Young Blood

Thanks for inviting me to Gracefield, it’s over twenty years since I left Dumfries to go to Glasgow School of Art but I remember exhibiting here when I was at Dumfries Academy.

It’s increasingly important to find places where the public can see how and what creative people do. All too often the public and the politicians like what we produce but aren’t interested in seeing where it comes from or investing in its production.

Educating creative people is a dirty business that’s not as straightforward as teaching sciences and many other subjects. It’s less easy to quantify and measure the progress of a painter than a scientist or a linguist. And in today’s educational climate we have to fight ever harder for the right to exist (banks) but its just as well we do because (interdisciplinary) creativity is at the heart of the new creative economy and it will continue to be so for quite some time as the the arts and sciences continue to converge. An exciting time to go to art school, as ever.

I believe it’s vitally important that different creative disciplines are shown together because regardless of technical specialism whether we’re designing trains, books or wedding dresses or creating sculpture or art, we’re all using exactly the same creative process. It’s the stuff that makes us different from animals and the stuff that allowed us to create civilisation from a pile of dirt and some pretty strange rituals.

It’s also good that new creative talent is given the chance to show itself in Dumfries and Galloway, it’s own patch. All too often in the UK and in Scotland we forget we’re as good, if not better that other more exotic sounding countries. It is possible, and for me preferable, to have in international business based in Scotland and it would be nice to see some of the cultural and economic potential displayed in this evening’s exhibition come home to roost in Dumfries and Galloway.

In this exhibition we have 17 graduates with different technical skills ranging from the design of jewelery and garments to painting and drawing.

Graduates are Kirsty Martindale, Julianne Foss, Stuart Webb, Kirsten Lyons, Pauline Montgomery, Linda McGill, Fiona Lammie, David Shannon, Lee Dickson, Andrew Brown, Derek Payne, Teresa Moore, Iona Somerville, Clare Benson, Claire Roddick, Helen Scott and Julie Houston and they’ve come from colleges throughout Scotland and the UK to exhibit here tonight, so welcome home.

Thankyou to Dawn Henderby and Leslie Jardine for inviting me to open the show tonight and the Arts Team at Dumfries and Galloway Regional Council and the graduates for all their hard work, with the support of Dumfriesshire Educational Trust. The exhibition will tour to Stranraer Museum on 1–29 April with the help of the European Development Fund, so make sure your friends go along and see it.

The City as a Living Artwork

I’m Janice Kirkpatrick. I work as a multidisciplinary designer with Graven Images who are based in Glasgow.

I graduated from Glasgow School of Art from the Department of Graphic Design after studying film, film animation and video. I then went on to do a theoretical MA in Design where I produced objects and furniture.

I now practice for the larger part of my time as a graphic designer but also design and develop domestic products. I teach a few hours a week in the Product Design department in the School of Art.

I was involved in writing Glasgow’s outline bid for Year of Architecture and Design 1999, for which we chose the title, “Glasgow—The City as a Living Artwork”.

This title was selected because we felt it best communicated that Art, if we must call it that, is in everything around us if we can only see it. We also wanted to express our belief that Art is not something dead, or apart from our everyday life, hidden away in galleries, but is an integral and important part of living.

Notions of what Art is change with our changing culture and constantly require recalibration and re-evaluation.

The title was necessary in order to give the Arts Council of Great Britain a clue to what we seek to achieve in Glasow. To those of us who wrote the bid the title was of value only as a tactical marker, what really mattered was the structure of our outline document which has a broad strategic base aimed at promoting the appreciation of design and architecture in the broadest sense through education, example, innovation, participation and communication.

I personally believe that the terms Art, Architecture and Design are inaccurate and even anachronistic and elitist. What artists, architects and designers do is essentially the same. We all share a well documented creative process through which we control the evolution of ideas to a greater or lesser extent. This process is the same irrespective of whether you produce books or buildings or oil paintings. The things that separate us into factions are technical specialisms and snobbery. There’s nothing to stop a painter from designing a hair dryer as long as that painter takes time to access the technical knowledge she or he needs.

All designers, artists and architects underpin and inform their intuition with analytical methodologies, a bit of sociology, a bit of psychology, a bit of colour theory and so on. Sometimes artists use more intuition and a little less analytical method, sometimes not. What is more important is what binds us all together, the creative process and the sensorial language we communicate with. Design, architecture and art are sensorial, utilising all of the senses, not only the visual. I believe we all communicate through manipulating the elements of culture which I believe to be symbols, language, myths, rituals and values.

I believe we would all do the public and our respective professions a great favour by talking more plainly about what it is we do, to each other and the public.

I believe Glasgow’s bid for City of Architecture and Design promises to be a good one because it tries to bring together all the apparently separate factions within architecture, design and art, helping all of us to understand and communicate more eloquently with one another and the public around us in the belief that everyone has a responsibility in the shaping of the future.

I hope that by communicating with each other and inviting the public to participate people will better understand, value and contribute to the world we’re creating around us.

And if that sounds idealistic then I make no apology.

UK Pack Age

UK Pack Age is an exhibition of British packaging which has been designed in the UK. (I consider design to be the process of ‘controlling the evolution of ideas’—the creative process which has less to do with fashion and much to do with underpinning intuition with methodology.)

If you’re a packaging fetishist Britain is a very good place to be as it is festooned with packages of all shapes, sizes, materials and constructions. Napoleon hit the nail on the head when he scorned us, calling us, “a nation of shopkeepers”. But Britain has a distinguished history of design education and has evolved sophisticated methodologies which underpin packaging and retail design, therefore, it follows that we should be good at wrapping things up.

However, packaging is about much more than retailing and we have included in the exhibition items such as coffins and tea bags. The retail environment is a ‘hot-house’ yielding consumer goods that demonstrate the extent to which many packages, such as alcohol and shampoo, have evolved. Curating this exhibition was not easy. One walk through any supermarket reveals several thousand packs, a walk along any shopping street multiplies the choices several hundreds of times.

The game of curation is made harder still by manufacturers and retailers who delight in updating packs with phenomenal speed—in the five months of searching I selected packages and requested samples only to find that they had been discontinued and replaced by new packs.

This is especially true of ‘FMCGs’, or, ‘fast moving consumer goods’, like laundry products, toiletries and staple foodstuffs. These items are almost constantly re-calibrated, more rapidly than fashionable clothing, in order to compete with rival brands and find favour with the latest consumer trends. I would even go as far as to suggest that a nation’s economic health and cultural well-being can be measured by the rate of change of its packaging—because packages do much more than merely act as containers for products, they also act as mirrors of changing cultural attitudes, reflecting who we are and what we believe in, what our history has been and what tomorrow may hold in store for us. A healthy society should be in a constant state of flux. This is expressed through the objects we make, through the thought and care that goes into their detailing and construction, to the consideration given to how they will work in the home as well as in the retail environment, to how gracefully they will age and what impact they will have on the environment. We do get the objects and packages that we deserve.

Packaging performs such a broad range of functions within society that it almost defies classification. I chose to divide the exhibition into three areas: packages that protect and preserve, packages that perform and packages which promote. These four Ps provided a framework which allowed me to discuss some of the many complex roles that packages fulfil. It is important to understand that the exhibition is not a survey of UK packaging design, it is a personal selection and the simple framework provided by the four Ps helps to focus on broad characteristics. In reality, most packs, often the best packs, perform all four roles simultaneously.

Traditionally, packaging design occupies the ground between product design and graphic design, the area between objects and words, between advertising and art, creator and consumer, between manipulator and manipulated. However, as a direct result of technological developments and shared software, designers now move across traditional areas of specialisation. It is now possible to find musicians working as graphic designers, graphic designers working as product designers, musicians working as both and all collaborating with scientists, manufacturers and marketeers. Industrialists and scientists can contribute at many different levels. Because packaging involves elements of creativity and science it is an excellent medium for creative collaboration, perfectly reflecting these new, interdisciplinery trends in creative working and providing a showcase for some of the very best design solutions.

I believe that our supermarkets are among our greatest art galleries. They are at the cultural coal-face, giving an accurate picture of our attitudes at any fixed moment in time. Try strolling through the aisles with no money, or plastic, in your pockets. Examine the limited edition prints, the ironic multiples, the structures formed through display, the point-of-sale installations, the performance, the technology, the architecture, music and drama. Entry is free and if you see something you really would like to buy, the chances are that you can afford it.

Because of the high volume and low cost demands of the medium, packaging is a challenging area for designers to work in. Generally, packs must communicate with great eloquence and within extreme cost restraints. Designers can’t buy their way out of problems, but must instead use their ingenuity.

We always ritualise our deepest cultural activities, such as birth, death, marriage and power-giving, because it transforms them into indelible components within our lives, forming the hidden bonds which weld society together.

Packages tangibly express our feelings for one another. Gifts are expressions of ‘care’ and reverence. They are remote dispensers of compassion where the wrapping method carefully signals the manner in which the present should be given and received and the esteem in which the contents should be held. By extension, many everyday packages have the potential to make us feel good, or careful, or downright disappointed. This is powerful magic for packaging designers and for ourselves as we all like to receive gifts and probably enjoy ripping and unwrapping the layers of paper which have been carefully constructed for our pleasure. We all know the drama of a new purchase and the adrenalin rush as the last wrapper is breached and the delicious mystery of the package’s contents finally resolved.

Carluccio’s packaging is constructed like a gift. It appears to be hand-crafted and uses lots of different, contrasting materials including a traditional hard, wax box wrapped with a softly textured satin bow which feels romantically old-fashioned and well-mannered. Inside there’s crinkly straw, a ‘real’, ‘authentic’ material and crisp cellophane—lots of satisfying textures, sounds and smells to make the act of opening the package a pleasurable and memorable sensorial delight. The whole ensemble makes a group of standard products into a ‘gift’, economically and culturally increasing the value of the goods.

Packaging designers understand and respect the particular demands of different generic products such as soap powder, beer or bread. Many packs are so thoroughly researched, so carefully honed and regularly re-designed that they become like heat-seeking missiles homing-in on appropriate targets.

Each product type is ‘shopped’ in a different way by the consumer who has, often subliminally, been educated by the pack designer to differentiate between economy, mid-value and premium quality products within that generic type. Staple products such as soap powder must shout their messages much more loudly and quickly than more occasionally purchased products such as beer or cosmetics. The consumer expects to enjoy a longer period of time agonising over the purchase of a premium quality treat than a loaf of bread. Consequently the type, colouring and language of soap powder packs is larger, brighter and louder than any other pack in the supermarket. The packs’ messages are simple, brash and indispensable. For without soap powder packaging we would have no way of judging one product against another.

As well as being my favourite area in the supermarket, soap powder aisles provide excellent examples of own-brand products which are designed to compete with brand leaders. Sainsbury’s ‘Novon’ range has diversified to meet the customer’s expectations of the big brand leaders. In addition to ‘automatic’ and ‘biological’ the supermarket now produces ‘condensed’ and ‘colour’ versions of its products in all standard sizes. The products are designed, not as ‘economy’ alternatives, priced well below the market leaders, but as solidly constructed brands in their own right.

Harvey Nichols store has a range of own brand goods which are more covetable and expensive than many premium competitor brands. These handsome and unconventional packs carry duotone photography which makes them distinctive in a sea of multi-coloured images. They are cool, contemporary and desirable despite their economic two colour printing, which proves that is creativity, not expensive production, that is the key to a successful package.

As well as protecting and preserving the products (and the environment) from destruction and promoting brand messages, packs also act as totems and talismans. Packs simultaneously protect and preserve our cultural heritage and our sense of social and personal well-being.

Through many of the exhibits it is possible to uncover a hidden web of dynamic activity ranging in scale from the local and vernacular to vast, global relationships, between designers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Some multinational companies, like IBM, use local designers and carefully source carton material through local manufacturers, producing corrugated card in small batches in order to ensure that each batch is made from the same raw, straw material and is of consistent colour.

Some packs, like Kirriemuir Gingerbread, HP Sauce, Newcastle Brown and Guinness, retain elements of their local, cultural identity while tempering others in order to compete in the national and international marketplace. They are bastions of national identity and valuable national assets. This was recognised by the French government years ago and has only recently been recognised by government in the UK. Pop music, film, architecture, fashion and design are now viewed as valuable commondities central to national economic well-being rather than being viewed as impotent peripheral decoration.

As markets inevitably grow, and homogenise, elements of local identity ensure that products and services remain distinctive and desirable. If every company has essentially the same product, cultural idiosyncracies, as expressed through design, can provide the difference that gives that package an edge on it’s competitors.

When I talk of ‘cultural difference’ I don’t mean that all products from Scotland should be tartan. Cultural elements might include the typefaces created from local references or experiences, attitudes to layout and form and, perhaps most importantly, the manner in which the pack interacts with the user. The initial experience of opening a package colours our attitude to the contents. Manufacturers such as IBM take time to ensure that the out-of-box-experience is rewarding and appropriate. The unpackaing ritual may evoke laughter or humility, it may pamper or excite or tease. Manufacturers also take time to ensure that they communicate with the user and indemnify themselves against uncontrolled unpacking which may damage the contents or the user.

Music packaging deserves an exhibition all of its own because the choices are so vast and the quality of graphic innovation breathtaking. In his video interview Daniel Weil bemoans the conservative attitude of the large music companies who refuse to consider a standard CD box to be anything more than a protective, brittle, styrene, cover for a disc and a leaflet. The packages afterlife in the home and its usefulness outwith the retail environment are not considered. While this is disappointing, many of the smaller music companies have used the limited constraints of the CD format to produce some of the most beautiful packages. Nuphonic, Talkin’ Loud, Mo’Wax, Deconstruction, Intro and Phono are only a tiny selection of the companies responsible for commissioning some of the most exciting new graphic design. They are responsible for launching the careers of a generation of talented graphic designers.

When examining packages it’s important to consider not only who they must attract or repel but the context they will be placed within. Often the next layer of design around the package is ‘point of sale’, which is a kind of mini retail environment all of its own, fitting snugly within the big pack, the shop itself. You can tell from the shop’s facade what kind of retail experience to expect inside. Brown profiled aluminium cladding is the architectural equivalent of the cardboard box. Beautifully detailed stone and glass mean money, both inside and out. As a rule-of-thumb, plastic outside usually means plastic inside. It’s a shame that we have yet to get to grips with big, high-quality, plastic buildings when we’re so good at smaller plastic products, like Persil Concentrated Washing-Up Liquid and Halfords Oil.

The next time you shop, pause for a second before you reach for the package and ask yourself why you have chosen it above all others. Analyse your reactions—are you doing what the designer expected of you? We are all experienced, and usually unconscious, shoppers who could learn so much about ourselves through what we buy if only we make time to pause and think.

The Research Centre

In 1989 I went for a drink with Bob Palmer, the Canadian Director of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture. We were talking about how we might develop cheap and effective events that would have tangible lasting benefits for Glasgow beyond 1990s’ year-long festival. Bob told me that the cheapest and most effective programme he’d ever come across had been hosted by the city of Los Angeles in the late eighties. It simply consisted of a series of meals attended by a constantly changing retinue of diners who had never before clapped eyes on each other.

Over the hour or two spent eating, strangers got to know each other and many developed relationships and businesses with people who’s beliefs and values and visions they shared. Just as cities grow where people meet – at the intersections of roads and around ports, if you bring people together things happen, even businesses happen. Why would we form ‘companies’ if not to enjoy the company of like-minded people?

Lloyd’s of London started life in just this way. It was originally the kind of coffee house that grew up around London’s coaching stations. It’s rules celebrated the sociable atmosphere found in most urban places and for the price of a mug of coffee a person earned the right to speak in Lloyd’s room.

People used coffee houses for more than idle chat. Gathering around a cup of coffee provided the perfect excuse for people of different social rank to get together and exchange information on important subjects such as how busy the roads were or who was trading well or who was inventing a new way of doing or making something. Modern newspapers appeared on the scene and were made available behind the bar, further fuelling the conversation by providing new topics for discussion and news from further afield.

Lloyd’s spawned coffee houses all around London. The model was copied in France before the revolution where it acted as a cover for political groups who hung out around the Palais-Royale. After the Revolution the cafés became banks and banks, once more, have become coffee houses, and bars and restaurants. And I feel sure that many of these new places, if they’re of a high enough quality and designed to be sociable places, will in turn incubate new ‘companies’.

My point is that there’s nothing difficult or special about creativity because human beings are biologically predisposed to create. It’s what makes us different from animals. Our urge to reinvent the wheel and continually create more and better things is our greatest natural asset. So we must be doing something very wrong if we’re failing to capitalise on the most common resource on the face of the planet. I suppose we’re actually gathered here tonight to work out how we manage to stop ourselves from being creative, and that’s a very interesting and very ‘Scottish’ subject.

My own business, Graven Images, grew out of the social and educational environment at The Glasgow School of Art, the Vic Café and the Griffin. There we learned how creative people in Europe and North America configured their lives to be creatively innovative. We knew that we didn’t want boring jobs in boring companies. So it seemed reasonable that we should apply what we’d learned at art school to our own lives and do something interesting instead. We reckoned that was the purpose of education.

Sadly, at that time we were the only students to set up a company instead of going on yet another industrial placement. It wasn’t surprising because, in a way, the School would have been happier if we’d graduated with no jobs, they viewed our actions as precociously insolent. But we weren’t trying to be heroes, we simply didn’t know any better, we’d nothing to lose and we thought Glasgow was a good a place for a design business. So Graven Images was born, based on a model of a European cross-disciplinary design studio, even if it was in a somewhat colder climate.

Thankfully, one organisation believed in us: The Scottish Co-operative Development Committee. They helped us apply for Regional Development Grants, Enterprise Initiative cash and persuaded the City Council to give us a one-off grant of a thousand pounds just because we were a co-operative. In 1986 that gave us £38.40 a week to live on which was roughly the same as a student grant. It wasn’t much but it was enough.

Along the way, so-called business consultants with no actual experience of being in business gave us strange advice. We were told to get a safe job with a future (as if such a thing exists); to get a track record; not to be so damn sure; not to go into business with close friends, lovers or family members; we were told to wear suits and to aspire to be as good as people from London. The high street banks wouldn’t lend us cash and the government agencies wouldn’t give us soft loans, relevant advice or work. But we persevered and learned and changed lots of things along the way, including our co-operative constitution.

It’s a fact of life that institutions and investors are nervous of supporting new creative industries because they don’t look like traditional ones. New creative businesses look different and operate in different ways from traditional models so it’s difficult to find one support strategy that fits all, therefore investors prefer to give low risk project-based funding rather than core funding, a practise strikingly similar to usury.

We can’t really compare new creative industries to the monolithic business of shipbuilding but both are innovative and internationally influential. New creative industries don’t directly employ thousands but they are electronically linked to millions. There are more new creative industries than there ever were shipbuilders, but they’re smaller and lighter and more manoeuvrable than the ocean-going ships. They’re essential components in many global industries as well as being industries in themselves and, unlike shipbuilders, they don’t need to re-tool; they just upgrade software or quickly change direction. Like shipbuilders, they employ people with lots different skills. We employ graphic and interior designers and architects. We all use the same tools: the same hardware and software to collaborate with each other and with writers, musicians, filmmakers, engineers and technologists on projects ranging from two and three-dimensional corporate branding, graphic and interior design for retail and leisure industries to international travelling exhibitions.

Technological convergence and cross-disciplinary convergence of skill focussed around language and software are daily realities of working life. But while being able to discuss music and metallurgy on the Macintosh eases communication it’s not a substitute for knowledge. Innovative companies need research and development and the most pleasant way of uncovering new possibilities is through forming relationships with the many educational institutions on our doorstep. And while we’re on the subject I believe we should educate the marketplace as well as the workforce.

Scotland has an unrivalled tradition of education and innovation that gives us a global marketing advantage. We are expected to be inventive.

Contemporary Scotland has emerged as a mature, intelligent and idiosyncratic mongrel society. Cross-cultural influences and tendency towards the exotic puts us in a good position to express our rich differences through products and services – to make them distinctive and desirable in a global marketplace. We should bask in our Scottishness and create an environment where creativity is embedded in everything we do, where the risk that has traditionally accompanied us throughout history is once more regarded as an essential part of creative life. The more eggs you break the more omelettes you make.

We should stop trying to be American or Catalonian or from London. Ironically, it’s often harder for me to win work in Scotland than it is to win work in England and abroad. Big Scottish institutions are seduced by the apparent glamour and security of working with a London creative team therefore Scottish companies, like mine, don’t get the chance to do their best work at home. I learned long ago that no one ever got sacked for commissioning mediocre work and I think its high time they did.

We must lead by example and invest in creativity. Financially, Scotland’s a poor country. I therefore wholeheartedly approve of any positive discrimination that funds creative solutions, because they don’t cost more but they do take more effort. Effort doesn’t cost more money. It’s easy to get creative people to do their best work but first they must be given a chance.

In 1950 Hugh MacDiarmid spoke about the Arts in Scotland. I’ve taken a bit of his speech, published by Mainstream in 1984, and substituted ‘arts’ with ‘creativity’. It reads:

“The mass of the people will react all right if they get the chance. It is the stupid conservatism of their self-styled betters’ that’s the danger… Amateurism has always been the curse of the creativity in Scotland – amateurism and the inveterate predilection to ‘domesticate the issue’… the progress of creativity in Scotland is dependent upon… wider appreciation and striving after the highest possible standard”.

The biggest challenge we face in Scotland is to allow ourselves to be creative. We have to allow creativity to happen, learn to recognise it and support it, and we can’t innovate slowly, so I suggest we all go up the pub for a discussion and sign some cheques. Then we’ll run a slate and see how many of us have backed a winner.

Britain and Modernity

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

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

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

I think it does matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m going to quickly show four projects:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sweden–Scotland

National values, global virtues

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

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

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

Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovate Or Deteriorate—Design Or Die

The Role Of Design In Innovating For Business Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The identity that can’t speak its name

Stories from Stockholm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argentinean interviewee, Through Our Eyes 2*

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

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

SHARE—the tyranny of taste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the objects around you:

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

The Case For Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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