Design as a tool for cultural change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. design—what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

2. culture—what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. cultural strategy—what is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The urban environment—what is Glasgow?

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

The second city

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. what Glasgow can hope to achieve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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