Education Creative Industries

A new kind of creative industry

It’s appropriate that we’re in Dundee talking about the new creative industries. One of the city’s most famous old creative industries, weaving, was based on machinery that used cards punched with binary code, the forerunner of digital. And digital is the technology that underpins much of this new industrial revolution.

Having spent the last fifteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when phototypesetting disappeared. Overnight 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. Then Apple Macs began to appear in the studio, so, we dismantled our process camera. It had been an integral part of the graphic design studio and had originally been craned into position. But we took it apart bit by bit and threw it in a skip—one day it had been worth fifteen thousand pounds, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worth nothing—we couldn’t even give it away. Today the studio looks less cluttered but some important things remain—I still write in my day book rather than use a use an electronic assistant and I still use a sketch book. Other things, too, have changed: mostly I write electronic mail, use a mobile phone and my laptop which together help me work in corners of my life I never before knew existed.

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 slim, light, flexible and adaptable—because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

We now use our core skills in new ways. We’ve kept our expertise in particular areas, such as in setting type correctly—for the benefit of those clients who appreciate a well-turned line and are willing to pay for our experience. It worries me that as text-based knowledge remains, for the time being, at the core of our communications system both in the real world and on-line, and English the international language of choice. It worries me because we’ve forgotten how to spell, how to write in sentences and that we’ve put aside 3,000 years of typographic heritage. So, in Graven Images we continue to exploit our heritage, our skills. We now write, and publish and broadcast and curate exhibitions and develop critical debate about creativity and how it affects us, because we can and because the education we were given helps us to 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 long.

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

I’m also grateful for the teachers who taught me to be persistent because change is as exhausting as it is rewarding. Change means endless, costly software updates and the constant replacement of hardware, network failures, technical gliches, and interface problems with clients and subcontractors. Change means that we have to continually re-educate ourselves and our employees and our clients. Change is expensive because it takes time, and time used to be the only thing we had to sell. Now we also create content for other media: books, exhibitions or television programmes that, with the help of new technologies, can be cheaply distributed and sold, over and over again. This means we don’t have endlessly find fee paying clients, instead, we become our own client, turning our creativity into a tangible, lucrative asset, we have become a primary industry.

With all of this change happening around us, we would have been very stupid not to spend some time trying to understand the reasons behind it, and the implications for our business and our future—did we even have a future and would it be called ‘design’? We struggled to understand what the government and strategists meant by the ‘creative industries’, was it a pejorative term and did it have a bearing on the way we should go about our business?

The new creative industries

In their 1998 Mapping Document the Creative Industries Task Force describes ‘creative industries’ as; “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. They include: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio.

The ‘creative industries’ is not a definition as such, for if intellectual property were the common denominator then the pharmaceutical industries would be included in the list. They, like many creative industries, invest heavily in research and development at the beginning of a project and then reap the benefits in years to come through selling licenses to produce their product.

I believe that creativity is in everything we make and do, it’s an intrinsic part of being human and a vital part in every successful industry, not an exclusive part of what are now described as the ‘creative industries’. Most things that work well and give pleasure have been deliberately designed with more than a modest measure of creativity.

In many ways the lack of an absolute definition of the creative industries probably betrays the real state of industrial creativity, which although it has been around for a very long time is a little understood phenomena. But the emergence of a loose term to describe what I do certainly raises interesting and overdue questions, such as; “what does my business have in common with an antique dealership? Or, what for that matter could the antiques market and the interactive leisure software industry possibly have in common?” What the Creative Industries Mapping Document most usefully reveals is that the world as we thought we knew it is changing, and gathering momentum more quickly than we can comprehend. This makes life hard for all of us, in the creative industries and in the business of education, because it’s difficult to plan ahead when you don’t know what to plan for.

But there are ways to gain a clearer picture of the future, and that’s by looking at the past, because some aspects of the creative industries are comfortably familiar.

For a start, I don’t think there’s anything especially new about the idea of bringing together ‘creativity’ and ‘industry’. Industry and creativity have been happily co-existing for years. How else could we have civilised ourselves, built cities and filled them with so many amazing products? So there must be some clues in the past that can help us deal with the problems of the future.

Yet, at the same time, I don’t believe that this latest manifestation of ‘industrial creativity’ is just political spin or the emperor’s new clothes. We are in fact living and working in profoundly different ways compared to how we went about our business five, three, or even two years ago. It’s as if progress is rushing ahead, but surely this too must have happened before?

Technological change

Cataclysmic technological change has occurred twice in the past 250 years at a scale that’s in any way comparable to what we’re living through today. What many believe to be the first industrial revolution took place between 1760 and 1850 causing upheaval but giving us widespread innovations ranging from the mechanisation of hand skills, such as weaving, to the production of iron and steam engines. Its effects ricocheted around the globe, heralding a new social order and a new ‘world order’ with Great Britain, and the industrial north, at the heart of the Empire.

In this first Industrial Revolution the old creative industries broke with history and the craft traditions that had always underpinned the production of goods. With the help of new mechanical machines we began to make vast amounts of every imaginable kind of thing. But in order to make these new goods functional and attractive, educational institutions and schools of ‘applied art’, science and ‘industrial design’ emerged, in direct response to the new technologies. Their job was to ensure that the deluge of new manufactured goods was of the highest aesthetic and functional quality.

The first of these new educational institutions was a school of industrial design founded in London in 1837. It was originally designed to serve as a resource for manufacturing industry, containing reference material of many different styles and periods. In 1852 it moved from its original home in Somerset Place to Marlborough House and was renamed Central School of Practical Art before moving to new buildings in Exhibition Road in 1863. It was then renamed the Victoria & Albert Museum by Queen Victoria in 1896 before eventually, in 1909, becoming an art museum that embraced the Royal College of Art.

Hot on its heels, and 400 miles further north, was the second oldest school of design and art. The Glasgow school originated as the Glasgow School of Design in 1844, but with funding from the Haldane Trust it was able to initiate teaching in the fine arts, and by 1892 was known as the Glasgow School of Art. While the RCA and it’s adjoining museum were enjoying royal patronage the Glasgow school was busy educating the people who would shape the iconic locomotives, ships and heavy industrial products that would extend the influence of the Great British Empire. This earned Glasgow the title of ‘the finest Victorian city in the Empire’ and Scotland and the industrial North became the ‘workshop of the World’.

The time that elapsed from the moment when the first acrid brown shoots of the first industrial revolution emerged in 1760, to the foundation of the first school of industrial creativity, 77 grimy years had passed.

By the time education had caught up with the seemingly relentless pace of industrial progress, and its resulting social change, a second wave of industrial revolution was already upon us. Between 1890 and 1930 Scotland once again played a significant role in shaping the modern era with the help of Bell and Mackintosh, and Logie Baird was on his way. The RCA and Glasgow School of Art were by now fully formed, internationally respected institutions, well able to work alongside scientific universities and new technical colleges to understand, interpret, plan and exploit the benefits of widespread telecommunications and internal combustion engines. 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 with which strategists could 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 anyone but 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 grows and 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, increasing numbers of 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.

So what next?

For 15 years I’ve been working as a designer in a consultancy with one very important difference. We’ve always worked across traditional creative disciplines, as well as within them. What seemed sensible to us has in fact turned out to be one of our greatest strengths; our ability to understand and manage the process of creating diverse things. It’s certainly eased our transformation from a traditional design consultancy into ‘new creative industry’ and the people we look to employ or work with are people similarly inclined. They can read and write and are sociable, capable of challenging us, and have a broad range of interests. They’ve probably had the benefit of further education and are able to transferring their knowledge to new areas, and they’re willing to continue to change and to learn throughout their lives.

I believe that no one will be able to compete in the knowledge economy without being literate and modestly numerate. But there is an immediate need for a new kind of creative curriculum, one that unites the arts and science in the common purpose of creativity. This curriculum must also help people to be flexible and to work in teams, solve problems, innovate and take risks.

The traditional bastions of creativity, art and design remain of value in themselves, but their value is limited, especially if they become only self-referring departments. Specialisation has already relegated art to the level of entertainment; a mere party trick. Likewise, observational drawing and other drawn communication, without the benefit of analytical methods and research, is of no more value than learning to balance a ball on your nose—it’s a handy conversation piece.

Two weeks ago I was talking with Simon Waterfall, creative director the international website design company, Deepend. I was explaining how hard it was for us to find people with the right skills. I assumed it was because I was based in Glasgow, but I was wrong. Simon has offices all over the world and he has exactly the same problems. He recently opened an office in Bangalore to get skilled technical graduates he couldn’t get in the UK, and he is still desperately searching for creative people. (We always think that the grass is greener, but it’s not always the case.) When he opened his New York office he advertised for designers and received over seven hundred job applications. After weeks of interviewing he could employ only four people. Like me, he believes the situation is now critical.

I welcome the term, creative industries, because it allows me to talk about creativity rather than the old vocations ‘art’ or ‘design’, and because it allows all of us all to talk about creative and analytical skills in every aspect of every subject from algebra to zoology. When students leave the art class and go on to further education their understanding of their subject should be equivalent in depth, analytical method and importance to that of mathematics and science.

Already, the Singapore government is committed to expanding the teaching of creativity to occupy fully one third of the curriculum by 2020. But where will we be in 2020? Hopefully, not in Singapore.

Speed and invisibility are key characteristics of this third revolution. In order to keep pace with it, and to reach the people who need it most, education must become fast and virtual, too. Because we all need education, we need it everywhere as never before; we need it all of the time, 24 hours a day.

Leveraging Creativity

Government Policy

Welcome to this workshop session that will explore ways in which government policy can help ‘leverage’ creativity.

Before we begin, I’ll say a few words of introduction that will explain my viewpoint. I’m Janice Kirkpatrick, I’m am a founding Director of an interdisciplinary, international design consultancy based in Glasgow, Scotland.

I’m also a Director of Glasgow School of Art, a Director of The Lighthouse: Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City and a Trustee of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. The UK’s only endowment charged with the task of supporting and encouraging creative people to fulfil their potential so that we can all benefit, economically, socially and culturally.

Can governments allocate sufficient resources and expertise to incubate and groom new creative talent?

I’ve been invited here today by the UK Department of Culture Media & Sport, as a member of the Ministerial Creative Industries Strategy Group. I welcome, and am grateful for this opportunity because I strongly believe that if our economies are to thrive we must quickly find ways of encouraging the creation of, and support for, entirely new kinds of business.

Having spent almost sixteen years running a ‘design consultancy’ I’m now told that I actually run a ‘creative industry’. It’s funny but I had the feeling that something was up when my graphics studio changed shape overnight; phototypesetting disappeared, my interior designers and architects lost most of their drawing boards, and Apple Macintosh computers began to appear. Design was not the only industry to change, all of the industries around me have changed; change touches all of us and it continues to lead us, ever more quickly into a exciting, if rather confusing future.

How can governments create an environment that encourages people to value and take ownership of ideas?

Digital technology finds me working in new ways, at odd times and strange places, and with strangers. Today I’m just as likely to employ graduates from the arts, the fine arts, humanities and business schools as I am to employ graduates from architecture or design. But, every day it gets harder and harder to find high quality people to employ. I need people with specialist and communications skills, people who are team players and who have flexible attitudes to work and life long learning. People with the experience and confidence to identify and value the necessity to take risks, because all innovation is risky business.

Do governments need to change in order to reflect our changing world?

In order to extend the capability of my company, and to ensure that we’re at the leading edge, I employ specialists such as film-makers, financial or software experts, even chefs. Often they’re employed on a job-by-job basis. I also forge informal partnerships with people and organisations that complement my own. I form joint venture companies for specific projects but I keep my core business slim, light, flexible and adaptable—because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow; and the same is true of my clients. Their future is also uncertain. They’re also interested in extending their capabilities through working with me. They judge my value by the services I offer in-house, by the quality of my knowledge and my experience, but they also judge me by the quality and depth of my business relationships and my contacts; these are additional resources that they can access through me. My clients are even becoming my business partners.

How can governments provide citizens with widespread access to the teaching of thinking skills?

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, my clients would have presented me with a brief, now I compose the brief in partnership with them. Today, my clients demand everything of us; strategy and research, risk assessments, evaluation, business advice, even education. Time spent actually designing things is the exception; sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to make something: a brand, a book or a bit of a building. People want to pay for my ability to think creatively and productively about their businesses and I, surprisingly, find it straightforward to transfer my professional process (that of controlling the evolution of ideas), from the studio to the boardroom.

Increasingly, I’m expected to work with clients in a strategic role, where once we would have been expected to simply work for them. Increasingly our clients lack the experience, knowledge and skill and they rely on us to advise them.

How can governments build linkages between (themselves and) industry, the creative industries and the educational system?

In order to meet our clients’ expectations we continually re-educate ourselves, our employees and our clients. We invest in endless costly software updates, the constant replacement of hardware and systems, and in research, education and training. We also learn from our clients and gain detailed knowledge of their businesses. Sometimes we understand more about their businesses than they themselves do; this knowledge is of premium value and strengthens our relationship with them; we reinvest it in their businesses, or we use it to develop new partnerships and businesses of our own.

How can governments introduce incentive schemes for companies to adopt innovative and creative practices?

This massive change in the way we operate is costly for us because it takes time, and until recently, time was the only thing we had to sell.

Today we’re paid to ‘think’ as well as to ‘make’. We use our skills to create new ‘knowledge’: new products, new processes and services by working in partnership with organisations who have assets, values and visions that complement our own.

How can governments build links between (themselves and) industry, the creative industries and the educational system?

It seems that at last Art, Architecture and Design are realising their potential; they’re moving away from being secondary, service industries to become primary industries; generating new wealth through creating something from nothing. This presents Education and Industry with unprecedented challenges, including preparing school children and graduates to become employers rather than employees.

Which leads me to the so-called ‘Creative Industries’. I have to ask which industry are we talking about, because Art, Architecture and Design no longer exist in isolation. In their 1998 Mapping Document the Creative Industries Task Force describes ‘creative industries’ as: “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. They include: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio. But they also, vitally, include the sciences, and partnerships between the arts and sciences.

How can governments increase the emphasis on creativity in order that we can ‘create a way forward’?

While the traditional bastions of creativity; art and design remain of value in themselves, their value is limited if they are allowed to exist only as self-referring ‘departments’. I welcome the term, ‘creative industries’, because it allows us to focus on the creative process that’s common in all we do; in both the arts and sciences, in every aspect of every subject from advertising to zoology. It also allows us to understand and value organisational, as well as individual creativity because it’s creative teams rather than individuals who will create much of tomorrow’s world.

Can governments reward innovation and encourage the protection and exploitation of intellectual property rights?

Today, I believe we share the same problems as our clients, industry in general and our governments. We are all confronted with unfamiliar opportunities and problems that need to be defined, understood, exploited or solved. We therefore need to produce creative professionals in all field of practise who can comfortably operate outside their specialisms and who can see the connections across apparently unrelated disciplines. They must have sound analytical and managerial skills, value intuition, know when to take risks and feel comfortable working as part of a multi-disciplinary team that aims to crystallise and commodify new knowledge.

The government of Singapore is already committed to expanding the teaching of creativity to occupy fully one third of the curriculum by 2020. But where will we be in 2020? Hopefully, not in Singapore. This is a tall order, but speed is a key characteristic of this third industrial revolution. In order to keep pace with it, we need people who’re educated and encouraged to create and innovate and we need them now, today, not in ten years time.

I welcome the opportunity to see if in the next 90 minutes we can come up with some processes that will help leverage creativity not just for the benefit of the economy but also for the benefit of our culture and society.

In 1997, America produced $414bn worth of books, films, music, TV programmes and other copyrighted cultural products. They became America’s number one export, outselling clothes, chemicals, cars, planes and even computers. In 1998 the UK Ministerial Creative Industries Strategy Group was formed because we know that the creative industries are an important sector in the UK economy. In 2001 they accounted for £112.5 billion pounds of revenue, employed 1.3 million people, contributed £10.3 billion to the UK balance of trade, made up 5% of our Gross Domestic Product and continue to grow two to three times faster than the rest of the economy.

Notes for Design In Business Week

Notes for Design In Business Week 27 Oct 2000

Tomorrow will be different—the future of design in business

The backdrop to my presentation is taken from the hoarding surrounding the site of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. The drawings are of school children by school children. Not only do they remind me who inherits the world we make, they remind me that design is a political activity. If ever Business needed evidence of the power of design they need look no further than the school playground.

I am convinced that the future of ‘design in business’ will be a good one. But only if we invest in design research and creative education that deepens our understanding, our knowledge and our ability to control and exploit the rich opportunities presented by the ‘knowledge revolution’.

While creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, ‘design’, as we know it, only appeared in the 1830s. And if design’s short history tells us anything of value, it clearly demonstrates that Business must be prepared if it is to responsibly exploit the potential wealth brought about by industrial revolution. And preparation means education.

Cataclysmic technological change has occurred twice in the past 250 years.

In what many believe to be the first industrial revolution, the old creative industries broke with their craft traditions and entered the Machine Age. New schools of ‘applied art’ invented the idea of the ‘industrial designer’, who exploited technology and ensured that products were aesthetically pleasing and functional—that products were wilfully designed to stimulate new markets and satisfied customers. From the first acrid brown shoots of industrial revolution in 1760, to the foundation of the first school of industrial design, took 77 grimy years.

But by the time education had caught up with the increasing pace of industrial progress, a second revolution had arrived and its results were quite literally, electrifying. This time designers were ready to exploit scientific discoveries with brands, structural concrete, cars, cookers and Crimplene frocks while young people were educated to look forward to a lifetime’s employment in industry.

Much has changed in the 170 years since ‘design’ was invented. That tomorrow will be different goes without saying. Because of the speed of change, even today is different; we go to sleep in a different world from the one we woke up in. Three years is a very long time in the digital age.

It was the speed of this third industrial revolution that caught many of us out. But designers saw it coming when phototypesetting hit the skip and the Apple Mac replaced the drawing board. But 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 designers believe it so richly deserve.

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.

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.

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.

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 design is much more than just another industry, it’s an integral part of almost every successful industry. Design will continue to mean different things to different people, in different industries, often becoming subsumed within the broader term ‘creativity’. Designers will increasingly reflect the inter-disciplinary working practices adopted by the new creative industries—often working in partnership with people and organisations whose values they share and whose skills are complementary to their own. Design will mutate, evolve and endure.

Just as we’ve lost our corner shops and local brands, in the future it will be increasingly difficult for brands that aren’t global to survive, likewise, the people who create them. But brand-builders and global business must look beyond market domination and the demands of shareholders and recognise the value of the new global language they’ve created.

Thankfully, these drawings show us that no one is “just Nike”, each child remains a recognisable individual and a promiscuous brand consumer. Thanks to brands we all communicate in new ways which opens up big creative opportunities and challenges for responsible designers and businesses. I believe customers are smart enough to know rubbish when they see it, hear it and feel it.

170 years ago ‘design’ was borne of ‘business’; it was created to meet the needs of industry. Today industry and design need each other as never before, so let’s spend the next three years building on our long relationship and get design further into business, business further into design and creativity into the heart of education and the British economy. Because in tomorrow’s world creativity will be our greatest natural resource, our primary industry and our richest national asset.

Design Matters

I formed Graven Images Limited, with two fellow students, while still in the School of Art. We came from different backgrounds, Ross from Architecture, Adele from Embroidered and Woven Textiles and me from Graphic Design, where I specialised in film and television. Ross and I already had the option of full-time employment in Los Angeles and London but decided to try and do something more interesting in Glasgow before getting a mortgage and a lifestyle we’d be reluctant to lose.

Starting a business was a relatively easy decision to make as we had no money and no commitments. We were both naive enough to believe we could pick up the threads of Glasgow’s design heritage and once again bring a European style of working to the city. We hoped we’d encourage other graduates to do the same and decided to give the project three years.

We’ve now been going for seven and a half years, although Adele left after the first year, and have settled with twelve staff, eight of whom are designers and seven of those are graduates. We are a multidisciplinary design consultancy and undertake a broad spectrum of work from architectural projects, interiors, products and graphics to exhibitions and television related work.

We have no formal structure within the office but tend to have informal teams which change according to the task at hand. Different personalities and skills are suited for different projects but we all offer criticism and informally contribute to each others work and learn from one another.

All designers are trained managers and expected to liaise with clients and sub-contractors, all designers are responsible for cost control and are supported by administrative and accounting staff. All designers are literate, numerate and Apple Mac literate. We all have to understand the technology related to any technical process we may use in order to exploit its potential.

I would like to put forward a definition of design which works. It came about through a series of joint lectures in conjunction with Dr Andy Lowe from the Department of International Marketing at the University of Strathclyde who undertakes research in the qualitative methodologies which underpin the design process.

Design Orders Chaos

What is Design? Design is about the controlled evolution of ideas.

The practice of design in all of its different disciplines is underpinned by a system which ensures the controlled evolution of ideas, what’s commonly known as ‘design process’. Peter Gorb, in a Design Council publication , defines design as “… the planning process for artifacts”. I would go further in that I believe that design is ‘the ultimate planning process’. Design is an analytical, rational process in which the production of artifacts may or may not play a part.

Design is about control. Fine art is also concerned with control, or as with design, a conscious lack of it. Fine art, design and architecture use technology and increasingly the same technology.

New York

The process of designing something requires that we control the evolution of ideas, creating order out of chaos, and presenting information in a structure which is meaningful. Design and fine art are also concerned with the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas.

Designers and artists must be inventive and structured in their process, which is essentially inductive or logical. Identifying the fundamental and dynamic forces within an area of investigation and apparently bringing order out of chaos in a form which can be finally communicated.

It might be communicated as a clearly articulated problem or a problem resolved.

Map Slide

In the case of design or architecture a problem clearly articulated might also be communicated in the form of a brief. In the case of art it might be a piece of art which itself poses a question or is inconclusive.

Word Slide

Designers and fine artists communicate through a common language. This language isn’t concerned exclusively with the visual but with all of the human senses and utilises language, semiotics, myths, rituals and values in order to articulate culture. I call this language sensorial language.

Brochures + The Lounge

The tangible aspects of this language, those we can touch and see, might include written language and printed material, moving and still images, products and other artifacts, interiors spaces and architecture.

Clinio Castelli

The intangible aspects of this language, those we can’t touch or see, which are less obvious but much more potent, are smell, taste, sound and temperature. They frequently produce subliminal responses.

Artists, designers and architects are all educated to interpret and communicate various aspects of human culture and need.

In order to understand the importance of our role in the world and how universal and potent our language is we have first of all to understand the nature of culture.

Culture

Culture is one of those words which everyone uses but is rarely understood. Even academics have great difficulty in coming to terms with its definition. Because culture is largely intangible it can’t be measured, it can only be interpreted. Cultural traits are qualitative by nature, and as such need to be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. It is argued that culture should be seen as a set of solutions to the key problems of survival.

The core of any culture is its ideologies. These are the fundamental driving forces which impel people 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 which hide and protect the ideologies. There are five layers through which one has to penetrate before an understanding of ideologies can be reached: language, semiotics, myths, rituals and values.

Language

Language is more than vocabulary, it is an enabling mechanism which explains why and how people behave.

Coke + The Herald

Semiotics

The language of signs has been described by Umberto Eco as comprising three main categories of sign: symbol, icon and index. This is an important distinction for all of us who use visual and sensorial language and we should be aware of the impact these three forms of sign can have.

Symbols

BR + Mercedes

These are abstract manifestations of a particular reality one may be trying to communicate. They are most useful in an international context when written language would not be understood.

Icons

Prudential + Herald

Normally these are representational and figurative in form. They tend to literally be a mirror image of the concept being communicated. Their particular power means that they can be easily remembered.

Indices

Mont Blanc + Tunnel

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

Myths

BCCI + Jaguar + BR

Claude Levi-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 don’t have to be true to be believed—Twin Peaks falls into this category. This is not lost by politicians, David Lynch or the music industry and has remained a powerful idea throughout the ages. Much medical clinical treatment works because the patient has the implicit belief that the doctor knows what he’s doing. Likewise industry and the economy base much of their speculation on myth—De Lorean sports cars in Ireland funded by the British taxpayers/ Jaguar (would have gone out of business on bumeric basis alone) and the flagging British car industry.

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 prolonged periods of time so we create systems of behaviour which will deliver an environment which provides predictability and stability.

Although rituals are potent they are usually enshrined in invisible social boundaries which are often only revealed to the outsider when they are violated.

Royalton

The hotel is a good example of how behaviour is ritualised. The hotel business is really an extension of show business. It gives big set piece performances in its restaurants three times a day and has a continuous performance in the front lobby. Architecture, design and art provide the theatrical backdrop for these performances and influence and control their shape.

Lobby + Dining Room

Values

All relationships are about values, business is about values. Values are concerned with the fundamental driving forces which impel people into action. All business relationships are value driven and research clearly shows that people do business with those they like rather than with those who only offer economic or technical effectiveness.

Heraldic (loyalty/history) + Railfreight

Designers, artists and architects control their creative output through the design process. Our education provides us with a mixture of analytical methodologies (a bit of philosophy, a bit of anthropology, a bit of psychology etc) all informing and enhancing our intuition.

The education of designers and architects has more emphasis on analytical method, the education of artists has perhaps more emphasis on intuition and less tightly structured research. All are inextricably linked through the sensorial language we use and the Mac-based technology we use.

Design in a multi-disciplinary activity

We must understand and communicate what it is we all do—develop, share and value our knowledge or other academics and professionals will take it from us.

As we move away from numerical and quantitative methods, towards interpretive, qualitative methods of evaluating the environment around us, we open up a myriad possibilities of understanding and enjoying the world, and making money through our pooled knowledge. We now have property, product and publishing.

Starck + Loewy + Mackintosh

New technology offers opportunities to work together across disciplines and continents—technical restraints seem paltry faced with the awesome task of designing and expressing a totally new reality, virtual reality, with all its problems such as how to deal with new perceptions of time. We are well equipped to interpret and design this new world.

This must encourage us to explore and promote our common process and dwell less on individual, technical and vocational activities.

If we continue to squander our energy pidgeonholing design into it’s technical specialisms. Separating out research and management components and marketing them all as separate little courses for short term financial gain, we will find that the core of our activity, the really powerful bit; the design process, has been hijacked by marketing and business studies, the sciences and social sciences. We will be confined to the role of social decorators.

The task ahead of all of us is truly gargantuan. Not only must we set our educational systems in order but also learn to communicate our expertise to the wider population. That they might consider value in terms other than the financial when making choices. We must also become an eloquent force in the media and local and national politics if we are to have all our good work put to its proper use—to bring about a sensorially literate society of caring and intelligent people who are equipped with the tools which allow them to understand and value the world around them.

Ignore Design at Your Peril

I fully support the DBA in it’s encouragement of ‘effective’ design. I passionately support any initiative to explain the value of design, what it is and what it does, because ‘design’, ‘creativity’, ‘the controlled evolution of ideas’, call it what you will, touches each one of us every day and adds value to our lives.

In the Design Renaissance conference in Glasgow last year, Stephano Marzano pointed out, “Design is a political activity …”. It was a sharp reminder to us of the manipulative power we wield as designers and the responsibility we carry on behalf of the population to ensure our outcomes are functionally, socially, economically, environmentally and culturally honourable.

Design is a service industry and we must never forget that we must make great efforts to explain to the public and industry what it is that we do. Design is also an effective tool for economic and social change; it can create new ways of living and making money. It can create desire and satisfy craving. Each completed, new piece of work has the potential to act as an example to others, raising aspirations and awareness, opening new worlds and opportunities for ourselves and others.

Design in Britain in the ’90s is not a professional activity, it is open warfare, full of phyrric victories and battles hard won. Why should industry pay for design expertise when the public are sensorially and visually disenfranchised. Deliberately prevented from acquiring education which would empower them to participate in the world around them? If you don’t know what a better world looks and feels like how can you possibly ask for one?

To be an effective designer you must first be a good communicator. You must engender trust, be a good listener and a social archeologist. You must be capable of penetrating walls, smoke screens and agendas, piecing together clues from fragments of language and emotion, underpinning your own heightened intuition with an armoury of analytical methodologies then articulating your conclusion as an object, space or text, a book or a bed.

Each one of us brings our own cultural baggage, our own way of interpreting the world and the brief, which enriches the end result and makes it special and distinctive. I am one of a team of designers working from a base in Glasgow which has it’s own experiences and priorities.

But how do you judge effective design? How good is a book or a bed? What is the best chair in the world? Is it the one that costs the least, sells the most, looks the best, uses the most environmentally sustainable materials or is ergonomically satisfying?

Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum, buildings and objects require processes and people to bring them to life: manufacturers, retailers, distributors, publishers and even banks … Whilst designed objects generate economic activity and wealth they also perform a more valuable long term role in articulating what’s special about our culture. We don’t actually need chairs in order to sit, we can sit on a box. Chairs allow us to sit in a particular way which distinguishes us from other people. Differences should be celebrated and history has taught us to be wary of homogeneous, international style. We need to re-evaluate Great Britain and recognise what’s special about it if we are to produce distinctive goods and services which can compete in a federalised Europe or a global marketplace.

Schools of art and design are notorious for plundering the past or looking to other cultures for direction, ensuring we will always imitate and rarely innovate. Britain is currently condemned to importing effectively designed goods from other cultures and times to act as props against which we all play out the theatre of our every day lives. I am not a nationalist but it’s very difficult to be Scottish when all the props in the play are Japanese, Taiwanese or Dralon reproductions of Louis XIV’s boudoir.

I enjoy very much having products of other cultures around me but would like to have the choice of using English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh products too. I don’t mean products which look as if they’ve been used on the set of Brigadoon, but well conceived products which reflect Britain as an international player in a global marketplace. Design, after all, is an international activity and the creative process is universal.

Glasgow has moved from being ‘The Workshop of the World’, to the ‘Service Capital of Scotland’. Thirty years on Glasgow still feels sore about not being able to make things. It needs to see tangible evidence of it’s own productivity. Service industries need design as much as manufacturing, as it is only through design that they become tangible and visible, through the buildings they inhabit, the clothes their employees wear and the way they communicate through their stationery and graphic design.

To actively deny a country the right to manufacture is to deny it’s right to exist.

So how do we communicate the real value of design to the public, clients and British industry?

Design must be viewed as the essential ingredient in business and culture which allows us to control the way we choose to live and work. To evaluate the performance of a designed product or process on the basis of economic effectiveness alone is insufficient. Design is a multi-layered, political activity the implications of which go far beyond environmental sustainability. Design must be evaluated in the broadest possible sense if we are to really change Britain’s fortunes in the new millennium.

The measure of a nations civilisation will be read in the artifacts it leaves behind. I wonder what the archeologists of the future will make of Once Great Britain?

Graven Images is a multidisciplinery design consultancy, but instead of showing you a complete project from beginning to end I’ve chosen to show a maverick, ongoing project which is the result of collaboration between Graven Images and Nice House, a retailer, contractor and distributor in Glasgow. It’s called Home Produce and is a growing series of domestic products, the bulk of which are derived from locally available, sustainable sources, local skills and designers. It came about through a need to source products for our own interior work and has grown to examine setting up small scale, local manufacturing to support Housing Associations with a requirement for a large number of furnished properties throughout the City.

There are 40 Housing Associations in Glasgow who are responsible for producing some of the best architecture in the City. They also run design education programmes for committee members responsible for commissioning design and architecture. They control a spend of millions every year and many are committed to supporting excellence in design and promoting the well-being of their communities through creating employment as well as supplying good quality housing.

Creativity and the Rural Economy

In 2001 the creative industries accounted for £112.5 billion of revenue, employed 1.3 million people, contributed £10.3 billion to the UK balance of trade, made up 5% of our Gross Domestic Product and continue to grow two to three times faster than the rest of the economy.

Yesterday SE published their figures for the last financial year. They showed that the Scottish economy grew by just 0.6%, one third the rate of the rest of the UK and a quarter of the rate of the rest of the world as a whole. With the exception of Japan, Malta, Turkey, Argentina and Mexico we have one of the lowest growth rates in Europe and one of the worst in the developed world.

Let’’s consider what this means. We know that the creative industries are an important sector in the UK economy. They are “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity … and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”.

Of all the patents granted throughout the world for new inventions in the last 50 years, 40% have been to inventors from the UK, and this trend is continuing. Most of the innovation behind the technologies that dominate modern life are Scottish; the telephone, television and fax, and many aspects of the new biotech sciences.

We are the world’s great research and development department; the seat of distinguished universities and depositories of knowledge, the creator of new communications technologies. Therefore it’s strange that in this 3rd industrial revolution, one predicated on knowledge and underpinned by digital technology we are the losers. We have an uncanny knack of failing to convert creativity into cash and instead contrive to keep academia and business apart; academia confined within the stone quadrangles of ancient universities, condemned to an existence where success is too often measured by the quantity of published material rather than by it’s useful contribution to our culture and economy; our businesses meanwhile are coralled in ghettoes called “parks” or within corporate palaces in our central business districts. There’s little encouragement for a business to invest in R&D, or little left to invest after government takes its cut.

One thing’s for sure; we will continue to be the creativity behind the world’s biggest brands unless we find ways to work with academia to ensure we create new kinds of products, services and businesses. And there’s no rule that says we have to work in cities. On both counts I thank Auchencruive for hosting this evening’s Club.

Since government began to quantify the creative industries sector back in 1998, economic strategy has also been one of focussing on urban centres. But, as Robert Burns (our original creative industrialist) continues to show us, creativity also happens outside cities. Digital communication makes a virtue out of Scottish geography and arguably there’s never been a better time to re-examine how we develop our rural economy.

There are already many good reasons to locate creative industries in rural locations:

Better quality of life (access to world-class amenities)

Lower overheads

Excellent infrastructure and communications, including road and air links with major cities

Closeness to world-class centres of reseach: Roslyn, Hannah, SAC and an increasing number of new research facilities

Contrasting environments

Opportunity for new/different models of creative organisations, including new hybrid urban/rural protoypes

We’ve had a studio in central Glasgow for 16 years. It’s great but now we’re creating a reseach centre in deepest Ayrshire. We have a wider range of employees than we originally had, all with different priorities. We need more space, quiet space and flexible space and that’s expensive in Glasgow. It takes less that an hour to commute to from one location to the next and we have access to another international airport and great business facilities Royal Troon and Turnberry that broaden our appeal to overseas clients (and UK ones) … and we’re not alone in our thinking. There are a growing number of creative business here already.

I’d welcome a Scottish revaluation of the creative industries sector that looks are our special institutions, our key creative businesses and our geography. I’d welcome a revaluation that doesn’t just follow the simple London model of clustering businesses in urban areas. And I’d welcome any encouragement for creative businesses to team with acknowledged centres of research.

Given Scotland’s current economic performance and the £8.3m funding left of the original 3 year/£25m funding allocated by SE to the fasting growing sector of the UK economy, we’ve nothing to lose and an awful lot to gain.

Cities

Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative process

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

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

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

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

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

Cities

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

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

Culture

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

Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glasgow has moved a long way from being, ‘The Workshop of the World’, to the ‘Service Capital of Scotland’. Thirty years on Glasgow still feels sore about not being able to make things, it has no outlet to express it’s old ideologies and channel the old pride in new constructive ways. To actively deny any country the right to manufacture is to deny it’s right to exist in the real world – it becomes invisible or frozen in time. Any country’s success as a civilised nation can be directly measured in the artifacts it leaves behind: I wonder what the archeologists of the future will make of ‘once great Britain’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Branding Matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBC

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

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

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

Personal, powerful and political.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Business Image Counts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graven Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.