Ignore Design at Your Peril

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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