Arts, People, Spaces, Inroductions—Charles Esche

‘Culture’ is a difficult subject to talk about because we are all part of it and can never stand apart from it in order to get a better view. Academics constantly fight over it’s definition, but the best definition of culture I’ve come across is ‘social glue’, the stuff that binds us together and makes us into ‘society’.

Culture is highly qualitative in nature and cannot be fully measured, it can only be interpreted and explained in order to be understood. Creativity and the arts are vital in explaining our culture and in helping us to understand the nature of our cultural situation. Because life is constantly changing our culture must be constantly re-defined and re-explained.

Contemporary arts spaces such as Tramway play a vital role within our society as they try not to pre-determine the outcome of a project. Instead they provide space and support to allow new, multi-dimensional creative expressions of culture to occur. They are catalytic spaces which allow the future to form in a new dimension.

Our speaker this morning is Charles Esche who moved from Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge in 1993 to become Visual Arts Programmer at Tramway in Glasgow.

Charles has curated many, many exhibitions and written many catalogue essays and interviews. His curation includes Christine Borland, Christian Boltanski’s Lost and the group show Excavating Ruins which included work by Tony Cragg, Stephen Willats, Art in Ruins and Avis Newman. Charles is a reviewer for may art journals including Artefactum and Portfolio and is a visiting lecturer at many art institutions in Britain, Finland and Japan.

Arne Jacobson Centenary

Arne Jacobson Centenary (of his birth) Evergreens and Nevergreens created by Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen.

In Scotland we’re used to being compared to Denmark. We share many characteristics, including having populations of just over 5 million people and we enjoy similar, northenly locations.

We also have in common, a rich, world-class heritage in design and architecture, which may be a result of our geography. Our rather voyeuristic positions might be said to give creative people the space and distance to be truly original; to benefit from being close to the bulk of Europe, but not overwhelmed by its gravitational pull. I believe that this gives rise to work that is distinctive and extraordinarily rich.

Evergreens and Nevergreens is a special exhibition about the work of this very special Danish man.

Arne Jacobson had extraordinary abilty to work across traditional specialisms rather than confine himself to any one. He disdained being called a designer as he felt that the word failed to describe all that he did. He was born one hundred years ago, the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed the Willow Tearooms for Mrs Cranston. Like Mackintosh, Arne Jacobson was comfortable designing a spectrum of objects ranging from buildings to teaspoons and taps, and many of his artifacts share the same monumental purety, beauty and attention to detail.

Jacobson was also an accomplished watercolourist and botanist but unlike Mackintosh, he trancended a craft approach to his work and embraced the manufacturing industries. He did this without losing any of the soft, satisfying perfection, that has become the hallmark of his work. Perhaps it’s just this undefinable quality that ensures his work endures, becoming an icon for other cultures and new generations—it was on his chair that Christine Keeler sat, Jacobson was an icon for the modern era, and his work simply gets better with age.

On behalf of The Lighthouse I welcome you all here tonight. We are absolutely thrilled to host this wonderful exhibition, created by the Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen, during Arne Jacobson’s centenary year. I would like to thank everyone who helped to make this possible.

Before I introduce this evening’s speakers I’d like to ask you to be careful not to trip on the floor tiles and to be careful with your drinks.

I would now like to introduce Kim Casparen, Director of the Danish Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to say a few words, followed by Poul Kristensen, Managing Director and Head of Marketing for Bo Concept—Poul has kindly sponsored this evening’s reception. Bo Concept are a Danish Furniture company and they are about to open their first Glasgow store in Princess Square, so please go along and buy some treasures for your home.

1868-1928

AICA @ RCA conference

Tony kindly invited me to talk about current change in culture and technology within design and the arts. I’ll do that as best I can and while I’m doing it I’ll show some images of our work.

Graven Images is the company I share with my partner and co Director, Ross Hunter, an architect. We’re based in Glasgow, Scotland, which is about 400 miles or one hour North of London by plane. We founded the company after I graduated from Glasgow School of Art and Ross from the Mackintosh School of Architecture back in 1985. We have sixteen full-time employees, mostly architects, interior and graphic designers and we collaborate with a host of other creative people, artists, filmmakers, musicians and other academics who help us realise specific projects.

All of our work is for commercial clients from both the public and private sectors. It falls into roughly three areas; interiors for workplace, retail and leisure sectors, international travelling exhibitions and corporate graphic design. Most of our work is centred in the UK, around 70% in London and the rest a mixture from Europe and abroad—we do have North American clients (and direct flights from Glasgow International Airport). Almost everyone in the West of Scotland has at least one relation in North America, so our connection with you is very strong.

Now

Now is a good time to talk about change because technology and its ensuing cultural upheaval are all around us; it’s as if we’re living in the eye of the tornado. History tells us that times of change usually present many great opportunities for creative people. Today, we’re arguably living through more change that at any other point in the history of civilisation. We can make almost anything we can dream of, we can create new tools that help us design with atomic depth, global scale and superhuman speed—and education is the key to unlocking the potential of our awesome, ever-expanding capabilities. Because education provides us with a process: a framework that allows us to have some control over our ability to shape the future.

I come from a traditional design background. I was originally educated as a graphic designer specialising in film animation, then I became immersed in theory, then I was seduced by architecture and then began making objects. Now I do all of these things, and write. I don’t really care how I’m labelled or in what discipline I ply my trade, I find that with a little thought and some work I can transfer the creative process that underpins my work from one discipline to another. This is just as well because graphic design as I first knew it bears little relation to how it is practised today, and I’ve no idea what it will look like tomorrow.

Maybe I should give some context:

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

Creativity has been around since the beginning of civilisation, it is the civilising force and the thing that separates us from animals. But, ‘design’, as we know it, only appeared in the 1830s. ‘Design’ was created by industry in order to meet the needs of industry. For our sins, the oldest schools of design in the world are here in the UK. The Glasgow School of Art is the second oldest school, founded in 1844, only seven years after The Royal College of Art.

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

But, it’s worth examining Design’s distinguished if rather short history because it describes the progress of the last 170 years. It encompasses the mechanisation of craft traditions, the Modernisation of the West, the growth of the motorcar and proliferation of electrical appliances, television, radio, sanitary and social housing, branding, advertising and global communications. Design, more than everything else in the world, struggles to keep pace with the rate of progress. Design strives to capture and contain change, to crystallise it and transform it into meaningful or usable things. Design helps to create the illusion that we can control progress. In fact it only humanises it by giving it some weight, a sound or a familiar shape. Maybe, it gives it a typeface or a handle or turns it into a ritual that helps to make our uncertain future appear a little less blatantly terrifying.

The most cataclysmic changes in the way creative people work have occurred in the last ten years, and they show no signs of slowing down. The current digital revolution came upon all of us so quickly that many of us were forced to change the way we worked overnight, or wither away.

Having spent all of my professional life 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. The graphics studio changed shape overnight; 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 studio the architects and interior designers lost all but one of their drawing boards, complete with their parallel motions. They also lost Rotring technical pens and endless bottles of black ink. French curves and adjustable set-squares were next to go. Apple Macs began to appear in our studio, so, we dismantled the process camera that had been an integral part of graphic production (and had originally been craned into position). We took it apart bit-by-bit and threw it out with the trash—one day it had been worth twenty-five thousand dollars, but six months and one Apple Mac later, it was worthless—we couldn’t even give it away. Today the studio looks less cluttered. I use electronic mail, a mobile phone and a laptop which conspire to make me work in corners of my life I never knew existed. However, a few important things remain—like my sketch books and pencils.

Change is the most real, meaningful and overwhelming fact of my life as a designer. I spend my time trying to understand how it affects my clients and their businesses but it’s almost impossible to keep pace. No one knows what Design will be tomorrow, least of all me.

For fifteen 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, slipping easily between two and three dimensions. It’s certainly eased our transformation from a traditional design consultancy into ‘new creative industry’ and the people we employ 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.

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 employ graduates from the arts, humanities and business schools as I am to employ graduates from design or the fine arts. I’m also much more likely to employ people with specific skills on a job-by-job basis or to forge informal partnerships with people and organisations that complement my own. I form companies and joint ventures to do specific projects but keep my core business small, light and flexible—because I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

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’s 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.

Education

The speed of change makes it almost impossible for educators to predict what the world will require of their students. Therefore I believe it’s useful to provide a broad education coupled with specific specialist areas of study—this probably sounds familiar and it seems to work.

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

Graduates must also be flexible because the chances are that they’ll work in many fields other than those that they originally specialised in. As creative people from many different disciplines work across common software platforms it’s increasingly necessary for graduates to work across traditional disciplines. Therefore an appreciation of how others work is practically useful. I especially enjoy working with people who have the energy and the confidence to challenge each other, their clients and superiors, and generally keep life interesting for all of us. We’ve all got to be energetic and wide awake and prepared to challenge or discard old ways of doing things—graduates can help us do this by being inquisitive, open-minded and strong.

However, I do find that graduates who have real competence in at least one technical skill are more secure and sure of themselves, and it doesn’t really matter what that skill is. Being really good at something, knowing something really well, makes you value the complexity of all that you don’t know. This encourages humility, which I believe is a good quality in a fuzzy world that doesn’t stand still long enough to have immutable rights or wrongs; a world that creates more information that any one of us can ever know.

When I talk about technical skills I’m talking about more than software training. Software training provides ‘tools’ for creative people but it’s no substitute for learning core skills such as reading, writing, drawing, analysing and understanding; these skills help us to control our creativity rather than just play with it. Vocational training is not education. Creative businesses demand confident, intelligent and educated graduates with strong opinions and a structured process that underpins their intuition and their work.

In Graven Images we continue to use the core skills we were given in art school in new ways. We’re currently building a research centre because we’ve recognised that as our clients and their budgets grow so too does the risk associated with an intuitive response to their design problems. We’re developing new ways of understanding and validating our work because this helps to accurately define problems, measure risks and ultimately give us more control over our intuition.

We’re also reinvesting in what we’ve identified as expert skills, such as in our ability to communicate with type, because for the time being, text-based knowledge remains the core of our communications system in both the real and virtual worlds, and English the international language of choice.

I find it worrying that many graduates can’t spell or write in sentences or don’t know how to set type that actually communicates. I believe the ability to communicate in spoken and written language is becoming increasingly valuable. I continue to exploit my graphic heritage through writing, and publishing, broadcasting, because I can, and because my education has helped me flourish in a changing world.

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 to endlessly find fee paying clients, instead, we become our own client, turning our creativity: the richest and most abundant natural asset, into a tangible, lucrative commodity—we have become a primary industry.

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

Speed

As educators, change provides us with many rich opportunities, and for the first time in history, technology provides us with the means to move quickly in order to exploit them. It helps us, in the UK, to transcend our sometimes overwhelming links with heavy industrial history and move more lightly ahead.

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

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

This time round graduates were equipped with the skills they needed to enter industry and win jobs. Young people were educated to become employees.

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

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

Creative education has rarely kept pace with change and it never will unless it stops merely reacting to the needs of old fashioned, monolithic industries. As well as providing useful graduates who can become both employees and employers. Art schools can literally return to their roots and work with industry to help predict and shape the future, to guide industry through change by demonstrating the benefits it brings. Change terrifies industry but it’s the lifeblood of creativity, innovation and the arts.

While UK 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 UK Business is to inherit its share of creative action.

The US and the UK are widely acknowledged as the world’s great reservoirs of creativity and innovation. However, I believe we’re all living on a creative legacy that desperately needs replenishing because it’s in danger of becoming depleted.

In the UK 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.

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.

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 rest of us who need it most, education must become fast and virtual, too. Because we all need creative education, we need it everywhere as never before: and we need it all of the time, 24 hours a day.

Janice Creative Process

Ross Hunter and I formed Graven Images Limited when we left Glasgow School of Art almost ten years ago. Forming the company was an alternative to going on an industrial placement while on the MA Design course. We had both been offered employment elsewhere but decided to see if we could make a go of it in Glasgow as we had nothing to lose and it was an opportunity to see if a multi-disciplinary, European design consultancy could work. It did and we brought in other people to work with. We have graphic designers, interior designers and an architect all working together.

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 help make the world a better place. We, as designers, fail to explain this to the wider public, who are subsequently 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. I think it’s really important that designers understand that design is a political activity and that we can create wealth and enhance peoples lives.

Scotland is a poor country and it desperately needs to manufacture …  director, Graven Images: “A big part of being successful is to remind yourself of what you’re best at and what makes you happiest.”

11 Downing Street

1 1986 @ GSA instead of industrial placement – a happy accident and nothing to lose!

– creative collaboration across disciplines, ” European”, and now very fashionable, from base in Glasgow

– belief that all creative process is common and shared – technical specialisms set us apart

– now £1M/year turnover and 17 people

2 we have architects, interior and graphic designers and work in collaboration with musicians, film-makers and other specialists

– clients in UK and abroad including DTI, British Council, IBM, Babtie Group and Royal Mail

– corporate graphics, publications, signage, retail and workplace interiors, pubs, clubs, restaurants and international exhibitions

3 what we do – design is about shaping and controlling experience. We help our clients to control their transactions with their own customers and clients.

Design operates at the crossroads between art and commerce, underpinning intuition with methodology in order to give culture a tangible shape that can be turned into business (next century creativity will be everything).

4 The interiors, objects and publications we collectively create form the backdrop, props and dialogue in our “national theatre”. All industries are cultural industries and every nation will judge us on the quality of our performance!

– Glasgow – memory of excellence and determination to be great again – bias towards risk and innovation, dangerous opportunities. There are no cosy niches.

5 GIL’s future is in consolodating “core” expertise but also exploiting it to form new businesses with partners who have complimentary skills and shared values.

– restaurant with Nick Nairn

– long relationship with education

– broadcasting

– writing and publications

6 4 ideas (based on an agricultural paradigm!)

– business parenting

– business breeding

– valuing mongrels

– looking for lost lambs

7 practise good parenting

– get graduates and turn naivety and idealism into new businesses – they’ve nothing to lose and have great clarity of vision

– give them help and support to aid them in the transition to commercial reality

– every business is different – can’t “teach” business but you can explain principles

8 breed businesses

– get people from disparate areas of arts and sciences to come together and talk because this breeds collaboration and businesses

– reduce cost of business travel (£300 return Glasgow to London)

9 value mongrels

sciences and arts are converging at alarming speed – they’re sharing tools: common software and hardware

– old categorisation of areas of expertise must change – this starts in education but must reach high street lenders: they must be taught to recognise and support mongrels.

– GIL had to become property developers in order to create capital to run the business.

10 look for lost lambs

Move the focus of the media away from London. People need to know what we do – we work, and spend, hard to ensure we’re visible but others can’t afford to.

London-based media repeatedly creates the false impression that nothing of worth happens north of Watford. This has a very real effect on our ability to attract investment and I’m convinced it has slowed business growth in the North.

– you believe what you see and read – if it’s not on the telly or in the press then it’s not happening.

Urban Living—What makes good design in cities?

Urban Living—What makes good design in cities (in the present day)?

Rather than using slides to illustrate my words I’m going to show a ten minute slice of Glasgow, a random ten minute walk from my studio to my lawyers and then to lunch. It’s a route I’ve walked hundreds of times that never bores me because there’s a robustness and complexity and change-ability about it that keeps it interesting. This, for me, is a good place to ask the question:

What is good design in urban settings, in the present day?

It’s a strange question to be asked; “what makes good design in cities”—“in the present day”—as if I could ever find the answer to such a question.

Previous generations would have confidently and answered this question, sure that theirs was the only right answer.

The Victorians answered this question by destroying medieval Glasgow. They completely re-planned and reconstructed the city according to their need for power and desire for wealth, all carefully disguised as social ‘improvement’. The Victorians erased everything that had gone before them, leaving behind only two medieval buildings: the cathedral and the Provand’s Lordship.

Modernism too, swept through Europe and took some of Glasgow with it, demanding that the city now conform to a new ideal. But Glasgow’s horizontal rain dissolved the Modern experiment before it gathered the momentum—there wasn’t much call for Brise Soleil in the land of rickets. But Modernism’s failure to modernise Glasgow and turn it into a Birmingham or a Liverpool sent the planners and improvers scurrying back to the safety of sandstone and monolithic legacy of Victoriana that endures today.

Personally, I take the question, “What is good design in urban settings, in the present day”, as a warning.

As any of you who live in cities know, good urban design is much more than great architecture or signage and sewage systems. It’s much more than affordable transportation that actually takes you where you want to go. It’s even more than the service and product industries that many of us help create through our architectural, interior, product, graphic and interactive design.

But I do think, “what makes good design in cities, in the present day”, is a good question to ask because it’s only now, today, that it’s become acceptable not to have the answer to such a question. This says how much the role of the architect or the designer has changed in the last twenty-five years. I sincerely hope that design has moved to a less arrogant and more useful position, one where it can play a really useful role as part of a team in helping to create great places to live.

We now know that successful, thriving cities are complex and fragile environments that can be easily destroyed. They’re much more than the sum of their physical parts, much more than what we can touch and see.

I think that the things that make Glasgow work well as a city are the same things that make Manchester and Dublin work well: a happy mixture of people in secure jobs who live out the larger part of their lives in the city and energised by a thriving community. Above all else cities need active people. They must also have:

Individuality—Cities need to be allowed to become themselves. To do this they need planner, politician, strategists and people who are brave enough to risk being different. Cities that manage to keep their local pubs and not automatically build another Modern Art Gallery just because it’s what the best-dressed cities are wearing this year. Cities also must have:

Ambiguity—A good city should be complex enough to make you work hard to get under its skin. It’s got to have more than a good shopping street to be a success. It must have enough content to be different things to different people on different days of the week. It might have the most exclusive shopping this side of London, but swathes of the city are given over to peddling second-hand underwear and false teeth; it may have an international legacy in art and architecture, and in football. They should also have:

Depth—So they reveals more of themselves to you over time. You should be able to live in a city for a lifetime and never fully comprehend it – it should hold you, enthrall you and make you sad to leave it. It should be capable of making you feel at home and yet you should still find parts of it where you’re made to feel like a complete stranger. Like a classic text a city must have the depth to satisfy. You will be able to randomly dip into its pages and find surprises and treasures, or read one page every day for the rest of your life and still feel satisfied. But great cities also must have:

Conflict—A good city should force you to touch someone, have an argument with someone and provide you with a civilised means of interaction and escape. To do this cities must be dense, with alleyways, public spaces, public toilets, parks, churches and other clubs. Density is the precondition for bumping into someone in the first place. You must feel able to talk to strangers without having to do it on the telephone. But cities must also have:

Cohesion—They must have a physical consistency, textures and materials that make them homogeneous. They must be one city not a collection of separate parts. Transportation is an important part of this. You should be able to walk from one part to another, and run, and cycle, and use a car, or a bus or a train. How a city talks about itself: its centre and East End and West End, Rive Gauche, Southside or riverside reveals to you its different faces, its perceptions of itself. Cities are living things and like us they have a:

Memory—The collective memory of a city betrays its history, depth, cohesion, conflict and ambiguity. Memories of industrial might or educational excellence or scientific discovery live on in the hearts and minds of subsequent generations while architecture marks tragedies, victories or merely bears witness to the passing of time. Memories provide clues that help us to fix a steady course for the future. In fact memories often have as much to do with future aspirations as with the past events. For its our aspirations that really matter.

Aspiration—drives change. If a city is static it becomes Brugge; a shopping enclave surrounded by canals; a city crystallised in time and trapped by tourism.

Whole cities are much too complex to design. I wish people would stop trying to regard them as large corporate organisations, branding them and giving them logotypes and straplines. Good design in urban settings means wielding the power of change with a light touch, resisting the temptation to replace much with little, much you can see, touch or define with the little you can. It’s very easy to upset the delicate urban ecosystem. Good design in urban settings means protecting the special places that give cities their unique personalities, their idiosyncrasies, their beauty and their ugliness.

Designs on Tomorrow’s New World

How we shape our lives today will impact on future generations, says designer Janice Kirkpatrick.

Design is a much bandied about word, misused, abused and almost entirely linked to clothes in some people’s minds. The reality is that design is a strong influence on the way we live, now and in the future. This is the argument behind a new series I’ve written for BBC2.

The six programmes each focus on a different subject, such as the chair or the body, to illustrate how design shapes our world. The series was shot on an extremely tight schedule between May and October last year in Britain, Japan, Iceland and America.

Filming and writing on the hoof for weeks on end is not glamorous. In America we did 20 interviews in 19 locations in 10 states over 28 days. It was exhausting, but the up side was meeting some great people, seeing some strange sights and hearing even stranger stories.

In Phoenix, Arizona, in a shopping centre so hot we were continually sprayed with a fine mist of water, I met Patti Moore, a gerontologist. In her twenties, Patti became frustrated with lack of information on the effects of ageing, so she decided to experience it first-hand and transformed herself into a woman 50 years older.

She wore glasses to impair her vision, clothes that restricted her movements and applied make-up to create the lines and wrinkles of old age. For two years Moore lived a double life in various American cities. Outside she was an old lady, her frailty largely ignored by others. Inside she was a young woman playing the role of observer.

She stopped when youths beat her up for no other reason other than she was old and dispensable. The attack left her injured but with a mission to make the world a better place for the elderly. She has since designed new products specifically for the older generation.

For the programme which explores the chair, I visited the Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Ohio where we filmed inmates manufacturing office chairs as part of a rehabilitation programme. I interviewed Tumbleson, an inmate specially selected by the prison to answer my list of approved questions. Unfortunately I couldn’t allude to his past history or current environment, including the daily grind of being baked in an institutional oven that stank of male sweat and playground manners. Stripping him of his personality was the ultimate punishment, it seems.

Guards and police departments use Tumbleson’s chairs, but he can’t. Inmates are denied chairs, because they are viewed by the authorities as a privilege, something which would express the owner’s individuality and taste.

My most poignant moment came the evening before I was due to interview Kari Stefansson, a biotechnologist and entrepreneur aiming to unlock the genetic causes of the world’s worst diseases by putting the medical records of Iceland’s population under the microscope. I met a woman with multiple sclerosis, who was profoundly opposed to the gene project. She feared if her illness was found to be inherited, her children would not get medical insurance. She, more than anyone else, summed up our addiction to improving the world without always being able to live with the consequences of our creativity.

This series has been a long time coming to fruition. In 1996, May Miller, executive producer from BBC Scotland, called to ask if I’d like to write it. May’s request came out of the blue; I’d done bits and pieces for BBC over the years but nothing as big as this.

I co-manage the design business Graven Images and do some writing, so being asked to commit my thoughts to paper in a structured way was okay, but it felt good to be doing something new with my well-worn skills. I borrowed old programme proposals to learn the shape and style and set to work drafting my proposal. In 1998, when I’d assumed the project was dead, the BBC called to say that they wanted to make my series the following year for transmission in 2000.

Early on I realised I didn’t want to write about “design” in the ordinary sense. I wanted to use the chance to tell stories about the explosion in creativity.

This process is common to all of us. It’s the thing that separates us from other animals. Our most common natural resource, creativity allows us to make civilisation from a wilderness of dust and rituals.

Designers are among a long list of alchemists, scientists, assorted royalty, witches, architects and industrialists: People who use their power to change the world. They manipulate others by creating a kind of huge stage set on which their subjects unconsciously play out the drama of their lives.

It’s hard to tell a complicated story in six half-hour bursts, so I decided to explain why the world is the shape it is by focusing on the chair, the word, the wheel, the home, the body and the patent.

Chairs are a good place to start because we don’t need chairs to sit down, but chairs reveal our particular place in the scheme of things. The chairman controls and the Queen rules from her throne. There’s a chair for everyone and every occasion.

James Dyson, inventor of the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner, tells us how patents allow ideas to be owned in another programme.

The wheel study explores our addiction to speed and how reinvention accelerates us into the future. A Tibetan monk and Neil Mackenzie, the superbike champion, talk about the technical and spiritual dimensions of these seemingly simple objects. In Virginia scientists are building a smart road where intelligent wheels will drive cars for us.

Our homes show how we’ve so many lifestyles to choose from that we’ve lost our sense of place. In our rush to consume products from other cultures we’ve almost forgotten what its like to be here and now.

I couldn’t ignore our bodies as they’re the starting point for almost everything we’ve ever made. Throughout history we’ve idealised and standardised our bodies then applied the resulting proportions and measurements to our city plans, buildings, tools and clothes. In our determination to find one size that fits everyone we’ve created a world that fits none of us perfectly.

Today we are struggling to reconcile our biological need for faster progress with the cataclysmic potential of our new inventions. The result is that we may have lost control of our most basic human birthrights: Our bodies and our creativity.

What will tomorrow’s world look like when we are all wholly owned subsidiaries of private companies and public institutions, when we’ve changed our bodies, the very things that gave it scale and proportion in the first place?

Hell’s Angel

Janice Kirkpatrick on how our words are ruled by the Roman Empire.

On the Monday October 3rd 1932 The Times newspaper dramatically transformed it’s character to counter the effect of radio as the new mass medium and retain its monopoly on news. Overnight the paper changed from Germanic dark pages and a Gothic heavy-metal masthead, to emerge blinking at the light white pages and spaces of the modern era. The Establishment had altered its accent.

Not everyone was happy with the new-look newspaper. Rumours tell of ructions in the Boardroom and in “Letters to the Editor” readers expressed their sorrow at the disappearance of their dear old friend, the gothic headline that was almost a part of the British constitution.

But the born-again broadsheet was a resounding success. It was endorsed by Sir William Lister, His Majesty’s oculist, who pronounced it easy on the eye. Voysey, the English architect and contemporary of Mackintosh, congratulated the paper on being so new and vibrant while Humphrey Milford, publisher of the Oxford University Press declared that he had never been able to comfortably read the old newspaper in the car, even while wearing his spectacles. But he could now easily read the re-designed paper without his spectacles as he drove to work, and what’s more, he blamed Morrison for this new state of affairs.

While Milford’s driving skills may have been somewhat quaint, the Morison in question was not: He was, and is, the most important British typographical expert of the twentieth century. Stanley Morison was typographical adviser to The Times from 1929, he was also an employee of Monotype Corporation who produced the typesetting technology that dominated the printing industries for most of the last century. He was a radical Englishman, a conscientious objector and one-time Marxist who believed that a more modern newspaper would attract a new, more democratic reader.

Morison created a typeface especially for the re-designed Times. It was an amalgamation of new ideas packaged within the familiar, incorruptible shape of classical stone-carved letters. His invention was lighter on the page and therefore easier on the eye than the chunky black letters it replaced. Simultaneously he increased the “word yield”; the number of letters that could be set on a page that was a vital factor in a business where words meant money. But the crucial factor in the outrageous success of his typeface was his ability to give it the voice of authority: That of Classical Rome whose integrated system of democracy, law, philosophy, architecture and the alphabet conquered the ancient world and continued to direct and shape British society.

Times New Roman, the face Morison created, was the most readable typeface of its day and remains the most widely used in the English-speaking world. It’s often bundled, in one version or another, with almost every personal computer on the market.

This package of old-style information presented in a new technological format created an outwardly anachronistic but stunningly effective double-act. It allowed ambitious corporations to assume the familiar and trustworthy shape of Roman letters in this, the most recent round in a six-thousand year long conspiracy to dominate the world, with words.

From writing’s humble origins in Mesopotamia to the vast empires of Monotype, Microsoft and Murdoch, powerful people have conspired to control our words and our world. Throughout history we learned that the ability to read and write gave the author “authority” over others who could not: The writer was right. The Word was a gift of god and The Law. If words were printed in black (ink) on white (paper) we assumed that they were the truth. Words even transcended death, becoming magical and conferring immortality on the author who could influence new generations from beyond the grave. Letters were the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, intractable and eternal. Throughout history we used their power to cast spells, preach gospels, make laws, create and crack codes to win wars, we’ve founded type-foundries and the constitutions of companies and countries, and now technology has moved the plot into a new electronic dimension.

Since the invention of the typewriter, illiteracy has risen in direct proportion to the development of new writing technologies. As access to information increases the value of handwriting decreases and a growing technological underclass becomes disenfranchised. In business, handwriting is considered amateur, unprofessional and untrustworthy while we’re urged to value word-processed virtual reality over the real thing. In our rush to embrace a technological future we imprudently choose electronic information over hard-copy, even if it can be invisibly altered by the very corporations who guarantee its incorruptibility: Software is discredited unlike the simplicity of hardcopy or manuscripts. We even seem to trust the incontinent empires of Microsoft, AOL Time Warner and the US Government, or maybe we simply have no choice in a corporate world without borders.

With thanks to Stanley Morison our most popular typeface honours the honest stone-carved letters and monolithic culture of Classicism. But some things have changed, because in the twenty minutes or so it took a Roman stonemason to carve a single letter, tens of thousands of copies of a national newspaper now roll off a printing press and countless millions log-on to The Internet and World Wide Web.

The Romans may not have conquered the world the first time round but with the help of the communications supercompanies who control our words and the technologies and distribution to reach a wider audience, their classicist values—call it the Times New Roman Empire—could still triumph.

Bruno Ducati

Engineer and co-founder of the famous motorcycle marque.

Bruno Cavalieri Ducati must have died a proud man. He was an engineer and the last of three famous brothers who founded the famous Italian motorcycle marque that continues to lead World Superbikes in 2001.

Ducati’s story is centred in Bologna and spans 75 years. In 1925 the company, led by Bruno’s physicist brother, Adriano, made radio transmitters that connected Italy to the world. By the 1930s, it was the country’s second largest company, employing 11,000 people.

During the war, Ducati operated a policy of “No man and no machine goes to Germany” which saved valuable manufacturing plant, but not their Borgo Panigale factory. In 1946, after risking death as partisans, they produced their first moped, the popular Cucciolo, or Puppy, that offered affordable transportation. However, the drought of 1947 and ensuing power shortages pushed the company into debt, receivership, and eventual expropriation by the Italian state.

Since 1949 Ducati has continued to develop without the direct contribution of the Cavalieri Ducati family, but its survival and growth is attributed to their legacy and the post-war demand for a plethora of consumer goods including motorcycles, household appliances, and mechanical engineering.

Adriano worked for the US aerospace industry until his death in 1991 and Marcello continued as as an electro-mechanical engineer until his death in 1998. Bruno continued his career in the field of electro-mechanics, specialising in nuclear power, safety, and research. He obtained many patents.

Ducati, which was bought, and turned round, by American investors in 1996, is famous for its big twins, especially the Tamburini-designed 916/996, considered by many to be the most beautiful motorcycle ever created.

The UK has a special place in the Ducati story. In 1978 Mike Haliwood, a retired British racing legend with nine world motorcycle titles and a Formula 2 championship under his belt, returned to the Isle of Man TT races on a Ducati 900ss. He won the world championship.

The trend continued with Burnley’s own “king” Carl Fogarty, recently retired, securing four of Ducati’s five World Superbike championships between 1994 and 2000 and a total of 59 victories for the Italian manufacturer.

Scotland, too, can claim a unique relationship with Ducati. Before he retired from racing, Niall Mackenzie set the current lap record of 50.499 seconds at Knockhill on a GSE Racing INS Ducati 996 last year.

Saltire Magazine

Glasgow is an international City, a creative City. Historically it expressed it’s personality through designed products and architecture. These had inestimable cultural value and great monetary wealth, enabling the City to pay it’s way through it’s own resourcefulness, a product of it’s own brand of Scottish engineering and education, canny economics and socialist politics expressed in a world market.

The City communicated it’s character through ships and locomotives, through architecture and publishing. Glasgow was the ‘Workshop of the World’, “… the finest Victorian City in Britain”. The term ‘Clydebuilt’ was synonymous with enduring quality, craftsmanship and innovation. Glaswegian design was understood throughout the world and valued by every Citizen because it touched everyone, rich and poor, and was a necessary and intrinsic part of life.

The growth in Glasgow’s physical and international dimensions during the 18th and 19th Centuries still forms a major ideological component in the City’s culture. It’s alive in the mythology, language and values the City holds to be most precious. It runs much deeper than even those people who worked in the industries can ever convey.

However, the effect of our vigorous history has not been cumulative. We irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we might have.

In the late 19th Century Thomson and Mackintosh heralded a new order. The democratic internationalism of the Modern Movement appealed to Glasgow’s easy conviviality and an acknowledged track record in Classicism encouraged the City to believe it could sustain a place in the brave new world of concrete and Helvetica.

As Modernism gathered momentum the City destroyed much of what was good. Glasgow began the most intensive building programme in Europe driven by central government in London and prompted by the arid architectural polemic of drier climates. Glasgow, with it’s international socialism, fell prey to International Modernism without pausing to reflect on the human consequences of it’s actions. Politicians didn’t realise that Glasgow’s socialism was a different brand from everyone else’s. Glaswegian culture was replaced by economics in the guise of social housing, it’s manufacturing industries allowed to decline in favour of the new service industries.

In 1993 we can comfortably say that Glasgow has come through it’s most traumatic phase in recent years. Our post-modern, post-recession politicians are terrified of making mistakes or even making decisions which might be construed as mistakes. It’s therefore no surprise that it’s the students and the housing associations who are producing the most innovative design in the City. Only a handful of under-funded manufacturers make products of quality; a sorry state of affairs for a culture dependant upon objects for the expression of it’s aspirations and it’s values.

Politicians and economists don’t understand that every culture needs objects to signify what it is and does, and more importantly, what it believes in. If the success of a culture is said to be measured by the objects it leaves behind what on earth will the archeologists make of us?

We now need to generate a new vision of our City instead of constantly regenerating an old one, or a bland one or an imported one. Charles McKean of the RIAS is correct to ask, “What is Glasgow?” It certainly isn’t clear anymore, we used to know what we were.

Glasgow is learning to it’s cost the price of undervaluing it’s architecture, art and design. Essentially the same process, they don’t exist in a vacuum, but are influenced by and articulate culture, economics and politics.

What we, the architects, artists and designers must now do, is build a new Glasgow founded on the experience of the past, the talent of the present and a brave new vision of the future.