Meaningful Differentiation

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The evolutionary process of civilisation is painful and has doubtless killed many innovations as quickly as they were conceived. Solutions to many problems may well have been prematurely discarded in favour of others which solved the immediate terrors of disease, starvation and lack of shelter.

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If innovation threatened those in power, creative individuals would be killed or derided. Their names added to the long list of people who dared to ‘do things differently’.

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If a problem was solved too quickly the creator might have been burned as a ‘witch’, effectively banning exploration of the ‘magical’ unknown. Consequently, new ideas have developed and travelled slowly.

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We have inherited a suspicion of new ideas, which are cynically presented as the ‘exception to all known rules’. Today’s ‘superstitious’ businesses still consider creativity to be dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’.

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Design is as old as civilisation. It is the creative process which controls the evolution of ideas, bringing order to the world, bringing forth cities from the chaos of dust and ritual. There is a seamless evolutionary route from the development of speech, drawing and writing, to the creation of products and architecture. Objects help us to perform tasks. They also help us to communicate and help businesses to function. They are the props and backdrops against which we play out the drama of everyday live.

Has any generation felt privileged to live in the present? I don’t think so. But we should feel lucky.

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We are fortunate to live in wealthy regions where we have the resources to realise the business opportunities presented by challenge and change. We’re lucky to live at at point in time when we’re catching up with ourselves and with all we’ve learned in the history of civilisation.

Today, designers rely on much more than intuition. We work in cross-disciplinery teams. We borrow methodologies from all of the sciences, arts and humanities, from history and fiction. We create our own methodologies.

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We use all of this information to underpin our intuition, creating new perspectives on the past, the present and the future. We begin to see tomorrow in sharpen focus, with real clarity, with better understanding. We are better able to predict and control the shape of tomorrow – it’s architecture, products and services.

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We now have the technology to create an anthology of the past, to look at and reevaluate the sum of civilisation. With this collected information we can glimpse a more refined model of the world – even if that model changes too quickly for us to crystallise it’s many meanings.

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Our gaze is never constant because we too change with alarming speed; becoming chimera: men with animal organs, prosthetically enhanced and genetically and culturally mutated. Nothing stands still, everything resonates with meaning.

With our stone age bodies and classically fashioned thoughts we inhabit the age of invisibility. We move with the heaviness of leaden boots along the bottom of the ocean while all around us is lightness, intelligence, invisibility and speed – a matrix of chaotic possibilities.

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The sciences and the arts are merging. Hardware yields software, wetware and intelligent, effervescent networks suspended invisibly in gas.

The meaning of everything changes: ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘work’ and ‘leisure’, ‘art’ and ‘science’. All fail to describe the spectrum of states existing between, and beyond, these polarised definitions.

We need new multi-dimensional languages to describe these myriad new phenomenon. In the rush to name and claim each new realisation scientists steal poetry in a bid to qualify the unquantifiable. Artists and designers raid the maths and science block in order to legitimise, professionalise and quantify the essentially unmeasurable.

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We stand in the middle of a model of our universe, amidst more information than we can meaningfully process. We are in the eye of a tornado which has gathered in strength, depth and speed throughout history. We are simultaneously part of it and apart from it. We have created it and are created by it. We stare transfixed, trying to still it with clumsy animal gestures as it confoundingly changes before our eyes, sparkling and threatening to overwhelm us with pure, potential energy.

All of this new information may yield a glorious renaissance, a point in history in which the contemporary world binds with it’s ancient past. A time in which we process wisdom from all ages to create a truer, more confusing, model of the world.

Everything we have dreamed of is now probable, possible.

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As a designer I can’t imagine living in a more exciting time. But I find it worrying that with all of this new knowledge, and all of these new opportunities, that we are surrounded by banality, mediocrity and historical pastiche in communications, products, services and architecture.

Too many British businesses are standing still when everything around them is moving. They will be consigned to the past, to the slow lane of the economic motorway.

So how will you help your business meet the challenge of change? How will you recognise the opportunities for new services, new processes and products? New ways of working that will guarantee a future for you and your employees?

It’s no use only watching the opposition because that will tell you what’s already been done, that’s yesterday’s news. It’s no use only asking the public what they want because they will describe a version of what already exists, that’s history. You must think anew and venture into unchartered territory.

Tomorrow’s businesses must innovate or deteriorate. They must design or die.

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We live in a time when we can make almost any material, any process, we can imagine.

Designers are given thinking tools with which to help you make today’s dreams tomorrow’s products. Tools which help organise and give shape to this new and chaotic information.

We now have degree courses in Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Music – science and art , not ‘pure’ subjects working in isolation, but ‘tainted’ subjects designed to produces graduates with a broader understanding of the world. We have degree courses in Product Design Engineering incorporating aesthetics, cultural issues, physics, mathematics, ergonomics and design history. Today’s designers need these skills to make sense of and to make use of this new technological knowledge, expressing it in diverse products and services that will fulfil the latent aspirations of tomorrow’s clients and customers.

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We know we must understand before we create. We understand more today than at any point in time. We are developing new tools which predict the outcome of our actions, making risk less risky.

Dangerous opportunities presented through creative innovation are less dangerous than they have ever been. Consequently, innovation will become the norm rather than the exception. Turning dreams into realities will be commonplace in tomorrow’s world.

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British businesses have the chance to work with the very best, most challenging designers. In the UK we have the world’s oldest and best creative resource – the most skilled designers, the best talent. The businesses who choose to work with these world-class designers will win tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be created by teams. Teams will be made-up of professionals and non-professionals, businesses and individuals, designers and scientists and economists.

There will only be one rule – that tomorrow’s successful teams must be creative if they are to succeed.

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It still seems that the world moves very quickly and we understand so little – it’s taken us forty years to understand ’50s products. That’s why we like retro-styling. It’s a retrogressive respite which momentarily halts the terror of tomorrow’s products. But we’re learning ever more quickly and no amount of hiding in yesterday’s services and bland architecture will stop the demands of our overwhelming aspirations of our age of transparency. An age where we absolutely rely on physical artifacts to give tangible shape to invisible technology. For the first time in human history tomorrow has no shape, unless we choose to give it one.

All of human history is a rehearsal for the new world which is daily uncovered or created, which daily doubles in size and offers your business unparalleled opportunities for economic exploitation.

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New software has helped us to create common languages which deliver us from hundreds of years of technical specialisation. Creativity is democratised, it’s on the streets, not fetishised and professionalised in art galleries and universities. We individually have the power to bridge the space between dreams and realities if only we have the courage to try and make sense of a little part of what we now know, turning intangible information into physical reality. For only by doing this will British businesses culturally and economically inhabit tomorrow’s world.

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Meaningful differentiation, intelligent diversity, is inevitable – it’s happening exponentially, all around us. It provides businesses with fertile territory for new services and products.

Designers grow tired of preaching and start new companies who do for themselves what they would gladly have done for their clients – if only they been asked.

We no longer live in an age of darkness, but an age of lightness. Businesses need designers to help them breathe in this new knowledge and breathe out, filling the world with new shapes for products and buildings and strange, exciting new service industries.

A lace factory in East Kilbride weaves a slender slingshot which will propel a satellite into a new orbit.

Now is a time for you to:

explore true feelings not false facts

feel insecure not falsely secure

generalise don’t specialise

live in today and tomorrow not yesterday

acknowledge there are no certainties only probabilities

Now is a time for possibilities. A time for being better, being different, for cherishing diversity, encouraging individuality, informalising, being inter-reliant, breaking-out of preconceived ideas, evaluating and revaluating, recognising and welcoming change, being inquisitive and proactive.

Now is the time to stop dreaming about tomorrow and start to create it.

Now is a time for you to to work with designers and to make creativity the first priority in your business. with other nations, other objects, in contrast, act as discreet talismans, expressing our regional and individual personalities. Some objects perform both roles simultaneously.

Today’s successful products and services must tangibly express our international relationships and the values that are important to us. As the world becomes more homogeneous, greater significance is placed on the role of objects to eloquently distinguish and celebrate our cultural differences, differences which offer powerful trading advantages; showing competitors desirable aspects of our society that they may wish to gain through trade.

Cultural difference is a valuable national asset because it differentiates us from our competitors. Products which are visibly different are distinguishable and attractive to consumers who, in turn, use products to describe their own individuality. In our complex, and often contradictory world, with many globally common values, technologies, needs and markets. The quality of ‘difference’ adds value to products and services and commands premium prices. Consumers expect to pay a premium price for products which have the ‘added-value’ of being different and special.

However, designers can only ever create through manipulating the raw material of culture. Culture, or ‘social glue’ has five layers, these can be likened to the skin on a onion, which when peeled away reveals our most dearly held ideologies – the things we get excited about. The five layers are language, symbols, myths, rituals and values. However, designers can’t change culture but they can help us to see familiar things in new ways, viewed from a new angle in a new time.

The best designers help us to understand new things by giving us clues which help describe the purpose of an object or a process. These clues might come from the past, presenting old, familiar elements in new ways while simultaneously hinting at what the future might be.

Glasgow

Cities change all the time, they’re in a constant state of flux. Glasgow has re-invented itself almost as many times as ‘art’ and ‘design’ have re-defined themselves. Glasgow has always used design to promote whatever its most recent reincarnation might be. We were ‘The Second City of the Empire’, ‘The Workshop of the World’, ‘The Finest Victorian City in Europe’, ‘The Cultural Capital of Europe in 1990’ and we’re ‘UK City of Architecture and Design’ in 1999. We also had one of the biggest type foundries in Europe and thankfully still have a school of design and two schools of architecture. However, the overall effect has not been cumulative; we irresolutely paraded our successes, neutralised our mistakes and consequently failed to progress as quickly as we would have liked.

Every city and every community within a city has different ways of living These differences are expressed through the intangible rituals of everyday life through business, through art, through sport. They are also expressed through the designed objects which form the props and backdrops in our ‘theatre of live’: our architecture, our products and garments. Local 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. (Some are maybe illegal…)

In business, cultural differences can significantly enhance a company’s success in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, giving a distinct edge which cannot be quantified in monetary terms alone. Cultural differences can do the same for cities; through evolving 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 dinosaurs.

I believe that cultural strategies should be developed through consultation with the wider community, through communication, education and participation and communication. Designers should be part of a team which gently orientates citizens away from anachronistic cultural ideologies, like those embodied in 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 place with a new set of values. Using old, established representations of power which help citizens make sense of an unfamiliar and daunting vision of the future.

Most designers want to share their vision with the rest of the world. Designers are egotistical and evangelical and if they’re going to usefully influence social and economic change they must learn explain what it is that they do if others are to understand, help and support them. Communication is vital for sustained design-led change.

Education is essential if non-designers are to understand the common languages which allow us to discuss change in the context of the physical, sensorial, social and the economic terms. There is a growing correlation between creativity, social benefit and economic success in Britain thanks to the Blair government. For far too long young people have been allowed to 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. It’s 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.

However, 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 it’s 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 essential for a healthy city. 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 a strategic vision in the midst of the criticism and doubt which will always accompany 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. 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.

Participation is key to any innovative, design-led project 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 and all designers must guard against egotistical behaviour which ultimately serves no one.

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tomorrow’s products, tomorrow’s designers

One thing that we can be sure of is that tomorrow’s successful products and buildings will be complex and, if they are to succeed, they must be aesthetically functional – they must communicate with us, repel or attract us, in accordance with their use. Buildings or products must be appropriate and efficient when they perform the task they are created for. Successful objects must give humanising shape and coherence to seamless, invisible new technologies, they must help us to understand and welcome the future rather than confuse and scare us, or make us feel stupid.

In the nineties the traditional design professions are merging and being replaced by a collaboration of people and skills: new media, science, art, music and fashion. New design processes and designed products reflect the past and reveal an exciting future. Brave new brands express fresh consumer aspirations and innovative ways of living. The UK is an energetic, eccentric, creative laboratory – an off-shore voyeurist and an island melting-pot where anything goes, everything rocks.

The new designers are often a product of the UK. They are from a broad art school education, collaborating with others who often have no academic back-ground at all. They are creative people who form unconventional partnerships: artists and graphic designers, film-makers and architects, poets, musicians and product designers. In the past artists and designers shared the common language of drawing, today, it is often the addition of new technology, common hardware and similar software platforms that have given people a common language which has allowed them to talk and work together. This gives us new ways of seeing the world and new kinds of products which express our new experiences.

The new UK style is the vigorous creative expression of contemporary British street life and culture. Fashion, products and music describe how young people live and work in the UK. These everyday objects build a picture of our society: a place which is rapidly changing. New trends are emerging. These trends reflect both cultural and technological change, describing how we might live in the new millennium.

The UK was the first into the industrial revolution and the first out. Throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries the UK was the ‘workshop of the world’, the premier manufacturing nation. Our manufacturing pre-eminence has waned but our strength in design and creative innovation remains unchallenged. The nineteen thirties and the nineteen sixties were important creative moments in recent British history and today the Japanese acknowledge that 70% of all new ideas originate from the Britain. The UK of the nineties is a special place to be, it is the creative capital of the world and it is undergoing another renaissance, arguably the biggest this century and one which will have consequences reaching far into the the next century.

The new UK Style is important because it is a collection of objects: buildings, products and garments which express re-valuation, growth and renewal, giving us clues how we may live tomorrow. The UK, like Hong Kong is in a state of flux which, through intelligent control, can be the lucrative generator of economic innovation and generation.

In order to design well, it’s important to control creativity. In order to control creativity we must have a methodology which underpins our intuition. We must also understand the personality and aspirations of the clients and markets we are creating for.

If I were asked to define the personality of the new UK style I would say that it was:

complex

dynamic

contradictory

idiosyncratic

intelligent

humourous

ironic

irreverent

optimistic

and, energetic

Every region in every society in the world has a different character. Good design, like good art, must be sensitive towards these fragile differences and eloquent in expressing them as products and buildings and garments.

The UK invented design education which has it’s roots in the country’s manufacturing past – schools like the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London were established as an educational resource for Victorian industries. Much of the new UK style began life in the many schools and institutions of art and design throughout Britain.

Many of today’s graduates have rejected conventional business structures and have formed unconventional collaborations with other people who offer a new perspective on art, design and fashion. All this helps move traditional creative disciplines out of the institutions and on to the street.

New cultural trends

One characteristic of new British design is a trend towards inter-disciplinary working. Collaborations such as those by Born Free and Inflate where fashion meets product design, and Tomato, a changing collaboration between poets, advertising creatives, graphic designers and film-makers and collaborations between designers, manufacturers and retailers such as those found at Nice House and SCP. Many young creators such as One Foot Taller, Mo’Wax and Inflate have decided to become their own client and set up in business, controlling their own promotion, manufacturing and distribution. These young businesses can respond rapidly to change and are quick to describe new ideas through objects or music.

Traditional boundaries between creative disciplines are breaking down. Every day technology becomes more flexible and user friendly and artists, designers, musicians and architects find that they have a common creative process which underpins all of their work.

Many collaborations are between professionals and non-professionals, graduate designers and non-graduates. This often leads to strange hybrid products and objects. Many tiny pockets of energy give rise to highly individual products which come from very personal experiences such as Precious McBane who were hairdressers and now design furniture and theatre sets.

The de-professional-isation of design is another interesting phenomenon which signals cultural change. Many old technical professions are being de-skilled and presented in new media formats which allow more people to access them. The big messages about creativity and design and their usefulness in business and in everyday life are getting on to the street. People are opening their eyes and their minds to new ways of living.

new languages for a new millennium

There is no doubt that creativity is gathering power within the world of international business because there is a growing understanding of the role design plays as an international language allowing us to trade successfully with one another. The potential to trade successfully depends on our ability to recognise and understand cultural differences, ensuring we encode our products and buildings with the appropriate messages while respecting the special cultural expectations of individual societies. In the UK we are beginning to enjoy the idiosyncrasies in our cultural personality and rely less on a monolithic view of life in Britain which is no longer true but probably never was. In the UK we must be careful to protect and nurture cultural differences because they are a fragile and valuable source of human richness and economic wealth which will diminish and vanish if they are misunderstood and abused.

Who are the guardians of creativity and style?

The real guardians of UK creativity and the new UK style are not the formal organisations and national institutions. The real guardians of UK style are the individuals and local, informal networks made in the process of designing and working. The invisible networks created as creative people seek out partners who share similar values and aspirations. These networks are fragile because are unsupported by formal institutions and would die if forced to conform to a national policy on creative direction. Instead they depend upon courageous individuals who dare to be different. In Glasgow we have our own kind of UK Style and a growing culture of innovation which is angry, energetic, expressionistic, iconoclastic and very optimistic.

Designers can play a constructive role in finding a route through the confusion, finding order within apparent chaos and helping to present and promote the positive elements in the emerging personality of a renewed culture. These elements, new languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values can form the basis of a palette which will underpin the development of new products and services, these in turn will attract trade with other nations who desperately want a piece of this fresh, new action.