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.

Mistaken Identity

Good design and successful corporate identity management come about through control. Design orders chaos.

Good design and corporate identity management are evident when the personality, or soul, of an organisation is clearly defined and articulated; when numerous messages both complex and simple are communicated well, time after time, to both the client, organisation, and the rest of the world.

Good design and corporate identity management come about through dialogue and negotiation, through knowledge shared between the designer and the client organisation. They rarely arise through accident and must be consciously and positively called into being.

Design is structured activity based on analytical methodologies and informed intuition. It is therefore important that you employ well-educated designers. All good design is underpinned by clearly defined process, clarity and attention to detail (God is, after all, in the details).

Design is a multidisciplinery problem solving process. The process of designing a brochure is essentially the same as designing a building although the technical aspects differ. In Britain the education system has a tendency to pigeonhole designers in departments dedicated to specific technical applications in the mistaken belief that this is what industry requires. A multidisciplinery practice can offer a more holistic evaluation of problems and posit more radical and effective solutions.

NOT departments dedicated to specialisms but individuals with complete design intelligence.

In my experience the creation and maintenance of corporate identity could immediately become more cost effective if designers were used properly and allowed to exercise their skills. Design, like most professional services, tends to be billed against time spent irrespective of whether the time is spent thinking or making or specifying. The best value time you can buy from a designer is thinking time. In order to get the best value out of this time its important to accurately articulate the problem—the first guideline to save time and money is to construct a brief.

Work with the designer to write the brief.

* ensure the designer understands the corporate culture and has accurate information.

* ensure the designer is aware of any potential problems and irrational likes and dislikes.

* ensure the designer has access to individuals within the organisation responsible for implementing the outcome of the brief or championing the corporate identity.

When you pay for designers to solve problems you should get the additional bonus of educational evangelism. Good clients tend to be made rather than acquired. Designers are used to explaining the why’s and wherefores—so use designers to champion causes on your behalf.

The second role of cost effective corporate identity management is to disallow preconceptions; design is an analytical activity not a deterministic one. It is similar to homeopathy, looking at root causes and their solution, not merely at symptoms. “So, you think you want a logo”—but there could easily be another more unique, appropriate and inexpensive solution. Designers are educated to absorb, analyse and articulate cultural change so use their skills for your benefit.

To simply produce a brief demanding pre-determined response, or produce a brief with insufficient information requesting a speculative response is not a serious way to obtain an accurate and cost effective solution. Initial speculation on the part of the client can lead to significant savings as the problem is accurately defined before any solutions arise.

The third guideline for cost effective corporate identity management is to avoid the mistaken belief that an expensive manual is any sort of end in itself.

The unit cost of many corporate identity manuals doesn’t correspond with their usefulness. All organisations undergo constant cultural change and an inflexible document quickly becomes obsolete.

The manual shouldn’t be worshipped or cast in stone—The Herald, The Broomielaw—both evolving projects.

Individuals within organisations must feel empathy with their corporate identity. Guidelines must be communicated in a simple non-didactic, non-legislative way. People must understand why colours etc. have been chosen. People dislike being ordered what to do, or patronised. People dislike systems which legislate against any creative imput and abhor systems which confuse, or are incomplete. Unnecessary bureaucracy leads to maintenance of the status quo.

However professional the generic printed binder may look, if often fails the produce to desired response. People have a healthy disregard for the printed word.

GIL gave The Herald a system with which to solve their problems —“Kit of parts”—“set of tools”. Tools are inert if not used—people have to use them. The manual in effect is “a request for action/involvement”.

The fourth guideline for cost effective corporate identity management is to make more use of sensorial vocabularies rather than visual ones.

Design isn’t only concerned with the visual but with all of the human senses and comunicates with a sensorial language utilising myths, rituals, symbols, values and beliefs in order to articulate culture.

The tangible aspects of design language include written and printed material, moving images, products and other artifacts, interiors and architecture—they are the expensive parts of design language.

The intangible aspects of the design vocabulary are less obvious but more potent: smell, taste, touch, sound, temperature and light. They produce a frequently subliminal response and when used intelligently often diffray the need for a more tangible and expensive solution.

Bread shop without smell; church without an echo, difference between and canteen and a restaurant.

Invest in clear thinking and attention to detail. The quality of the design process should replace the weight of specification. Good design is about control—sensorial control as well as financial control.

Meaningful Differentiation

1

The evolutionary process of civilisation is painful and has doubtless killed many innovations as quickly as they were conceived. Solutions to many problems may well have been prematurely discarded in favour of others which solved the immediate terrors of disease, starvation and lack of shelter.

2

If innovation threatened those in power, creative individuals would be killed or derided. Their names added to the long list of people who dared to ‘do things differently’.

3

If a problem was solved too quickly the creator might have been burned as a ‘witch’, effectively banning exploration of the ‘magical’ unknown. Consequently, new ideas have developed and travelled slowly.

4

We have inherited a suspicion of new ideas, which are cynically presented as the ‘exception to all known rules’. Today’s ‘superstitious’ businesses still consider creativity to be dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’.

5

Design is as old as civilisation. It is the creative process which controls the evolution of ideas, bringing order to the world, bringing forth cities from the chaos of dust and ritual. There is a seamless evolutionary route from the development of speech, drawing and writing, to the creation of products and architecture. Objects help us to perform tasks. They also help us to communicate and help businesses to function. They are the props and backdrops against which we play out the drama of everyday live.

Has any generation felt privileged to live in the present? I don’t think so. But we should feel lucky.

6

We are fortunate to live in wealthy regions where we have the resources to realise the business opportunities presented by challenge and change. We’re lucky to live at at point in time when we’re catching up with ourselves and with all we’ve learned in the history of civilisation.

Today, designers rely on much more than intuition. We work in cross-disciplinery teams. We borrow methodologies from all of the sciences, arts and humanities, from history and fiction. We create our own methodologies.

7

We use all of this information to underpin our intuition, creating new perspectives on the past, the present and the future. We begin to see tomorrow in sharpen focus, with real clarity, with better understanding. We are better able to predict and control the shape of tomorrow – it’s architecture, products and services.

8

We now have the technology to create an anthology of the past, to look at and reevaluate the sum of civilisation. With this collected information we can glimpse a more refined model of the world – even if that model changes too quickly for us to crystallise it’s many meanings.

9

Our gaze is never constant because we too change with alarming speed; becoming chimera: men with animal organs, prosthetically enhanced and genetically and culturally mutated. Nothing stands still, everything resonates with meaning.

With our stone age bodies and classically fashioned thoughts we inhabit the age of invisibility. We move with the heaviness of leaden boots along the bottom of the ocean while all around us is lightness, intelligence, invisibility and speed – a matrix of chaotic possibilities.

10

The sciences and the arts are merging. Hardware yields software, wetware and intelligent, effervescent networks suspended invisibly in gas.

The meaning of everything changes: ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘art’ and ‘science’. All fail to describe the spectrum of states existing between, and beyond, these polarised definitions.

We need new multi-dimensional languages to describe these myriad new phenomenon. In the rush to name and claim each new realisation scientists steal poetry in a bid to qualify the unquantifiable. Artists and designers raid the maths and science block in order to legitimise, professionalise and quantify the essentially unmeasurable.

11

We stand in the middle of a model of our universe, amidst more information than we can meaningfully process. We are in the eye of a tornado which has gathered in strength, depth and speed throughout history. We are simultaneously part of it and apart from it. We have created it and are created by it. We stare transfixed, trying to still it with clumsy animal gestures as it confoundingly changes before our eyes, sparkling and threatening to overwhelm us with pure, potential energy.

All of this new information may yield a glorious renaissance, a point in history in which the contemporary world binds with it’s ancient past. A time in which we process wisdom from all ages to create a truer, more confusing, model of the world.

Everything we have dreamed of is now probable, possible.

12

As a designer I can’t imagine living in a more exciting time. But I find it worrying that with all of this new knowledge, and all of these new opportunities, that we are surrounded by banality, mediocrity and historical pastiche in communications, products, services and architecture.

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

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

It’s no use only 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’s history. You must think anew and venture into unchartered territory.

Tomorrow’s businesses must innovate or deteriorate. They must design or die.

13

We live in a time when we can make almost any material, any process, we can imagine.

Designers are given thinking tools with which to help you make today’s dreams tomorrow’s products. Tools which help organise and give shape to this new and chaotic information.

We now have degree courses in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Music – science and art , not ‘pure’ subjects working in isolation, but ‘tainted’ subjects designed to produces graduates with a broader understanding of the world. We have degree courses in Product Design Engineering incorporating aesthetics, cultural issues, physics, mathematics, ergonomics and design history. Today’s designers need these skills to make sense of and to make use of this new technological knowledge, expressing it in diverse products and services that will fulfil the latent aspirations of tomorrow’s clients and customers.

14

We know we must understand before we create. We understand more today than at any point in time. We are developing new tools which predict the outcome of our actions, making risk less risky.

Dangerous opportunities presented through creative innovation are less dangerous than they have ever been. Consequently, innovation will become the norm rather than the exception. Turning dreams into realities will be commonplace in tomorrow’s world.

15

British businesses have the chance to work with the very best, most challenging designers. In the UK we have the world’s oldest and best creative resource – the most skilled designers, the best talent. The businesses who choose to work with these world-class designers will win tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be created by teams. Teams will be made-up of professionals and non-professionals, businesses and individuals, designers and scientists and economists.

There will only be one rule – that tomorrow’s successful teams must be creative if they are to succeed.

16

It still seems that the world moves very quickly and we understand so little – it’s taken us forty years to understand ’50s products. That’s why we like retro-styling. It’s a retrogressive respite which momentarily halts the terror of tomorrow’s products. But we’re learning ever more quickly and no amount of hiding in yesterday’s services and bland architecture will stop the demands of our overwhelming aspirations of our age of transparency. An age where we absolutely rely on physical artifacts to give tangible shape to invisible technology. For the first time in human history tomorrow has no shape, unless we choose to give it one.

All of human history is a rehearsal for the new world which is daily uncovered or created, which daily doubles in size and offers your business unparalleled opportunities for economic exploitation.

17

New software has helped us to create common languages which deliver us from hundreds of years of technical specialisation. Creativity is democratised, it’s on the streets, not fetishised and professionalised in art galleries and universities. We individually have the power to bridge the space between dreams and realities if only we have the courage to try and make sense of a little part of what we now know, turning intangible information into physical reality. For only by doing this will British businesses culturally and economically inhabit tomorrow’s world.

18

Meaningful differentiation, intelligent diversity, is inevitable – it’s happening exponentially, all around us. It provides businesses with fertile territory for new services and products.

Designers grow tired of preaching and start new companies who do for themselves what they would gladly have done for their clients – if only they been asked.

We no longer live in an age of darkness, but an age of lightness. Businesses need designers to help them breathe in this new knowledge and breathe out, filling the world with new shapes for products and buildings and strange, exciting new service industries.

A lace factory in East Kilbride weaves a slender slingshot which will propel a satellite into a new orbit.

Now is a time for you to:

explore true feelings not false facts

feel insecure not falsely secure

generalise don’t specialise

live in today and tomorrow not yesterday

acknowledge there are no certainties only probabilities

Now is a time for possibilities. A time for being better, being different, for cherishing diversity, encouraging individuality, informalising, being inter-reliant, breaking-out of preconceived ideas, evaluating and revaluating, recognising and welcoming change, being inquisitive and proactive.

Now is the time to stop dreaming about tomorrow and start to create it.

Now is a time for you to to work with designers and to make creativity the first priority in your business. with other nations, other objects, in contrast, act as discreet talismans, expressing our regional and individual personalities. Some objects perform both roles simultaneously.

Today’s successful products and services must tangibly express our international relationships and the values that are important to us. As the world becomes more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects to eloquently distinguish and celebrate our cultural differences, differences which offer powerful trading advantages; showing competitors desirable aspects of our society that they may wish to gain through trade.

Cultural difference is a valuable national asset because it differentiates us from our competitors. Products which are visibly different are distinguishable and attractive to consumers who, in turn, use products to describe their own individuality. In our complex, and often contradictory world, with many globally common values, technologies, needs and markets. The quality of ‘difference’ adds value to products and services and commands premium prices. Consumers expect to pay a premium price for products which have the ‘added-value’ of being different and special.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Culture, or ‘social glue’ has five layers, these can be likened to the skin on a onion, which when peeled away reveals our most dearly held ideologies – the things we get excited about. The five layers are language, symbols, myths, rituals and values. However, designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar things in new ways, viewed from a new angle in a new time.

The best designers help us to understand new things by giving us clues which help describe the purpose of an object or a process. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways while simultaneously hinting at what the future might be.

Glasgow

Cities change all the time, they’re in a constant state of flux. Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. Glasgow has always used design to promote whatever its most recent reincarnation might be. We were ‘The Second City of the Empire’, ‘The Workshop of the World’, ‘The Finest Victorian City in Europe’, ‘The Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’ and we’re ‘UK City of Architecture and Design’ in 1999. We also had one of the biggest type foundries in Europe and thankfully still have a school of design and two schools of architecture. However, the overall effect has not been cumulative; we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have liked.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport. They are also expressed through the designed objects which form the props and backdrops in our ‘theatre of live’: our architecture, our products and garments. Local differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations. (Some are maybe illegal…)

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s success in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through evolving indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaurs.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through communication, education and participation and communication. Designers should be part of a team which gently orientates citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, like those embodied in heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed place with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of power which help citizens make sense of an unfamiliar and daunting vision of the future.

Most designers want to share their vision with the rest of the world. Designers are egotistical and evangelical and if they’re going to usefully influence social and economic change they must learn explain what it is that they do if others are to understand, help and support them. Communication is vital for sustained design-led change.

Education is essential if non-designers are to understand the common languages which allow us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and the economic terms. There is a growing correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain thanks to the Blair government. For far too long young people have been allowed to leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area.

Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. It’s therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

However, designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by it’s very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is essential for a healthy city. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain a strategic vision in the midst of the criticism and doubt which will always accompany change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/ obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

Participation is key to any innovative, design-led project because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects and all designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

—————–

tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

One thing that we can be sure of is that tomorrow’s successful products and buildings will be complex and, if they are to succeed, they must be aesthetically functional – they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must be appropriate and efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, invisible new technologies, they must help us to understand and welcome the future rather than confuse and scare us, or make us feel stupid.

In the nineties the traditional design professions are merging and being replaced by a collaboration of people and skills: new media, science, art, music and fashion. New design processes and designed products reflect the past and reveal an exciting future. Brave new brands express fresh consumer aspirations and innovative ways of living. The UK is an energetic, eccentric, creative laboratory – an off-shore voyeurist and an island melting-pot where anything goes, everything rocks.

The new designers are often a product of the UK. They are from a broad art school education, collaborating with others who often have no academic back-ground at all. They are creative people who form unconventional partnerships: artists and graphic designers, film-makers and architects, poets, musicians and product designers. In the past artists and designers shared the common language of drawing, today, it is often the addition of new technology, common hardware and similar software platforms that have given people a common language which has allowed them to talk and work together. This gives us new ways of seeing the world and new kinds of products which express our new experiences.

The new UK style is the vigorous creative expression of contemporary British street life and culture. Fashion, products and music describe how young people live and work in the UK. These everyday objects build a picture of our society: a place which is rapidly changing. New trends are emerging. These trends reflect both cultural and technological change, describing how we might live in the new millennium.

The UK was the first into the industrial revolution and the first out. Throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries the UK was the ‘workshop of the world’, the premier manufacturing nation. Our manufacturing pre-eminence has waned but our strength in design and creative innovation remains unchallenged. The nineteen thirties and the nineteen sixties were important creative moments in recent British history and today the Japanese acknowledge that 70% of all new ideas originate from the Britain. The UK of the nineties is a special place to be, it is the creative capital of the world and it is undergoing another renaissance, arguably the biggest this century and one which will have consequences reaching far into the the next century.

The new UK Style is important because it is a collection of objects: buildings, products and garments which express re-valuation, growth and renewal, giving us clues how we may live tomorrow. The UK, like Hong Kong is in a state of flux which, through intelligent control, can be the lucrative generator of economic innovation and generation.

In order to design well, it’s important to control creativity. In order to control creativity we must have a methodology which underpins our intuition. We must also understand the personality and aspirations of the clients and markets we are creating for.

If I were asked to define the personality of the new UK style I would say that it was:

complex

dynamic

contradictory

idiosyncratic

intelligent

humourous

ironic

irreverent

optimistic

and, energetic

Every region in every society in the world has a different character. Good design, like good art, must be sensitive towards these fragile differences and eloquent in expressing them as products and buildings and garments.

The UK invented design education which has it’s roots in the country’s manufacturing past – schools like the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London were established as an educational resource for Victorian industries. Much of the new UK style began life in the many schools and institutions of art and design throughout Britain.

Many of today’s graduates have rejected conventional business structures and have formed unconventional collaborations with other people who offer a new perspective on art, design and fashion. All this helps move traditional creative disciplines out of the institutions and on to the street.

New cultural trends

One characteristic of new British design is a trend towards inter-disciplinary working. Collaborations such as those by Born Free and Inflate where fashion meets product design, and Tomato, a changing collaboration between poets, advertising creatives, graphic designers and film-makers and collaborations between designers, manufacturers and retailers such as those found at Nice House and SCP. Many young creators such as One Foot Taller, Mo’Wax and Inflate have decided to become their own client and set up in business, controlling their own promotion, manufacturing and distribution. These young businesses can respond rapidly to change and are quick to describe new ideas through objects or music.

Traditional boundaries between creative disciplines are breaking down. Every day technology becomes more flexible and user friendly and artists, designers, musicians and architects find that they have a common creative process which underpins all of their work.

Many collaborations are between professionals and non-professionals, graduate designers and non-graduates. This often leads to strange hybrid products and objects. Many tiny pockets of energy give rise to highly individual products which come from very personal experiences such as Precious McBane who were hairdressers and now design furniture and theatre sets.

The de-professional-isation of design is another interesting phenomenon which signals cultural change. Many old technical professions are being de-skilled and presented in new media formats which allow more people to access them. The big messages about creativity and design and their usefulness in business and in everyday life are getting on to the street. People are opening their eyes and their minds to new ways of living.

new languages for a new millennium

There is no doubt that creativity is gathering power within the world of international business because there is a growing understanding of the role design plays as an international language allowing us to trade successfully with one another. The potential to trade successfully depends on our ability to recognise and understand cultural differences, ensuring we encode our products and buildings with the appropriate messages while respecting the special cultural expectations of individual societies. In the UK we are beginning to enjoy the idiosyncrasies in our cultural personality and rely less on a monolithic view of life in Britain which is no longer true but probably never was. In the UK we must be careful to protect and nurture cultural differences because they are a fragile and valuable source of human richness and economic wealth which will diminish and vanish if they are misunderstood and abused.

Who are the guardians of creativity and style?

The real guardians of UK creativity and the new UK style are not the formal organisations and national institutions. The real guardians of UK style are the individuals and local, informal networks made in the process of designing and working. The invisible networks created as creative people seek out partners who share similar values and aspirations. These networks are fragile because are unsupported by formal institutions and would die if forced to conform to a national policy on creative direction. Instead they depend upon courageous individuals who dare to be different. In Glasgow we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Designers can play a constructive role in finding a route through the confusion, finding order within apparent chaos and helping to present and promote the positive elements in the emerging personality of a renewed culture. These elements, new languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values can form the basis of a palette which will underpin the development of new products and services, these in turn will attract trade with other nations who desperately want a piece of this fresh, new action.

Design + Cities + Culture

Design has always mattered but it’s only recently been called ‘design’.

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

Aldous Huxley once said “Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you make of what happens to you”. In our time and place it is designers who straddle the ever-lessening gap between the arts and sciences and who try to make sense of and give shape to our chaotic world.

Designers are only a recent addition to the list of sorcerers, magicians, scribes, kings, architects and artists who have helped shape the world. All have helped direct the creation of cities from a confusion of dust and ritual, responding to the ancient human fear of chaos and disorder. Designers have subtly manipulated city plans, the form of buildings and objects, re-shaping and controlling the way we respond to the physical world.

In the ancient world different societies designed different architecture, clothing and tools. These expressed unique cultural values, technologies and ways of living which gave each society a special, concrete personality. The pyramids, sports cars, suits and homewares all help us to form a tangible picture of who were are, where we come from and what we believe in. They form an eloquent world without words.

Each society is obviously unique and special, other societies need to trade in order to obtain desirable new objects, products, technologies and processes. New objects bring new ways of doing things which radically change how we live and work.

As long as society and technology continue to change we will need tangible new objects and buildings which describe that change. Today, we live in the age of speed: a time of unprecedented change and continuous re-calibration. Our aspirations are ‘space age’ but our universe is ‘stone age’, therefore we need ecologically, socially and economically sustainable methods of change.

Today’s objects, like those in the ancient world continue to perform important roles within society; as totems, international markers which publicly affirm our status in the world and help to define our relationships with other nations, other objects, in contrast, act as discreet talismans, expressing our regional and individual personalities. Some objects perform both roles simultaneously.

Today’s successful products and services must tangibly express our international relationships and the values that are important to us. As the world becomes more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects to eloquently distinguish and celebrate our cultural differences, differences which offer powerful trading advantages; showing competitors desirable aspects of our society that they may wish to gain through trade.

Cultural difference is a valuable national asset because it differentiates us from our competitors. Products which are visibly different are distinguishable and attractive to consumers who, in turn, use products to describe their own individuality. In our complex, and often contradictory world, with many globally common values, technologies, needs and markets. The quality of ‘difference’ adds value to products and services and commands premium prices. Consumers expect to pay a premium price for products which have the ‘added-value’ of being different and special.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Culture, or ‘social glue’ has five layers, these can be likened to the skin on a onion, which when peeled away reveals our most dearly held ideologies—the things we get excited about. The five layers are language, symbols, myths, rituals and values. However, designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar things in new ways, viewed from a new angle in a new time.

The best designers help us to understand new things by giving us clues which help describe the purpose of an object or a process. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways while simultaneously hinting at what the future might be.

Glasgow

Cities change all the time, they’re in a constant state of flux. Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. Glasgow has always used design to promote whatever its most recent reincarnation might be. We were ‘The Second City of the Empire’, ‘The Workshop of the World’, ‘The Finest Victorian City in Europe’, ‘The Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’ and we’re ‘UK City of Architecture and Design’ in 1999. We also had one of the biggest type foundries in Europe and thankfully still have a school of design and two schools of architecture. However, the overall effect has not been cumulative; we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have liked.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport. They are also expressed through the designed objects which form a the props and backdrops in our ‘theatre of live’: our architecture, our products and garments. Local differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations. (Some are maybe illegal …)

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s success in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through evolving indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaurs.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through communication, education and participation and communication. Designers should be part of a team which gently orientates citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, like those embodied in heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed place with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of power which help citizens make sense of an unfamiliar and daunting vision of the future.

Most designers want to share their vision with the rest of the world. Designers are egotistical and evangelical and if they’re going to usefully influence social and economic change they must learn explain what it is that they do if others are to understand, help and support them. Communication is vital for sustained design-led change.

Education is essential if non-designers are to understand the common languages which allow us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and the economic terms. There is a growing correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain thanks to the Blair government. For far too long young people have been allowed to leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area.

Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. It’s therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

However, designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by it’s very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is essential for a healthy city. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain a strategic vision in the midst of the criticism and doubt which will always accompany change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/ obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

Participation is key to any innovative, design-led project because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects and all designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

—————–

Tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

One thing that we can be sure of is that tomorrow’s successful products and buildings will be complex and, if they are to succeed, they must be aesthetically functional—they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must be appropriate and efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, invisible new technologies, they must help us to understand and welcome the future rather than confuse and scare us, or make us feel stupid.

In the nineties the traditional design professions are merging and being replaced by a collaboration of people and skills: new media, science, art, music and fashion. New design processes and designed products reflect the past and reveal an exciting future. Brave new brands express fresh consumer aspirations and innovative ways of living. The UK is an energetic, eccentric, creative laboratory—an off-shore voyeurist and an island melting-pot where anything goes, everything rocks.

The new designers are often a product of the UK. They are from a broad art school education, collaborating with others who often have no academic back-ground at all. They are creative people who form unconventional partnerships: artists and graphic designers, film-makers and architects, poets, musicians and product designers. In the past artists and designers shared the common language of drawing, today, it is often the addition of new technology, common hardware and similar software platforms that have given people a common language which has allowed them to talk and work together. This gives us new ways of seeing the world and new kinds of products which express our new experiences.

The new UK style is the vigorous creative expression of contemporary British street life and culture. Fashion, products and music describe how young people live and work in the UK. These everyday objects build a picture of our society; a place which is rapidly changing. New trends are emerging. These trends reflect both cultural and technological change, describing how we might live in the new millennium.

The UK was the first into the industrial revolution and the first out. Throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries the UK was the ‘workshop of the world’, the premier manufacturing nation. Our manufacturing pre-eminence has waned but our strength in design and creative innovation remains unchallenged. The nineteen thirties and the nineteen sixties were important creative moments in recent British history and today the Japanese acknowledge that 70% of all new ideas originate from the Britain. The UK of the nineties is a special place to be, it is the creative capital of the world and it is undergoing another renaissance, arguably the biggest this century and one which will have consequences reaching far into the the next century.

The new UK Style is important because it is a collection of objects: buildings, products and garments which express re-valuation, growth and renewal, giving us clues how we may live tomorrow. The UK, like Hong Kong is in a state of flux which, through intelligent control, can be the lucrative generator of economic innovation and generation.

In order to design well, it’s important to control creativity. In order to control creativity we must have a methodology which underpins our intuition. We must also understand the personality and aspirations of the clients and markets we are creating for.

If I were asked to define the personality of the new UK style I would say that it was:

complex
dynamic
contradictory
idiosyncratic
intelligent
humourous
ironic
irreverent
optimistic
and, energetic

Every region in every society in the world has a different character. Good design, like good art, must be sensitive these fragile differences and eloquent in expressing them as products and buildings and garments.

The UK invented design education which has it’s roots in the country’s manufacturing past—schools like the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London were established as an educational resource for Victorian industries. Much of the new UK style began life in the many schools and institutions of art and design throughout Britain.

Many of today’s graduates have rejected conventional business structures and have formed unconventional collaborations with other people who offer a new perspective on art, design and fashion. All this helps move traditional creative disciplines out of the institutions and on to the street.

New cultural trends

One characteristic of new British design is a trend towards inter-disciplinary working. Collaborations such as those by Born Free and Inflate where fashion meets product design, and Tomato, a changing collaboration between poets, advertising creatives, graphic designers and film-makers and collaborations between designers, manufacturers and retailers such as those found at NIce House and SCP. Many young creators such as One Foot Taller, Mo’Wax and Inflate have decided to become their own client and set up in business, controlling their own promotion, manufacturing and distribution. These young businesses can respond rapidly to change and are quick to describe new ideas through objects or music.

Traditional boundaries between creative disciplines are breaking down. Every day technology becomes more flexible and user friendly and artists, designers, musicians and architects find that they have a common creative process which underpins all of their work.

Many collaborations are between professionals and non-professionals, graduate designers and non-graduates. This often leads to strange hybrid products and objects. Many tiny pockets of energy give rise to highly individual products which come from very personal experiences such as Precious McBane who were hairdressers and now design furniture and theatre sets.

The de-professional-isation of design is another interesting phenomenon which signals cultural change. Many old technical professions are being de-skilled and presented in new media formats which allow more people to access them. The big messages about creativity and design and their usefulness in business and in everyday life are getting on to the street. People are opening their eyes and their minds to new ways of living.

Nnew languages for a new millennium

There is no doubt that creativity is gathering power within the world of international business because there is a growing understanding of the role design plays as an international language allowing us to trade successfully with one another. The potential to trade successfully depends on our ability to recognise and understand cultural differences, ensuring we encode our products and buildings with the appropriate messages while respecting the special cultural expectations of individual societies. In the UK we are beginning to enjoy the idiosyncrasies in our cultural personality and rely less on a monolithic view of life in Britain which is no longer true but probably never was. In the UK we must be careful to protect and nurture cultural differences because they are a fragile and valuable source of human richness and economic wealth which will diminish and vanish if they are misunderstood and abused.

Who are the guardians of creativity and style?

The real guardians of UK creativity and the new UK style are not the formal organisations and national institutions. The real guardians of UK style are the individuals and local, informal networks made in the process of designing and working. The invisible networks created as creative people seek out partners who share similar values and aspirations. These networks are fragile because are unsupported by formal institutions and would die if forced to conform to a national policy on creative direction. Instead they depend upon courageous individuals who dare to be different. In Glasgow we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Designers can play a constructive role in finding a route through the confusion, finding order within apparent chaos and helping to present and promote the positive elements in the emerging personality of a renewed culture. These elements, new languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values can form the basis of a palette which will underpin the development of new products and services, these in turn will attract trade with other nations who desperately want a piece of this fresh, new action.

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse is much more than an architecture centre.

Cultural Landscapes

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

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

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

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

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

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

My role in the cultural landscape

Design

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

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

Creative process

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

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

Elements of culture

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

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

Typography

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

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

The Glaswegian cultural landscape

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

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

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

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

Kidsize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design as a tool for cultural change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. design—what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

2. culture—what is it?

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

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

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living and surviving. These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport and designed products which form the tangible theatre of life, the props and the backdrops; our architecture, products and garments. These differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations.

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s relationship with the external world, giving an advantage and adding value in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through expressing indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaur.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through education, participation and communication. Designers can gently orientate citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, such as those embodied by heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed environment with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of order to make sense of an apparently chaotic vision of the future.

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

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

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

The second strand is education which is essential if non-designers are to understand this common language which allows us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and economic environment. There is no correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain at present. In the United Kingdom young people can leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area. Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. Is it therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

Designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by its very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is the third strand in Glasgow’s strategy. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain this strategic vision in the midst of criticism and the doubt which always accompanies change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. We must create an environment in which innovation is seen as challenging and not frightening. Failure must be viewed as a necessary part of the process of change.

Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

The fourth strand in Glasgow’s five strands of strategy is participation, because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects. All designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

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

3. cultural strategy—what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The urban environment—what is Glasgow?

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

The second city

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. what Glasgow can hope to achieve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is 1999 a waste of time?

Is 1999 a waste of time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 design – what is it?

2 culture – what is it?

3 cultural strategy – what is it?

4 the urban environment – what is Glasgow?

5 what Glasgow can hope to achieve

1 design – what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 culture – what is it?

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

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

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living and surviving. These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport and designed products which form the tangible theatre of life, the props and the backdrops: our architecture, products and garments. These differences are unique, fragile and very precious because they give us a sense of identity, a sense of place and of home. Their creation and survival depends on the support of ordinary people and informal networks, not governments or professional organisations.

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s relationship with the external world, giving an advantage and adding value in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through expressing indigenous forms of architecture; through shaping the environment to reflect the unique demands of citizens; through employing people in cultural industries, these industries include the service industries, manufacturing, publishing and building, not only the ‘Arts’.

Cultural differences can be used to create self-awareness, understanding and pride within cities. Restoring confidence and a worthwhile vision of the future through examining, understanding and re-presenting history, community and the economy in the new context of today and tomorrow. Allowing us to intelligently create new industries and environments with which to fill the place yesterdays heavy industrial dinosaur.

Cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through education, participation and communication. Designers can gently orientate citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, such as those embodied by heavy engineering, using symbols of the old power, the old ideologies and cultural grammar. Designers can give well understood meaning and real depth to a new future in a transformed environment with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of order to make sense of an apparently chaotic vision of the future.

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

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

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

The second strand is education which is essential if non-designers are to understand this common language which allows us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and economic environment. There is no correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain at present. In the United Kingdom young people can leave school after thirteen years of formal education and undertake a science based degree with thirteen years pre-understanding of the subject area. Architects and designers after thirteen years of formal education go on to their degree courses with no pre-understanding of their subject area. Is it therefore not surprising that our environment doesn’t work. Education for both old and young is a priority if we are to positively change any aspect of our environment in the longer term.

Designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. Glasgow tried to and realised at the last moment that the urban environment and the communities who lived there were complex and very fragile. Change should be gradual and set within a strategy which promotes communication between designers and the rest of society through education. Designing new ways to live and work will, by it’s very nature, be innovative, not simply an exercise in importing methodology from another culture. Every place is different and special however similar it may seem on the surface. Glasgow has tried to transplant successful monolithic solutions from other cultures, in a bid to solve its own problems. These solutions were doomed to failure, and temporarily destroying confidence and the political will to innovate and progress.

Innovation is the third strand in Glasgow’s strategy. Innovation requires deep self-knowledge, control, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how cities might plan for the future. As designers we should have the tenacity to sustain this strategic vision in the midst of criticism and the doubt which always accompanies change.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, should involve every faction within society. Innovation should be participative, enrolling every community, allowing people to understand and feel part of the process of change. People feed from the energy created by a successful project. Education and participation ensure people understand why a project might have succeeded or failed, it gives them the strength and support of a team with which to support a second attempt if the first one fails.

Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful cities must face the challenge of innovation if they are to embrace the future. We must create an environment in which innovation is seen as challenging and not frightening. Failure must be viewed as a necessary part of the process of change.

Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful cities must be courageous enough to risk and be mature enough to be supportive in failure. Failure is not bad, but a necessary component in a successful strategy for change. In many ways Glasgow’s greatest strength is it’s historical ability to consistently fail and it’s pathological need to strive for a better future, almost like a compulsive/obsessive disorder, continually destroying and creating, but always, ultimately, moving forwards.

The fourth strand in Glasgow’s five strands of strategy is participation, because it is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous environments inflicted by designers on communities, without any consultation, compassion or even a properly negotiated brief. Product and graphic designers discover their mistakes more quickly than architects. All designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

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

4 The urban environment – what is Glasgow?

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

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

the second city

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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