic – only available to the wealthy – but eventually we all got:

• Water and drains
• Waste disposal
• Roads
• Power and light
• Healthcare and hospitals

Properly fast internet ought to be next. It should be the current equivalent of roads, railways, canals and motorways of previous eras. Ironically, here, in The Merchant City, it is lamentable and it’s apparently because within this exchange area The City Council and University of Strathclyde have their own ‘big pipe’ intranets, making the rest of us too insignificant for the private suppliers to be very interested.

Virtual is fine but actual is the only place where we can taste and touch and smell and feel.

Vikas Mehta; wrote about The Street: A Quinissential Social Public Space. I think that you have to go smaller and into much finer detail but for him the basic building block of cities is the street.

He says:

“… one of the cardinal roles of the street, as public space, is to provide a setting for range of active and passive social behaviours… (without them) our cities and towns would be no more than agglomerations of privatised spaces and buildings, devoid of the space for the individual to be a complete citizen.”

“Good cities are places of social encounter. Creating spaces that encourage social behaviour in our neighbourhoods and cities is an important goal of urban design.”

“These encounters-the exchange of ideas and information-create innumerable possibilities to make innovation and growth possible.”

“Human beings receive fulfilment and enjoyment through interactions and contacts with others of their species. In sociological terms, our well being depends on a range of primary and secondary relationships”

So interaction is about fun as well as the economy but fundamentally when we come in contact with others we reinforce our social group. Its what gives us our identity, our individuality.

Which brings me back to homogenisation… 10 years ago a think tank called the New Economic Foundation published a report that coined the expression clone town Britain

The report stated: “Many town centres that have undergone substantial regeneration have even lost the distinctive facades of their high streets, as local building materials have been swapped in favour of identical glass, steel and concrete store fronts that provide the ideal degree of sterility to house a string of big, clone town retailers.”

NEF policy director Andrew Simms said: “Clone town Britain kind of creeps upon you – suddenly you turn round and your town is looking the same as every other town.”

The NEF report claimed that what it views as an ‘assault’ on the character of town centres “has been aided by planning and regeneration decisions that have drawn shoppers away from the high street and created a retail infrastructure hostile to small independent businesses”.

The report pointed out that:

• general stores are closing at the rate of one a day;
• between 1997 and 2002 specialist stores like butchers, bakers and fishmongers shut at the rate of 50 per week; and
• some 20 traditional (non-chain) pubs are closing per month.

The think-tank also identified what it termed a threat to “distinctive” local shops in the guise of the new breed of “micro-format” supermarket stores that have begun to replicate in high streets.

The question is whether our planning authorities need to do anything about it. When the conversation comes up the focus of attention is invariably Tesco, and the other mega-grocers but I’m more concerned by the little ones – Pret, Starbucks, Nero, Costa, Witherspoons, near here… Greggs, Pizza Hut, Jamie’s, Carluccios, Yates.

They are the enemy and you shouldn’t encourage them.

And why should planning policy allow these cuckoo clone brands do supplant unique local businesses? Would it be wring to introduce a bit of protectionism to the high street? I mean if there are controls on the design of your shopfront then why shouldn’t there be control over what (or who) is behind it?

Cities are focal points for specialisation.

The role of technology: You probably think I’m railing against technology. It is good to be off-grid a bit sometimes.

I suspect that usually, when you see someone tweeting as they cross the road, or texting in a restaurant, they are probably communicating with someone who is less than a mile away and it just adds to the idiomatic mix of communications that enrich our culture. It won’t stop them talking to each other.

But it will filter and package their language in a way that must diminish diversity.

I’m not so happy about that but I’m a lot less happy about the fact that 100m from here businesses struggle to get more than 10mb download speed and uploads at peak times are a complete joke.

So if anyone would like to have a conversation in the café downstairs about whom to talk to make that happen, then I’d be happy to speak to you!

Thank you.

Graven Images named the only British Gold Key Awards finalist for excellence in hospitality design

Graven Images has been named 32nd Annual Gold Key Awards Finalist for Radisson Blu Aqua, Chicago, representing the only British design studio to make it into the shortlist. Featured along with the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group in the Best Hotel Design – Midscale-Upscale category, Graven Images was selected among 200 submissions from around the world.

Opened in November 2011, the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel unveiled the first look at the design vision for the upper-upscale Radisson Blu brand in the United States. The flagship hotel is located on the first 18 floors of the 81-storey Aqua Tower, named “Skyscraper of the Year” by Emporis.

Graven Images’ Creative Director Jim Hamilton carefully handpicked features and materials reflective of the city of Chicago to implement a design relevant to the surroundings and everyday life. As an example, steel work features heavily throughout the interiors, paying homage to the city’s iconic skyscrapers. Similarly, the lobby’s brick walls studded with backlit glass blocks resemble the cityscape seen from a distance.

Representing the Radisson Blu brand and Chicago’s unique architectural style, a thought-provoking, contemporary design crafted by Graven Images prevails throughout. The 20-ton steel staircase leading to the mosaic-tiled Filini Restaurant, a dramatic Egyptian brass medallion screen wall and a 50-foot-long gas fireplace are some of the most distinctive elements.

Gold Key honours are presented annually to design firms responsible for the most innovative hospitality properties completed or renovated within the past 18 months. Nearly 200 projects in 23 countries were considered, representing a 25% increase in entries over 2011.

Announced by The International Hotel, Motel + Restaurant Show® (IHMRS), finalists were selected based on aesthetic appeal, practicality and functionality of design. The winners will be revealed at a breakfast ceremony due to be held at the Mandarin Oriental New York on 12 November 2012.

All work and play

Buildings are static but architecture creates journeys. Architects have to be more than just the travel agents – they have to be the storytellers, the playwrights, the movie directors.

While good architects have an intuitive understanding of the dramatic tension that comes from good architecture, they can be inarticulate narrators.

Which is ironic, because communication is ALL that an architect does. The thing that makes architects special is that they communicate using drawings as well as with words.

Drawings are for the communication of ideas and aspirations to clients.
Drawings are how architects communicate with themselves, and with other designers.
Drawings are how architects communicate with those craftsmen and professionals who are responsible for making buildings.

So with all this communication around why are new buildings often such dumb animals? Most corporate architecture is inert. Is it because it has nothing to say, or because the architect was so busy building the theatre that she forgot to write the play?

Through time even inert buildings will start to chatter and splutter – they start to give away secrets that only their owners should know. They tell visitors what its really like to work there, the truth behind the beautiful corporate jargon.

Buildings soak up the energy and experiences of those people who work in them. Like ghosts we all leave our imprint. Unhappy buildings tell tales.

Think about the average new-build office building in the UK. A lazy combination of easy-detail finishes to satisfy the minimum requirements of complacent employers. Some kind of nominally architectural curtain wall graphic over a frame hanging with services and all masked with a flimsy inner layer of Gyproc, carpet and ceiling tile. With fluorescent lighting, and a little tiling or some light oak in the reception area.

These are the bland backdrops against which people play out their lives, hoping for a game of golf at the weekend or an occasional after-work piss up.

Who sets the agenda? Well the money lenders of course – and the over-nourished property agents and other dull boys who suck the love out of life, in their semi-hibernation cells of suburban bungalows.

Graven Images has always been disrespectful of corporate banality. Nevertheless, some of our best friends are big companies and surveyors, and there are always good people in there somewhere!

Two projects, both of them with a past, and looking for a future:

Student Loans at Lingfield Point, Darlington…

This was a factory for the thread makers Patons and Baldwins. It is north-lighted and employed generations of local workers. The original building was created to optimise industrial production and as such it falls short of the usual criteria used for planning a modern office building. But once we started to work with it we realised that it offers a wonderful volume to perform all kinds of tasks. It is as flexible as a theatre, and invites dramatic interventions that make the usual interactions of work just a bit more enjoyable. The building is up-front about its past, and it tells its own story through the exposed structure and services and the images of its construction and former factory days. But it also talks to its new users to help them do their new jobs. It invites them to lunch together, sends them for a coffee on the way to a meeting, tells them when to talk quietly and when its OK to make a noise.

We were pleased when this was recognised as being one of the very best office environments in the UK last year. We were also thrilled to hear stories from the people who work there about their friends and family who used to be factory workers in the same place.

The Blythswood Hotel, Glasgow…

Blythswood Square is a square with a past! Not only was it the place where the Monte Carlo Rally left from in 1955, but the square was notorious as the centre of prostitution in Glasgow, the scene of Glasgow’s infamous poisoning case in 1857, and start or finish point for marches and demonstrations for years. So when we were invited to re-design the former RSAC building, converting it into a 5 star hotel, it was a bit like being asked to produce a sequel to an already famous and well-loved movie. As always we tried to make a series of spaces that reveal and invite its audience to get involved. There is an underlying suggestiveness that people often need to really have fun. Particularly in hotels, that experience is created through the exaggerated social rituals of meetings, conversation and service. Very little is about function and most is about people and how they behave in different circumstances. If we might coin a new dictum, “Form Follows Culture”.

Uisge Beatha: Gaelic for Girlie?

Whisky—our water of life—symbolic of Scotland. Robust, subtle, international, exacting and diverse in its hundreds of variations, it is vital to both our economy and national identity.

It is the one product through which the whole world can know us and understand who we are.

But there is a silent creeping malaise eating away at the character of the strong drink; and it is being led by the effete troupe of girlish graphic designers and limp marketing people.

Whisky packaging design and ‘re-branding’ is too often the process of emasculating tradition, of introducing Disney-style Victorian heritage, of replacing real with fake.

Perhaps it is the sclerosis that makes us too lily-livered. Perhaps we have been drinking the perfume. What other excuses can there be for the striking similarity between the contemporary whisky label and those bottles of Eau-de-Cologne?

On the other hand, maybe the Sol-swilling hairdresser classes have never tried a drop of the hard stuff.

The design of whisky packaging has become worrying distant from the contents of the bottle.

The process was really started by United Distillers who launched the enormously charming and successful Classic Malts range. They introduced the idea of the babbling copywriter to the label, and the twee illustrations were so beautifully crafted and breathtakingly printed that one may excuse them responsibility for the fallout which followed.

The copy of Talisker is simultaneously perfect and cringing. Spoken in an English accent, “more than a hint of local seaweed” is of course bollocks. Bloody hell, it comes from Skye, not a meadow in the Dordogne. It’s a big whisky, not all shy and blushing.

Cragganmore is better. The exquisite Victorian etching is so redolent of a Robert Louis Stevenson frontispiece and pubescent schoolboy days that the result is quite anally retentive. It spawned a legion of bastard children, all watercolours and soft-pencil drawings of hielan’ hames from Coatbridge to Corpach.

Oban, another ‘Classic Malt’, manages to get a 250-word essay on the front-along with a couple of seagulls. A made-up history for a real product and a real place.

And how the masses did follow, like lemmings to the crag. Illustrations of glens and bothies and every kind of bird and animal that ever graced our shores.

Farm animals, foxes, fish, cats, even oyster catchers, were drafted by London casting agencies to become representatives for our historic drink.

Not everyone can have a stag or a grouse. One of the distillery managers was given a blackcock. He was not amused.

Cream and green and gold became the uniform of the wannabe brands who are not sufficiently confident in themselves to recognise and articulate their own qualities.

Of course it is quire natural to try to follow those who appear to be the leaders, but it is shocking how easy it has been for designers to regurgitate heritage grammar in the most inappropriate settings, and then dress it up with sweet wee stories about some local alkies.

The tendency towards corporate branding has at times taken on a monolike approach—usually more appropriate to oil companies. The ‘Connoisseurs choice’ range from Long John makes a single brand out of more than 35 products.

Whilst this may be efficient and rational, it is against diversity and against the very uniqueness that its name professes to promote. Diversity is the foundation of richness. Once lost, it is impossible to re-invent.

Our culture is expressed through the design of our products. International homogeneity may eventually erode all that which is essentially Scottish and it is important to value the vernacular and sometimes crude work of old typographers and local printers.

That is where our true graphic tradition resides. It can still sometimes be seen in bakers’ bags and in the hand-painted fascias of independent retailers in small towns.

In order to keep it, we have to understand it and value it. There is always an easier route than clear thought and unfortunately this often comes seductively disguised as creativity.

Not all are bad: The Glenlivet is handsome and straightforward, and the soft serifs of The Macallan seem to reflect the character of the rounded single malt.

Laphroaig is almost controversial in its black and white plainness. No trivial ornament is deemed necessary from Scotland’s most richly flavoured whisky. In standing separately from the cream and decal-edged crown, Laphroaig is at once crude but unique. A man’s drink, a rough diamond.

Glenfiddaich and Chivas Regal are the Versace whiskies—a lot of gold, plenty of glitz. They represent that catholic strain in our national characteristic which relishes decoration, excess and conspicuous wealth.

But nevertheless they are magnificent classics. Perhaps they are not so fashionable at the moment but they will be long lasting, only ever in need of the occasional minor adjustment rather than wholesale re-design.

It is said that the distillers are concerned about the lack of appeal which whisky has to the style-conscious youth market of the under-25s.

The problem is not with the packaging but with the baggage of prejudice and snobbery that surrounds many of the brands. Much of new design work reinforces these attitudes—only recalling the floral wallpaper and decorative borders of suburban Edinburgh.

The trend of printing directly onto the bottle, made successful by Absolut and so many of the designer beers, has crept in as well.

What is rational for a clear spirit is plain daft for whisky. The awful Bowmore has adopted this technique with great enthusiasm, probably to impress the youngsters. I trust that when the heady thrill of being different wears off, the gimmick will become clear.

There is no harm in stepping to one side of idiomatic convention for a moment. J&B is the best of these. Enormous red text on a yellow label (a special kind of yellow which is more green), and all on a superb green bottle.

It is recognisable at a hundred paces. The design is unique and robust, it uses some of the same typographical devices as many of the others but achieves the design with such confidence that it cannot be missed—whether on supermarket or gantry shelf.

You can recognise Johnnie Walker from a mile away as well. The round bottle and confident naffness speaks volumes. Red or Black? Nothing could be more direct.

The design addresses the bigger formal issues with the gusto of the whisky without becoming obsessed with the trivial and effeminate curlicues of printers’ ornaments.

The trouble with graphic designers is that they are mostly very good at making things look pretty.

Whisky doesn’t need pretty. It is not that kind of drink.

Standard Life International

I’m here to talk about a small Scottish business, one of the 97% who employ less than 50 people, I’ll show you some of the work we have done abroad, and I’ll say a bit about our international aspirations.

I am one of the founders of Graven Images, a design consultancy based in Glasgow.

I started the company back in 1985, along with my partner Janice Kirkpatrick, whilst we were still students at the Glasgow School of Art. Me an architect, and she a graphic designer.

We had a choice back then – either resign yourself to an unchallenging career in Scotland’s design backwaters or leave for London/Milan/New York.

I had spent some time in the States and Janice had a job offer in London with the BBC but we were both reluctant to jump straight onto the career carousel and thought we could prolong studenthood by setting up this company which would allow us to test whether we could make a living out of doing the kind of work which interested us from Scotland.

We were inspired by Italian groups like Memphis who seemed to break all the conventional boundaries of the design disciplines by designing furniture and ceramics and textiles and graphics and interiors. So we rented a room with no windows in a lane at the back of Sauchiehall Street, and started to do the same.

Our method was always to produce work with a rigour which would allow it to be viewed in an international context.

International work from Glasgow, back in the pre-city of culture days, was a radical enough thought as it was, but probably were picking up on a feeling which was in the air.

Our very first commissions included a paper mache Stonehenge and an ecclesiastical mosaic (actually a genuine graven image) for the archdiocese of Glasgow.

And also, our first year or so we put together an exhibition on Glasgow’s creativity, designed furniture, opened a shop, and came up with ranges of products under the banner of Tartanalia—a word which seemed somehow exotic for the London press. But we were really interested in ordinary things—things which were rooted in our own culture.

It all generated good publicity. We always did our best to look moody and interesting.

Our work was exhibited and published and we got deeply involved in the run-up to the City of Culture events which were focused on Glasgow’s Tramway venue, where ultimately we were to create this foyer and café bar.

In the very early days of Apple Mac we produced difficult and ambitious graphic design—for Peter Brooks productions of Mahabarata, and Carmen, the Wooster Group and many others.

Sometimes the constraints of digital image making defeated us and we resorted to more conventional trickery.

This image was build up of poystyrene letters and projected slides—and the photographers assistant walked through the exposure at the right moment with a torch to create the wiggly line.

Our international aspiration never receded but commercial survival became necessary—alongside the gentle process of building our networks through talking and publishing as broadly as we could.

We manufactured furniture in Dundee and Salerno, we exhibited in New York and London, we lectured in Cairo and Helsinki—but all of this provided scant income.

We worked instinctively and opportunistically rather than strategically—which is both the strength and weakness of small energetic organisations.

In the early nineties there were seven or eight of us, and money was tight. We learned about corporate design and got serious with our approach to interior design.

Around ’95 Terence Conran invited Janice to collect and curate an exhibition at the Design Museum in London. The resulting show about ordinary things, not only generated a TV documentary but generated a wave of international exhibition contracts for The British Council, and the DTI.

Now, I say ordinary things, but Janice not only persuaded Terence to allow her to spend more than half the budget on the Ducati—but also to let her ride it for the six months leading up to the show.

She loved it so much that she bought one herself, and still belts around on it.

An exhibition about British street style, called UK Style, was commissioned by the DTI under Maggie Thatcher—showing that cool Britannia was actually a Tory idea. This toured to South Korea Hong Kong and New Zealand, and then we worked on a little show about biodiversity for China.

It was a little controversial—not least because of the imminent three gorges plan—so we had to be careful with the content. We came up with a simple series of demountable panels which were printed straight onto thin plywood, and held together with a system of tabs and chopsticks.

There was an awkward moment when I was on a reconnaissance trip to the Botanic Gardens in Shenzhen. I was there with two professors of botany from the UK. After showing us around in the morning our hosts served us an amazing and huge lunch. Afterwards they took us to room adjacent to one of the cactus houses, and sat us down in these soft low vinyl covered seats that the Chinese love and declared “now we have seminar”. At first I thought they were joking but was relaxed in the knowledge that it was not really my area of expertise and I could defer to my learned colleagues.

Then I noticed that they had both fallen asleep.

It would be fair to say that I bluffed my way through it with biodiversity for beginners—and they were too polite to challenge me.

In a way this picture represents an attitude which we tried to convey in representing British design culture—particularly in shows like UK style.

But we were sucked in by the establishment …

Partly, as it turned out, due to the especially astute and insightful Alan Murray (who some of you may know!).

China was to became a particular area of expertise for us. In 1998 Alan invited us to design a dinner and exhibition in Shanghai to mark the prime Minister’s visit. Now, we don’t normally do events, but realised that there was an opportunity to take a creative lead on the project, and to bring in specialist expertise to ensure that the event logistics and security issues were in safe hands.

Downing Street made it clear in the brief that there should be no sit-down formal dinner and that Tony Blair wanted to meet as many Chinese people as possible, rather than just a lot of ex-pats. Naturally, the British Chamber were involved and news of the forthcoming visit had already encouraged the wives to invest in new hats—so they were a bit nonplussed when we proposed a format which was based on the idea of an informal bar supper.

The trouble was it was for 700 people and we didn’t want to miss the chance to change Chinese perceptions that Britain has the worst food in the world. They may not be wrong there but they have an almost equally poor impression of the French.

So we engaged Nick Nairn, hero of daytime TV, and his team to design a menu which might appeal. Mushy peas, scallop spring rolls, lobster thingys, and smoked duck and neeps, were favourites on the night. We knew they would work, because the whole menu had been tested on Chinese volounteers in Scotland some months beforehand.

All of the ingredients were airfreighted in, in a giant chilled diplomatic bag—it was a wonderful experience seeing 20 chefs, some British as well as a local team working to produce 10,000 individual pieces of food.

The whole time, the man from BritCham, busied around telling us it would never work and that we had to get the dinner protocol right otherwise the Chinese VIP guests would be mortally insulted. Even the day before the event Simon was urging us to change everything to a conventional service format.

On the night, as part of the entertainment, Nick had agreed to do a cookery demonstration.

And on the spur of a moment he invited Cherie Blair to join him in the preparation—and she enthusiastically set about chopping tomatoes.

At this point, the Mayor of Shanghai, not to be out done, leapt to his feet and set about chopping a huge bunch of coriander with an enormous knife.

From then on the evening moved from being pleasantly informal to a bit of a party.

My lasting memory will be Simon from the Chamber of Commerce punching the air, eyes blazing, and exclaiming “we did it, we did it!”

If there is a lesson to be cautiously learned I think it is that people have more in common with each other than our diverse cultures and languages might suggest. By creating an event which didn’t conform to the formal protocols of either country we created an opportunity for people to relax, to join in, to lower their barriers and to simply enjoy themselves.

Since then we have designed and toured an exhibition on Abdul Aziz in the middle east, one about British packaging expertise and one on Football which was particularly popular in China.

Last year we designed and organised an exhibition called Leading Edge Showcase in Shanghai.

The exhibition was introduced by Maddy, Tomorrow’s World’s virtual presenter, who we managed to teach Mandarin, and have her talk in perfect lip synch.

Standard Life were one of the participants, along with sixty or so other British companies who are active in China.

For the first time we worked with Chinese contractors for the whole exhibition build and that meant we had to be very careful with our choice of materials and technologies.

We also designed a trade stand at Shenzhen Hi Tech Fair, which picked up a couple of awards, and as a result of both of these projects have been building a much more coherent strategy to extend our business opportunities in China.

This book, (available at all good book stores), put together by a Dutch publisher, and called Design in a Cold Climate is about some of our interior projects, and this year we will be publishing a book which specifically focuses on our graphic and exhibition designs, and a Chinese version will be available.

We have joined CBBC (who have been clients of ours for a few years) and have a simple strategy which aims to work primarily with British companies who already have Chinese partners or are active in the region. For us it’s a confident toe in the water but we are not quite ready yet to attack the Chinese consumer head on!

Now, this might seem like one extreme to another, but we have also developed in the last 4 or 5 years a close relationship with a US company called TSYS. Part of the Synovus group and based in Columbus, Georgia they are third party processors of debit and credit card transactions. They got to know us when they started to develop their business into the European market, opening offices in York and London. However most of the marketing fuctions are still based in the US.

They were concerned not to look like “just another American company” and sensitive to the need to adopt a more European perspective in their communications material.

They had just launched a new identity system when we first got to know them, and we helped them implement that, we designed various items of marketing collateral, some trade advertising and exhibitions.

They are a truly wonderful organisation—in some ways similar to Standard Life they have maintained a strong sense of community and remain responsible and involved with their local roots.

Our challenge is to convey their personality and people focussed ideology, and to keep it fresh and European.

Most of the work is briefed and approved electronically, and we have occasional conference calls to discuss options and strategies—but one of the great advantages of distance is that it eliminates unnecessary meetings.

At their recent show in Paris, they decided to serve cocktails. It was no problem for us to design a bar but they were struggling to find staff who could do all the Tom Cruise juggling and mixing. Round about the same time we came across a group of three Greenock lads who had just launched the appropriately named organisation “Liquid Assets”—and with a little trepidation we introduced them to our Client. Now, these guys are about as far as you get from deep southern politesse and refinement—but their cocktails were brilliant and they didn’t use a drop of Buckfast.

We made sure that they were well briefed on the names and organisations which were our clients’ key targets, so when they spotted someone important they used their bar tending skills to draw them.

We hope to do more with TSYS, and as they build on their successes in processing for The Royal Bank and Natwest, and Allied Irish, we will get wider opportunities to again extend that network.

We have always held that design is an international language, which can transcend the usual boundaries of geography.

It’s a medium which allows you to communicate emotion, energy, and enthusiasm, and as such it allows you to get closer to your clients or customers.

And finally, I couldn’t have you all here and miss the opportunity of showing a couple of slides from closer to home—RBS, Radisson, TCS—Thankyou very much.

The Scottish Show Essay

Everyone must say this of their own time, but we went to Art School at a great point in history. From Punk to the New Romantics, twangy Glasgow guitars, dressing up in bars, and Maggie Thatcher gave us grants so that we could enjoy our education.

Nico’s, The Griffin and The Halt bar were the centres of debate in design and architecture. We aspired to be in Berlin or Milan, but most of the good guys just drifted to London.

As students we were perplexed by the creative brain drain and frustrated by the idea that staying in Scotland meant fitting in with a professional environment that was, for design, barely existent and for architecture, a very grey place.

So, in a pique of naivety in 1985, some friends and I decided to make our own version of a Sottsass or Mendini design studio. There was little risk, because it was just like being a student for a bit longer. There were no computers to buy, because they hadn’t been invented yet.

We were not entirely on our own. We had heard of Tayburn (I somehow thought they would be in Perth). Westpoint were in Glasgow and designing very polished graphics. Forth Design, Crombie Anderson I think, and a few others whose names we sometimes saw on brochures like City Design, Randak, and Pete Fletcher’s Portfolio were all designers rather than advertising agencies. Pointsize and Blue Peach appeared a little later and of course we discovered McIlroy Coates and Graphic Partners in Edinburgh.

In architecture there was an interesting coterie of designers between McGurn, Logan, Duncan and Opfer (MLDO), Elder and Cannon, and Nick Groves Raines, all of whom were interested in furniture, colour and the rest of Europe.

Late 1980s Glasgow carried a sure sense of something happening. The Garden Festival in ‘88 started a direct focus on the City and provided a platform that helped Glasgow’s award as European City of Culture in 1990. The great thing about City of Culture was that it was not only a year-long festival, but it created a two year run-in. Tramway was converted to a replica of Paris’s Boufe du Nord theatre and in 1988 hosted Peter Brook’s production of the epic Mahabharata.

Before that, in ’86, ‘87 and ‘88, the wonderful Third Eye Centre created the Glasgow Style series of design and fashion events funded by the City Council and they travelled to Paris and Berlin. Apart from Spencer Railton’s hats it also included furniture and lighting design. Incahoots led a line of brilliant pre-digital textiles designers including Jan Nimmo and Joanie Jack (who at the time was designing for Missoni). Timorous Beasties launched straight from their degree shows about the same time.

Roots level enthusiasm from Nigel Cram, Gillian and BJ at BDP and our own Paul Gray generated the 3D events (Design, Debate, Demonstrate). The Phoenix Returns was a similarly type of event at The Ramshorn Church given great momentum by Andy Bow, Ian Alexander, Henry McKeown and Adam Bell. All of this created work and opportunities for experimentation and for showing off. And it created a kind of healthy competition, especially in graphic design for arts events.

By 1990 Nice House had transformed itself from a trader of 1930s and 1950s stuff into a commissioner of new work. It’s Home Produce exhibition at Tramway, in conjunction with Blueprint, was a great success and fitted in effortlessly with the glut of world-class events like T-Zone (in G-Zone), more Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, The Wooster Group and Patricia Brown.

Then two things happened. Recession swept north into Scotland and everything went hangover dark for a while. And digitisation changed the whole way graphic design worked. We used to spend about 10% of our turnover on phototypesetting. In 1988 we had to pay Davidson Van Breugal £300 to typeset a page of text in a circle. We got a MAC and all that stopped. The typesetters went bust and graphic designers quickly learned how to make a half decent job of it, or at least how to make lots of coloured text boxes and graduated tints. Emigré showed us that we could design our own fonts. From that point onwards there was a massive burgeoning of graphic design. In some ways it was de-skilled, but rather than reduce the market, new businesses expanded. ‘Graphic Identity’ became the quick fix of choice for marketing professionals, but clients started to see real value created by communication design.

Another festival was obviously needed! Glasgow missed out on a couple but the Design Festival of 1996 was a boost, and again, a bit like before, it teed up the big one – the whole process of going after and winning Glasgow 1999: UK City of Architecture and Design.

Architecture was doing well  – in the West that meant some really ambitious Housing Associations challenging architects to give more. Reidvale Housing Association was probably the most prominent.

All this time the interior design sector had been lagging way behind and relied on pubs and bars. At one end were the brewers, mostly producing awful brassy anglo-pubs, and at the other some low-budget independents like Ron McCulloch and Colin Barr getting connected with Barcelona and chasing an increasingly sophisticated clientele.

I remember that night in our studio with David Page and Chris Purslow when we named The Lighthouse and agreed to go after the old Herald offices for what was to become Scotland’s new centre for Architecture and Design. And I remember the fights about keeping design high on the agenda (not just because Sir Terence Conran was one of the judges). I also remember the spectacular soundscape that broadcast the noise and clang of ghostly printing presses through the first floor of the derelict Herald building just as the judges climbed the stairs.

And the rest is recent history. If you are reading this you were probably there. The explosion of interest in the ‘Creative Industries’ grew directly out of our success with the ‘Cultural Sector’.

Then came an explosion in growth in digital businesses: web designers working from bedrooms and black economy graphics on an international scale that created a rudely healthy infrastructure and high client expectations. Individuals with skill can now produce fast and complicated work without the need for huge supporting teams. This has allowed short and strategic collaborations, one-off projects and teams and the creation of a solar system of inter-relationships and cross-dependencies that’s probably not existed since before the Industrial Revolution.

Ideas and projects thrive in this kind of economy.

Instead of replacing travel, new easy email was almost matched by EasyJet. In our business cross-border raids became normal, and not just the fat economy of London. All of the ‘Business-English’ economies became easy to work in.

But for one malignant force, creativity and entrepreneurialism are in great shape. That force is ‘risk management’. Risk is the thing that many of the new generation of project managers despise. While any amount of effort can be raised under the banner of mitigation, without risk there is no life, no creativity and no profit.

When we started our business we were a ‘worker’s co-operative’. We made a plan that said we would use our skills to travel and work abroad and that we would combine our disciplines to produce ideas and products that could help create a bigger and more powerful Scottish design community that in turn would benefit our economy and society.

In a way that has happened, but in a fashion that’s much less about manufacturing than could ever have been imagined twenty or thirty years ago. So, when everything in our lives is made somewhere else, will it matter? Or will it only matter when everything in our lives is designed somewhere else?

Ross Hunter

What we do

Design is the process of controlling creativity.

At Graven Images we underpin creative excellence with tried-and-tested methods. We explain what we’re doing and demonstrate why it works.

We also invest in research that helps us to understand and control our process. We are committed to developing new methods and tools to keep us at the top of our profession and you at the leading-edge of yours.

Graven Images is the one-stop consultancy for integrated graphic, interior and exhibition design.

Graven Images understands how people communicate using written, spoken and visual language.

We also understand how products and environments are an effective part of the communications mix.

Graven Images’ experience, and that of our clients, is extremely valuable as knowledge creation and capture is essential to our work.

We constantly research new business sectors and forecast future trends.

In addition to creating graphic, interior and exhibition design, Graven Images can design products and events.

If the project is right we will use our skills and networks to deliver exceptional results.

Graven Images cares about the environment and about providing solutions that create ongoing value.

We are committed to providing solutions that are both environmentally and economically sustainable.

Graven Images can use its operational breadth, and knowledge of what works in different sectors, to create completely new design solutions.

Graven Images ensures that businesses will profit from design.