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.