Innovation—the politics of change

Facts of life

It is a fact of life that the United Kingdom is governed by politicians who don’t understand or value innovation.

In Britain, in recent times, we have achieved little that we can be proud of: Pride, hope 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 un-quantifiable. As a nation we are all doomed to failure because the world moves on and it can’t wait for us. Nor can we import successful solutions from other cultures because there problems are not the same as ours.

Designers have given moribund policy-makers, 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 facts of life.

There is much work for designers to do and we must hope that we haven’t been complacent for too long …

Hope

The creative process, the process of designing, is an excellent ‘tool’ for analysis, synthesis and reconstruction of the world. It reveals the ideologies that motivate us and excite us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing an innovative strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate: familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive. This ‘tool’ should be of use to politicians if designers take time to explain how it may be used.

The process of innovation, or rather, that of ‘allowing change to happen’, instead of actively preventing it from happening, must 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.

Innovation always involves risk. One definition of risk is ‘dangerous opportunity’. Successful designers 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. Nothing new is created without an element of the unknown. Successful designers 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.

We must have hope because we can help and support innovative projects.

Faith

Innovation requires control, process, skill, knowledge and faith. Innovation also demands deep self-knowledge, support and courage. Designers can help reveal how civilisations 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. We must have faith in ourselves.

Designers are impatient. But it is both difficult and undesirable to change the world overnight. The urban environment and the communities who lived there are complex and very fragile. Change must 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.

It is meaningless for designers to do it on their own. History is littered with disastrous products and environments inflicted by designers on an unsuspecting public, 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. 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.

If we, as creative people, can take the time to understand and communicate the social and economic benefits of what it is that we do, to politicians and strategists, encouraging them to use design and creativity as the ‘tool’ for economic regeneration we could help change the world. We must have faith in ourselves if we are to persuade others to have enough faith in design to risk the dangerous opportunities that innovation presents them with.

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.

Charity

Bureaucracies, by their very definition, maintain the status quo and avoid the risks associated with innovation. Expect nothing from them. Instead it’s important for designers to work in partnership. Partnerships help us understand how our very different worlds work and makes us respect one another. Partnerships and shared risks encourage innovation.

Innovation usually requires funding over a longer period of time because many products are complicated and require extended periods of research, development and testing. Unfortunately, the United Kingdom is now used to ten minute ‘product cycles’ thanks to the Thatcher government’s preoccupation with the stock market. Akio Morito, the then president of Sony warned the UK that it would never again be a powerful manufacturer unless it learned to invest in product development cycles of several years duration. We are a greedy and impatient country who want success today and immediate and profitable return on our investment tomorrow morning.

In Islamic countries it is forbidden for banks to charge interest on money lent, this is regarded as ‘usury’ and it’s a crime. Instead, banks share in the success or failure of each project.

However, designers and innovators aren’t looking for charity, for free money, but we are looking for partners who will help us innovate. Today we live in a world which can’t afford to look only at the financial equation of any project, that’s only a one dimensional picture of the world. We must also count the value of employment and see ‘charity’ as a characteristic which is essential if we are to have a world worth living in, in the next millennium.

Stephano Marzano, the Design Director of Philips said, “Design is a political activity”.

Design, because of its analytical, strategic process and its catalytic ability to invoke change and create wealth, 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.

Countries which are socially and economically successful innovate when designing for manufacturing, the service industries and the built environment. To actively deny a country the right to innovate is to deny its right to exist. What will the the archeologists of tomorrow make of British culture if all they find are Japanese electronic products, American beer bottles and cheap reproductions of seventeenth century English housing types?

Designers working together with manufacturing and service industries 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 to repair and re-start. Design provides the analytical framework through which society understands the archaeology of the past and describe what the archaeology of the future might be.

Britain’s future success will depend upon the ability of its creative people to persuade politicians and banks to invest in innovation and work with designers to create a future that doesn’t look like a badly re-worked version of the past.

Why Design Matters

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.

Designers are 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.

Tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

We can be sure 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 and 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 19th and first half of the 20th 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 1930s and the 1960s 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 to 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, in Scotland, we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Hong Kong is also experiencing massive change. 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.

Happy birthday!!!! Hill House

Firstly, I must thank Anne Ellis and The National Trust for Scotland for inviting me here. I have never opened an exhibition before and am honoured to be asked.

It makes me smile to be here because I always expected The National Trust to be immersed in heritage with little thought for contemporary creativity. I never expected The National Trust to so eloquently bridge the gap between the past and the present which they do through this exhibition, “New Perceptions: New Directions”. They have the courage to look to the future in a way Charles Rennie Mackintosh would have been proud of.

Despite having the second oldest and arguably the most distinguished school of design in the world Scotland has only a small design industry and very few places to show contemporary creativity within a national and international context. The perfoming arts and fine arts are well provided for while the Scottish Arts Council perversly fails to recognise architecture and design as ‘artforms’. This is unfortunate as design and architecture are excellent ambassadors for Scotland and the UK because they express culture and have a direct effect on the economy—a point not missed by our present government.

I think it’s great that The National Trust for Scotland has decided on the bold and successful move to include a space for contemporary creativity excellence in an already excellent, creative space created by an internationally recognised Scottish architect and designer. I sincerly hope The Trust continue to develop this example in their other properties.

On behalf of The National Trust for Scotland I would like to thank the European Regional Devolopment Fund, Dunbaronshire Enterprise, Liz Arthur, Bill and Sylvia Potter from Inhouse, David Page from Page and Park, Sir Terence Conran and NTS Studio for their support in making this project possible. I would also like to thank Arata Isosaki for kindly donating his Marilyn chair which pays homage to his love of Mackintosh and to that other 20th Century icon, Marilyn Monroe.

I would personally like to thank Anne Ellis for her tireless energy in supporting design in Scotland when others didn’t or wouldn’t.

I wish you every success with the gallery in the future.

Is Design an International Language?

A world without words

History

From the beginning of time objects have held a special place in the human imagination: the pyramids, sports cars, suits and homewares all help form a tangible picture of who were are, where we come from and what we believe in.

In the ancient world different societies designed different artifacts, different architecture and different clothing and tools. These played an active role in describing different values and different ways of living which gave each society a special, concrete personality.

Because each society was obviously special and different, other societies wanted to trade with them in order to obtain desirable new objects, which were different from their own, and sometimes technologically more advanced. New objects often brought with them new ways of doing things which radically changed how people lived and worked.

This picture remains true today, although we live in a much more complex world with many common values, technologies, needs and market places.

Today’s objects, like those in the ancient world, continue to perform important roles within society; as totems to be prominently placed to act as markers publicly affirming our status in the world, and as talismans which are more discreetly placed to privately reassure us that we have individual personalities. Objects express our ties with society and the values that are important to us.

As the world becomes more complex and more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects within society. Successful buildings or products must be aesthetically functional—they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must perform well—they must feel appropriate or efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, intangible new technologies and help us understand and welcome the future.

Designers

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

Cultural vocabularies

In fact, objects are the vocabulary in an ancient ‘grammatical toolkit’ which is a powerful international language in our eloquent ‘world without words’—a world where buildings and products act as ‘props and backdrops’, helping us to reassuringly order our chaotic dramas in the theatre of everyday life. Objects have many dimensions and there are many ways of analysing what they mean and how we should use them.

Like objects, typography acts as a ‘container for language’ changing it’s meaning in the same way as crystal glasses or plastic cups transform the value of the liquid contained inside. Science has taught us that there is no such thing as a two dimensional object. Even paper and ink have thickness and weight. Books move through time in the same way as we walk through buildings, watch film and videos or look at dancers perform movement scored in Labanotation.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar objects and environments in new ways, viewed from new angles in a new time.

The best definition of culture I have found is “social glue”, the stuff that binds us together and makes society. Because we are all part of culture it’s very difficult to stand aside from it to get a clearer view. There is no such thing as good culture or bad culture. Designers draw upon the aspects of culture which are most appropriate to understand and re-configure for the task in hand.

Designers create in a controlled way through manipulating a ‘cultural vocabulary’ made up of the elements of culture which (according to Umberto Eco and Dr Andy Lowe) includes language, myths, rituals, symbols and values.

They are like the skin of an onion which when peeled back reveal the ideologies—the fundamental driving forces that impel us into action and make us react to the object world around us.

Designers’ solutions, however well controlled, always contain an element of intuition which is unpredictable and uncontrollable. However, the larger part of the designers’ work involves underpinning intuition with analytical method including those offered by the social sciences.

Sensorial vocabularies

The way we create and use objects allows us to control one another and what we choose to disclose or obscure about our own personalities and those who commission or use objects.

The creative process of designing uses all of the human senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight. No matter where we come from, we are all essentially the same and react in approximately the same way to outside stimuli. We have common senses which designers manipulate in order to produce specific responses.

Designers use these sensorial vocabularies to give objects and spaces precise values in different societies. These values vary from culture to culture. In Europe we place a high value on personal objects which are small and heavy, in some Eastern cultures objects which are small and light are given a higher value. These intangible aspects of the designers’ vocabulary are less obvious but often more potent than concrete objects. They frequently produce subliminal responses and can replace the need for more physical and expensively constructed design solutions. Ironically it is smell, not sight, which is the most potent of the senses. Smell has the possibility of transporting us back to our childhood or to a specific place or person.

Sensorial vocabularies are only one element in the designers ‘grammatical toolkit’. In fact, there are many different ‘tools’ which allow designers to change the value of a product or environment, fine tuning it to meet the expectations of the user and the aspirations of the client.

New languages for a new millennium

I have no doubt that design is undoubtedly an international language.

The potential to trade successfully with one another 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. 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 abused.

We live in strange times when objects no longer automatically describe their use. Technology has become seamless and intangible and we must develop new languages if we are to eloquently describe new objects and communicate to users how these new objects should be used.

The best designers solve the problems today’s objects present by giving clues to suspicious users which help describe the purpose of an object. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways whilst simultaneously hinting at what tomorrow’s products might be.

Designers must empower users to understand and welcome the future through education which awakens them to what they already know and react to. Non-designers must play an active role in designing the world rather than feeling impotent and afraid of what tomorrow might hold.

Conversely, designers should not worry about being discarded and replaced by scientists and numerically based engineers. Culture is always changing and constantly needs re-calibration, revaluation and expression as new objects and processes.

Today, new organisations exist which use the familiar creative process but they do not describe themselves ‘designers’. These new organisations are developing ‘multi-dimensional tools’ for the analysis, prediction, synthesis and testing of new products prior to their introduction into the marketplace. They draw upon a mixture of methodologies from the arts and sciences. The ancient alchemy which transformed rocks and stones into magical objects throughout many cultures and many ages is at last being thoroughly investigated and understood so it’s principles can be applied to objects not yet conceived which will help us live comfortably, responsibly and profitably in a new millennium.

GSA, Heads of Departments Conference

What is the design context?

While creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, ‘design’, as we know it, only appeared in the 1830s. ‘Design’ was created by industry in order to meet the needs of industry. The oldest schools of design in the world are here in the UK. The Glasgow School of Art is the second oldest school, founded in 1844, seven years after The Royal College of Art in London.

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

I believe that the divisions between Art, Architecture and Design are devised to create often useful administration zones, focussed around increasingly complex technical specialisms. But the different disciplines have more in common than they’d often like to admit because all humans are predisposed to be creative, but specialist education makes us more productively creative: more human if you like.

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

It’s worth looking at the context of Design’s distinguished if rather short history. It describes the progress of the last 170 years and encompasses the mechanisation of craft traditions, the Modernisation of the West, the growth of the motorcar and proliferation electrical appliances, television, radio, sanitary and social housing, branding, advertising and global communications. Design, like almost everything else in the world, struggles to keep pace with the rate of progress.

But the most cataclysmic changes in the design landscape have occurred in the last ten years and they show all the signs of accelerating ever faster into the future. The current digital revolution came upon us so quickly that many of the design professions were forced to change overnight or die.

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

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

In reply to Seona’s question, ‘What is the design context?’ The only context I can vouch for with any certainty is that of continual and accelerating change. Change is the only context that is real and meaningful. No one knows what Design will mean tomorrow, least of all me.

Not only do I find myself working in strange ways and odd times but I find myself working with strangers: now I’m just as likely to work with and employ graduates from the arts, humanities and business schools as I am to employ graduates from design or the fine arts. I’m also much more likely to employ people with specific skills on a job by job basis or to forge informal partnerships with people and organisations that complement my own. I form companies and joint ventures to do specific projects but keep my core business small, light and flexible – because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

So, ‘What do I want from graduates?’

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

Graduates must also be flexible because the chances are that they’ll work in many fields other than those that they specialised in. As creative people from many different disciplines work across common software platforms it’s increasingly necessary for graduates to work across traditional disciplines so an appreciation of how others work is practically useful. I especially enjoy working with people who have energy and the confidence to challenge each other, and their clients and superiors, and generally keep life interesting for all of us.

However, I do find that graduates who have real competence in at least one technical skill are more secure and sure of themselves, and it doesn’t really matter what that skill is. Being really good at something, knowing something really well, makes you value the complexity of all that you don’t know. This encourages humility which is, I think, a good thing.

When I talk about technical skills I’m talking about more than software training. Software provides ‘tools’ for creative people but it’s no substitute for learning core skills such as reading, writing, drawing, knowing, understanding that mean we’re in control of our creativity rather than just playing with it. Vocational training is not education and the business of design demands confident, intelligent educated graduates with well-founded, strong opinions and a structured process that underpins their work. The speed of change makes it almost impossible for educators to predict what the world will require of their students so I believe that it’s useful to provide a broad education coupled with specific specialist areas of study – this should sound familiar and it seems to work well.

In my creative industry we continue to use the core skills we were given in art school in new ways. We’ve kept our expertise in particular areas, such as in drawing and in setting type correctly – for the benefit of those clients who appreciate a well-turned line and are willing to pay for our skill and experience.

Text-based knowledge remains, for the time being, the core of our communications system both in the real world and on-line, and English the international language of choice. This worries me because many graduates don’t know how to spell, how to write in sentences and how to set type so that actually communicates. I believe the ability to communicate in spoken and written language is ever more valuable. I continue to exploit my graphic heritage through writing, and publishing, broadcasting and developing critical debate about creativity and how it affects me, because I can and because my education helps me flourish in a changing world. Which is just as well, because the only thing I am sure about is that I won’t be working in the same way for very much longer.

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

In reply to Seona’s question, ‘Does education keep pace with change?’ I would have to say that education has never kept pace with change.

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

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

But this second industrial revolution was very different from the one that preceded it. For instead of being at the mercy of change, an educational framework was already established which enabled strategists to identify, understand and even shape, predict and control the outcome of change. Education had become an integral part of the process of change, maximising its potential. This time round schoolchildren and graduates were equipped with the skills they needed to enter industry and win jobs. Young people were educated to become employees.

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

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

Not only has education never kept pace with change it never will unless it stops merely reacting to the needs of industry and starts to proactively and flexibly help individuals and industries capitalise on the creative opportunities created by new technologies.

I believe that the broad education provided by art schools has once again come of age. As well as providing really useful graduates who can go on to become employees or employers. Art schools have an opportunity to return to their roots and work with industry in order to help predict the future. Art schools can help guide industry through change by showing business how to welcome the benefits it brings rather than run scared. Change terrifies businesses but it’s the lifeblood of creativity, innovation and the art school system.

So in reply to Seona’s question, ‘Should the context inform how the school develops?’ I have to say that the context of constant change gives art schools the opportunity, through research, to help industry innovate. Art schools should be in the driving seat of change, not locked in the luggage compartment.

So, where is education succeeding?

There’s a lot about education that’s right but there’s still a lot that’s wrong and the biggest problem education has is in making government understand the rate at which industry is changing. History and common sense tell us that industry must be prepared if it is to responsibly exploit the potential wealth brought about by this latest industrial revolution. And preparation means education.

While Britain may have written the textbook on design education, and be home to some of the finest design talent in the world, it’s our lucky history rather than our scrupulous planning that now place us in our excellent position. And we’re going to have to do an awful lot more, an awful lot more quickly if British Business is to inherit the share of the creative action that it so richly deserves.

The UK is widely acknowledged as the world’s creative capital, on par with the United States (but don’t take my work for it, read the Government’s and Design Council’s published research). However, I believe we’re living on a creative legacy that desperately needs replenishing because it’s in danger of becoming depleted.

Our school curriculum has barely changed since the last industrial revolution. School-leavers still expect to be employees rather than employers. Art, design and technical drawing are still what you do if you can’t do anything else. Creativity remains an option rather than a national obligation.

We must educate businesses to work in partnership with designers and continue to educate designers to think of their work in business terms. Design is a great medium for transferring technology between products and services.

If Business is to grow through creativity then we must educate more designers to ever-higher levels of competence. Business can help designers to discover new ways of validating their work. Because if the risk associated with intuition can’t be predicted, Business will suffer.

Design continues to add quantifiable value to Business through the creation of intellectual capital: the products and brands that are expressed as tangible assets on the balance sheet. Customers understand and expect to pay for design and the added value of having their personalities and values reflected in the products and services they choose to buy.

In the future a product, a process, a service or a building will not be defined only by its apparent form or performance but by its latent market potential. The potential size of a market will be huge, with a similar associated risk: the cost of opportunity will therefore be vast and the rewards for success bigger still. With the support of business, designers will predict and control the necessary risk associated with all innovation.

We now talk about design within the context of the ‘creative industries’, but creativity is much more than just another industry, it’s an integral part of almost every successful industry.

170 years ago art schools were created to work with Industry. Today industry and creativity need each other as never before. We should build on our long relationship and get creativity further into industry, get industrial investment in creativity and creative education, because in tomorrow’s world creativity will be our greatest natural resource, our primary industry and our richest national asset. Tomorrow must be a bright place for art schools, if it’s not business and society will suffer.

Grasping the Creative Agenda

First of all must decide what is the creative agenda? What is to be done?

I believe that the focus of this agenda must be to commercialise Scottish creativity and leverage Scottish creative heritage. By this I mean our heritage of innovation, our unique system of creative education and the understanding, exploitation and communication of the special conditions within the Scottish environment that continues to allow us to be one of the most creative places on earth.

Thanks to technological revolution ‘Creativity’ is now on the ‘to do’ list of almost every other major country. Some of the most unlikely countries: Singapore and Northern Ireland have already made creativity a national priority because they understand that it makes cash and delivers many additional social and cultural benefits. Therefore we must act quickly. We’ve been living off our creative heritage and the ad-hoc contributions of creative people and institutions with no plan and little investment.

I believe that we only grasp the creative agenda through active ownership of that agenda. This means taking the decision to value, and be seen to value, Scottish commercial creativity in all its manifestations: in the sciences, arts and technologies—working across disciplines and concentrating on the connections between these areas of activity which is a Scottish creative characteristic.

It means removing educational, economic and cultural barriers to commercial creativity.

It means actively actively supporting commercial creativity rather than cottage crafts. And it means supporting creativity in order to allow it to fertilise our business sector and the economy rather dismissing for being too risky strange or new.

It means actively supporting creativity far beyond the areas of activity that can be protected by current intellectual property laws (as these offer only limited opportunities—and don’t include many aspects of the service and other industries).

It means actively supporting new ways of working and the development of entirely new types of business predicated on the creation and exploitation of new knowledge, processes, products and services.

My agenda would consist of 3 tactical actions and 3 strategic goals.

Tactical actions include:

Supporting growth of Scottish creative businesses and ensuring that they have a worthwhile future in Scotland.

Supporting leading-edge creative professional practice through industry-led education, life long learning and research.

Supporting the creation of new knowledge and innovative business through industry-led research.

Strategic actions include:

Unlocking the potential of Scotland’s unique creative heritage.

Promoting Scotland as the world’s most creative nation and the world’s Research & Development department.

Planning to allow Scotland to become the thinking behind many of the world’s biggest brands.

(Scotland is about creative thinking and creative doing.)

Tactical actions—further details

Supporting the growth of Scottish creative businesses and ensuring that they have a worthwhile future in Scotland.

– infrastructure & networks
– support for technology
– support for R&D
– educated employees
– support for capitalisation/commercialisation/location

Supporting leading-edge creative professional practice through industry-led education, life long learning and research.

– new educational partnerships (support for businesses as educational resource)
– industry-led research

Supporting the creation of new knowledge and innovative business through industry-led research.

– new industry-led research partnerships
– incentives for businesses to invest in R&D
– support for business to become incubators
– support for commercialisation of industry-led research & pilot projects

Strategic actions—further details

Unlocking the potential of Scotland’s unique creative heritage.

– Communicate, educate and celebrate creative legacy, nationally and internationally—tell new and surprising stories

Promoting Scotland as the world’s most creative nation and the world’s Research & Development department.

– internationally and to all sectors, including cultural and business sectors
– through association with the best people/businesses in the world

Planning to allow Scotland to become the thinking behind many of the world’s biggest brands.

– through actively supporting the creation of new business and cultural relationships

(Scotland is about creative thinking and creative doing.)

Graduation Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Buy Girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chairs

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

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

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

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

Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wheels

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

Speed is our ecstasy and our most elementary human addiction.

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

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

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

Homes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what can we do to protect our creativity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Established 1985 on graduation from GSA with Ross Hunter

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

* Scottish base for international company, but not nationalistic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Corporate Control

Creative Corporate Control

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

What is corporate identity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It has not looked back since.

Why is corporate identity so important?

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

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

Why is corporate identity so difficult create?

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

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

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

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

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

(a) when there are major external environmental

changes happening

(b) when organisations find themselves in a highly

competitive market conditions

(c) when the organisation is considered to be

either mediocre or poor

(d) when the organisation is on the threshold of

becoming much larger in size

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

Anthropologists have known for decades that the culture of an organisation is the linchpin of survival of both individuals and organisations themselves. The core of any culture is its ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which impel people and organisations into action. Because culture is largely invisible clues have to be discovered from tangible artifacts, then interpreted. These clues are like the layers of skin on an onion. Pettigrew (1979) there are five sequential layers through which one has to penetrate before an understanding of the corporate ideologies are reached; language, semiotics, myths, beliefs and rituals.

Language

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

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Semiotics

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

Symbols

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

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Ikons

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

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Indexes

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

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Myths

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

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Rituals

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

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

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

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Why corporate identity needs to design rather agency driven

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Olins (1979)

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

Stop shuffling and start designing!

The CID can be communicated in three main ways:-

What it looks like [design]

What it says [advertising and PR]

What it does [its actual behaviour]

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

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

Evaluation of the effectiveness of corporate identity in major international corporations

BT Dutch PTT

Shell Q8,Exxon

Mercedes Benz

Insurance companies and banks