Sweden–Scotland

National values, global virtues

My business, Graven Images, is based in Glasgow, Scotland. But I, and many of my colleagues, spend a lot of time with clients here in London or working with clients and projects abroad, which is now even cheaper and easier that ever before.

When we founded the business eighteen years ago, we made a conscious decision to be an international company and to make our base in Glasgow, rather than in London or LA; the two cities which offered us contacts and possibilities. We decided to stay because we knew Glaswegian culture was rich and complex and would influence our creativity and give our work a different perspective from most of our London-based competition.

In the global marketplace you need all the advantages you can find and I know our Scottish location is attractive to clients, especially corporate clients, and it provides us with a rich cultural resource on which to draw in order to make your work as unique, distinctive and desirable as possible. Glasgow has given us all this and much, much more.

Glasgow

Most importantly, Glasgow gave us a broad and deep context within which to work. Our obsession with its social structures and institutions led us to form partnerships with academic institutions, that allowed us to invent the analytical tools and methods which now underpin much of our creative process.

Glasgow is a highly organised and intricately factionalised city. Its preoccupation with structure taught me the value of order and hierarchy in everything from books to buildings. It’s a place of strong contrasts and surprising contradictions: Glaswegians are forthright and questioning, they’re not shy to ask difficult questions, which produces strong and eloquent designers and architects. I believe that our process is robust because people question what we do.

Language, communication and publishing are also highly prized. And we were lucky that Glasgow gave us the chance to design one of the world’s oldest English language broadsheet newspapers at the moment when the world changed from analogue to digital. We’ve also designed a tabloid evening paper, which in many ways is much much harder to design that an elegant broadsheet.

The city also invited us to create a branded system of communication for what was then the UKs largest local authority—and then it challenged us to find consensus for our proposals amidst the chaos of two colliding political regimes. The experience we gained through this crash course in politics has been invaluable in working on many projects for governments in Westminster and in Edinburgh. We curated, designed and toured UK Style, the country’s first expression of ‘Cool Britannia’, the international exhibition of UK street style and design for the DTI while the Thatcher government was still in power. Working with 10 Downing Street we produced the Shanghai-based event that formed the backdrop to Tony Blair’s first visit to China after the handover of Hong Kong. We’re currently building two Chinese-based exhibitions curated and designed by us in conjunction with CBBC. These form the backdrop of the DTI’s major event in China this year, called the Leading Edge Showcase.

Moving from politics to pubs, Glasgow has even helped us to understand how to make sociable interior spaces. In Scotland people come indoors to meet and drink, like many Europeans they prefer to stand up (and don’t like carpet), and even the city’s smallest pub, or shop, as it’s locally called, has at least three distinctive types of space configured to meet the needs of lone customers, couples and groups. We’ve now transferred our pub-derived social knowledge into corporate workplaces and high street coffee outlets.

And of course, I can’t talk about Glasgow without mentioning the Glasgow School of Art, the world’s oldest undergraduate art school where I was educated. The power of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s building endures long after my time there, and it continues to remind me that projects with small budgets can be inspirational.

Glasgow has a special place in its heart for architecture and design. No other city in the UK has the energy, resources and the networks to support a year long festival of architecture and design, such as Glasgow’s huge event in 1999 when it was UK City of Architecture and Design.

My Glaswegian context has many different dimensions from which I, as a designer benefit. Glasgow was and remains Scotland’s most cosmopolitan and ambitious city with the largest population of designers, architects and artists outside London. In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was the powerful ‘workshop of the world’, generating industrial products and wealth while Parliament in Westminster absorbed itself in the colonisation of foreign territories. The wealth has gone but Glasgow’s strong relationships with continental Europe, North America and Ireland endure. It’s these networks that give me the broad perspective that benefits my business and the work I produce for my clients.

Scotland

However, just as London isn’t England, Glasgow isn’t Scotland. But what’s currently happening in Scotland is interesting, especially if you believe that design can generate wealth and make a significant contribution to the economy. Personally, I believe that design is a political activity, and I know that creativity is the catalyst for wealth creation.

Scotland has some world-class companies but it doesn’t have a dynamic economy, in fact the MD of HSBC recently said that Scotland was in permanent recession. This isn’t strictly true but we do have a perpetually small rate of economic growth. Which is odd if you consider that of all the patents granted throughout the world for new inventions in the last 50 years, 40% have been to inventors from the UK, and a disproportionate number of these from Scots. Scotland has always been great at having ideas, and poor at converting them into cash, and this remains true today. The fruits of our national creative heritage underpin much of modern life—the telephone, money and banking, television, the fax machine, pneumatic tyres and tarmac for roads, colour photography and now even cloning and many aspects of bio-sciences. We produce the thinking behind many of the world’s biggest brands, but with the exception of banking, we have failed to reap the rewards for our creative investment.

In the UK, design has been absorbed within the government term, Creative Industries. I believe that this is a good thing because the Creative Industries focus on the commercialisation of creativity, which is at the root of what we, as designers, do.

In Scotland, the Creative Industries have a special role to play in our future as they must deliver the promise of our creative heritage. Thankfully, key politicians in our new parliament are approachable and interested in our creative resource. They are showing signs of following the innovative government processes adopted by devolved government in Northern Ireland, where cross-departmental groups ensure creativity is at the core every part of government, and eventually, hopefully, in every aspect of life.

The Scottish Executive have already formed new partnerships in order to deliver policy effectively within the creative sector. The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City is already in the second year of a three year programme to deliver government policy on architecture.

The Creative Industries network, also administered by The Lighthouse, has several hundred members throughout Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northern England. It is already proving to be a valuable source of economic information for both industry and government and is showing every promise of transforming into an industry-led partnership with government, with a mission to release the economic potential of this significant part of the Scottish economy.

Personally, I believe that Scotland has much to gain by placing design at the heart of the economy, as a primary industry, with the potential to create new wealth by working in partnership with businesses, education and government. I believe in doing this we could truly convert our national values into global virtues.