The future of creativity

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to speak at the Royal Museum, and thank you for coming along.

I aim to talk first and show some slides before letting you ask questions if you want to.

About six months ago I was called by the Museum and asked to give a title for my talk. Because I was writing a book about creativity at the time I thought it might be useful to explore some of my observations and ideas during this lecture.

So, I’ll try and start at the beginning.

Some people think creativity is primarily the property of artists. It’s not. Creativity is something we’re all born with. It’s our most common natural resource and the thing that separates us from the animals. We’re all creative even if we think we’re not, even if we’re embarrassed or confused by what it means to be creative. We’re all interested in what creativity can do for us, how it can enhance our lives in some form or other; whether it manifests itself as fashion, painting, writing, a new software programme, new medicine, new architecture or some other kind of innovative invention or everyday activity like how you design your garden or wear your clothes and hair.

But the really interesting thing about creativity is that it’s nothing new, it’s as old as the human species.

Artists and designers, people who create professionally are taught to be creatively productive through underpinning their intuition with methodologies that are begged, borrowed and stolen from other arts and sciences. Sometimes artists use more intuition than methodology than designers but not always. The only things that separate artists, designers and architects are the labels we give ourselves. Artists don’t have a monopoly on creativity any more so than anyone else, although their agents would often have us believe otherwise. Likewise, they’re no more or less likely to sell their work than other creative professionals.

The creative process, the cyclical method through which we create, test and refine the specification for new and better things is common to all of us and professionally practised by scientists, architects, engineers, designers and artists. However you like to be labelled, whether as a designer of theatre sets or tram sheds or books, you go about the process of having and refining your ideas in exactly the same way as the next person, before applying the arcane knowledge that defines your specific technical discipline. Through this process of conceiving and refining our best ideas and making new things we perpetually re-order the world, remodel civilisation and making it contemporary in order to reflect our changing attitudes, technologies and beliefs.

While we’re all born with the potential to be creative we often have the confidence to do what comes naturally knocked out of us at an early age by the social or cultural pressure to conform or by schools and universities that care more about training and exam results than real education.

Some countries sustain and encourage creativity better than others while others are scared of it and try to hide it. Many of the Pacific rim countries have problems encouraging creativity because they have problems such as ‘face’ that makes it almost impossible for young people or students to challenge accepted ways of doing things without causing offence to their elders and teachers. They’re often hybrid countries lacking cultural diversity and productive conflict, unlike our mongrel society that thrives on constructive conflict.

One country that’s particularly renowned for innovation is the US. The US is interesting because when it was settled just over three hundred years ago it had no indigenous industry compared with Europe and the rest of the civilised world. But in a very short time the US has come to be the most economically powerful nation in the world and it continues to dominate the stock exchanges with new hi-tech industries. The US is good at taking risks and supporting failure because it’s impossible to succeed without failing sometimes. There’s nothing worth gaining that doesn’t involve an element of risk, in fact one Chinese definition of ‘risk’ is “dangerous opportunity”.

While the US has been quick to use patent law to own ideas and turn them into businesses and cash, it’s important to note that the another country known for creativity and it’s ‘risk averse’ lack of confidence to capitalise on it’s creative potential, is Scotland.

Scotland has a distinguished history of cultural and scientific innovation. It has enjoyed impossible challenges and remains unfazed by larger competitors, like the Nat West Bank and is largely tolerant of new or unconventional ideas. Scotland also has a long and distinguished history in providing world class education—which is a vital resource in helping to control and transform raw creativity into useful products, processes and services. It’s a naturally cosmopolitan place that suspects London may not in fact be the centre of the universe. Scotland has many idiosyncratic attitudes that are useful in a quickly changing world that’s immersed in media, where nothing is what it appears to be. That’s why I like living and working here.

I call myself a designer because I don’t know how else to describe what I do. However I realise that although it’s a comparatively new job description it’s already well past it’s sell-by-date.

Designers of many different descriptions create the architecture and objects that form the props and the backdrops that make up the vast stage on which we enact the mundane drama of everyday life.

But design is just the most recent term for someone who controls the shape of the man-made world in order to surreptitiously encourage and manipulate others to behave in predictable ways. Throughout history kings, priest, scribes, architects and scientists; powerful people who are literate in written, drawn, visual and sensorial languages have ordered the world and created civilisation from a chaos of dust and rituals. They’ve learned how to control the shape of the man-made world ever since we first emerged from caves and began to separate ourselves from the natural world. Because, fundamentally, design is about control.

Until recently it’s been hard to understand the histories and practices of many disparate creative professions. But the development of new technologies: software, hardware and common languages now allow us to collaborate across disciplines and pool all the knowledge we’ve accumulated throughout history in our biggest library ever.

Through the World Wide Web, and The Internet, we have access to a growing reservoir of knowledge to make invisible tools that shape and control the man-made and now the natural world too.

We now have the power to design with molecular depth and global breadth. Everything we have dreamed of is probable, and possible. We try to reconcile our innate creativity and therefore our biological addiction to progress with the cataclysmic potential of our new inventions … while our eyes still have something solid to focus upon and laws to protect us from the things we make, if indeed such laws exist …

I explore the future of creativity through my practise, though teaching and through researching and writing a book for Cassell and a television series for BBC2. In order to structure my thoughts I’ve followed the evolution of common objects demonstrating how our most fundamental human condition is threatened in unprecedented and ironic ways.

The six objects I use are the chair, the wheel, the word, the home, the body and the plan. Chairs are about hierarchies and order, words are about power, homes are about context and place, bodies are about nature and ideals and plans are about describing, owning and exploiting ideas.

Chairs

Before we can understand the sweeping changes happening in a world we’ve made for ourselves we first have to understand the vital role objects play in our lives. Chairs are interesting because we think we use them for sitting on when in fact we use them to order society and communicate with one another.

We don’t need chairs to sit down; we can sit on the ground. But, chairs, like all objects, say something more that words can about who we are and what we believe in. How we sit, publicly and privately, and what we sit on, defines our place in the home, the workplace and society.

Objects help us dramatise and ritualise our lives: HRH The Queen rules from a throne while Beavis and Butthead snigger on their sofa. The layout of chairs in parliament describes the shape of government while the Speaker’s chair controls, the umpire’s chair commands, the ejector seat explodes and the electric chair makes us sit up straight, civilising us while it kills us using clean modern power.

Chairs are packages of information; three-dimensional sentences in an object language. Through them, and with all of our other objects, we control how we communicate through the common vocabulary of our senses and the varying elements of culture: the languages, symbols, myths, rituals and values that we use to uphold and protect our fundamental values; our ideologies. As a general rule, we need to slow down and become more suspicious of how we react to the man-made things around us. We’re all unconscious experts, instinctively rearranging our furniture. Only by slowing down and questioning our actions will we learn to understand and control them.

Words

Before we learned to read and write we were the original and the only containers for our words. Like books we were bound in skin and had a spine, we altered our facial expressions and gestures and modulated the tone, volume and accent of our voices in order to change the meaning of our words.

Written and printed words physically represent us and our spoken language because typography ‘contains’ information in much the same way as objects.

In just this way typography acts as a ‘container’ for language, changing its meaning and value, like water when poured into a crystal glass or a plastic bucket. What we say is often less important than how we say it.

Throughout history the ability to read and write conferred power on the author, power over those who couldn’t read and write. But now new digital technologies threaten us and our words with a new totalitarian dark age; a time where more technology means less understanding and control of what we say and how we say it.

While personal computers appear to offer us the freedom of speech that at last delivers us from the endless tyranny of professional scribes, kings, clerics and compositors. Instead, they make us dependent on the private companies and governments that control invisible, global technologies: the search engines, the telecommunications carriers, the hardware and the software that allows us to speak and write in the belief that what we say is our own private property. It’s not.

For, ever since we first used sticks to write in mud we’ve fought to control the techniques and technologies of writing in all its different forms, whether as written or drawn thoughts and words, images, objects or other types of coded communication. We’ve controlled others with words through casting spells, preaching gospels, making laws and the constitutions of companies and countries. Words remain forever synonymous with power. From writing’s humble origins 8,000 years ago in Mesopotamia to the modern technologies of Monotype, Murdoch and Microsoft, we continue to fight to control the shape of our words and our world but we’re losing the battle and Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch are winning.

Wheels

“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine; from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is non-corporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.”
Milan Kundera, Slowness, Faber and Faber, London, 1995

Speed is our ecstasy and our most elementary human addiction.

Religion and philosophy quickly recognised the wheel’s paradoxical potential as a model of both the divine and secular worlds. The irony of moving forward while apparently standing still appears to be miraculous and reveals the mathematical perfection of a designed universe, presumably constructed by a higher intelligence; a god who created and designed. The wheel came to represent the universe and all that it contained, in perfect equilibrium. Ironically, the wheel also describes the futility of our own mundane lives, as we appear to stand still while everything whirls in circles around us, evading our grasp and our understanding. The wheel is also a model of stasis and perpetual change, efficiently transferring energy from one plane to another, becoming at once a religious meditation and an ecstasy of technical perfection; like a well-greased prayer machine.

The wheel, like our innate creativity, is a natural thing: the revolution of the planets and the cyclical changing of the seasons, so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever break our addiction to reinvention and need for speed and change. We couldn’t get off the technological treadmill even if we wanted to because wheels give us what we naturally crave. The last time we reinvented the wheel it gave us the car and the motorway, suburbia and pollution. Every time we reinvent wheels they change our world in ways we can’t predict or control. But we must try to control our impetuous creativity before our cleverness accidentally catapults us into a new age of invisibile technologies and immeasurable power to creative, with often unpredictable results.

Our appetite for speed and the next new thing has compelled the arts and sciences to collaborate on the production of tomorrow’s world. After more than two hundred years of separate development, the technical revolution has caused the arts and mathematician to converge and create new and better things using ‘rapid-prototyping’, ‘fast-tracking’ and ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing methods. But if we’re not careful we may create the future we’ve always dreamed of, a place of supernatural speed that isn’t subject to gravity, where things have no tangible form unless we choose to give them one. The allure of the accelerating wheel has already moved us further and faster towards a seamless and weightless future that we were somehow destined to create but paradoxically can’t yet inhabit.

Homes

There’s no place like home because home is the unique set of circumstances that make each of us special and different. Home is part of our identity, helping us to understand who we are in relation to the rest of the world.

But few of us can afford to live the way we want to. Instead we allow ourselves to be commercially exploited and socially engineered in the mistaken belief that in return we get a modern standard of living.

House builders, like other manufacturers, have systemised the production of homes to appeal to the broadest range of customers in many locations for financial profit. To create the illusion of choice homes are composed of a kit of cosmetic parts that give the impression of different architectural styles.

Home decoration industries work with house builders to provide a range of custom products with which we personalise our homes. They even encourage us to discard our real lives and buy a whole new lifestyle package.

Magazines and television programmes demand we recreate someone else’s idea of home in our own private space. We’re pushed to choose Roman style, or Provencal, anything but our own authentic, and often unstylish, cultural experiences. It’s as if we’d conspired to turn the clock back to a different times and places, even if they never really existed. Each new season brings new colours, curtains and references to other countries and times in the endless quest to be seen to be fashionably at home.

Private industries have snatched our private space and stopped us creating things without their help. Even our amateur creativity has been exploited and commercialised by DIY; but we don’t do it for ourselves, we do it because we’re told to open our front doors and turn our private spaces into a lucrative public show.

Corporations and governments have conspired to ensure that we have little control over how we live and what we make. Increased patenting of original ideas and the ownership of technologies has professionalised the creative process, relegating our ‘amateur’ creativity to a kind of recreational therapy; a vestigial part of the thing that once civilised us. We’re being stripped of our creativity and reduced to the status of animals.

Loss of our private space and our creativity damages both our personal and our national identities as new global companies destroy the local things that make our products and services visible and desirable in global markets. Instead of being a robust and durable foundation, home is fast becoming a fragile and endangered place as the commodification of our national and regional cultures continues.

Home is the benchmark against which we measure and judge all other cultures and places. If we lose this unique reference we limit our ability to design successful homes and economies in the future, and we’re in danger of seriously losing the place.

Bodies

Our attitudes to our bodies continue to change as we gradually extract ourselves from nature and decide how we’d like to look rather than putting up with what we were given at birth.

As we went about process of constructing our world we felt naturally inclined to improve and control nature. But we quickly realised that we too were natural and therefore imperfect. We were in no fit state to decide what was good or bad or what shape the ‘ideal’ human should be. Someone else had to help us make that decision, preferably someone with an overview who understood the project, who’d maybe had a hand in our construction and wanted a second shot at getting it just right.

Through a process of flawed argument that must have borne a blasphemous resemblance to the Darwinian theory of natural selection, we came to believe that god was an eternally fit, youngish man.

The resulting model was a collection of butcher’s prime cuts; an amalgamation of carefully selected ‘aesthetic’ exemplars defining the optimum condition of our various body parts. This new ideal bore ironic similarity to our own creation, except that we were flawed, a catalogue of errors; happy or not so happy natural accidents brought about by injudicious liaisons and a series of mistakes in the transcription of our genetic code. We hoped that in time these errors would be put right.

But diversity and variety are facts of our species and quite possibly the reason we’re still here today. Instead of regarding differences as a valuable part of being human we persist in pursuing unrealistic ideals with limited results and short-term gains.

Today’s cosmetic surgeons continue to emulate the aesthetic lines of the Vitruvian Golden Mean—the Classical ideal in living flesh, as they go about their daily business of correcting nature’s faults or helping us conform to one impossible ideal of beauty that encircles the globe.

Today, science allows us to venture far beyond the crude tailoring of living flesh. They believe that the possible solution to ugliness and ageing lies within the human body itself. The genes and proteins produced in our own bodies will be adapted to become the drugs of the future. They will be engineered to trigger growth and repair in area of our bodies that are dying through old age or sickness, or to switch off growth in cell growing too rapidly or abnormally as they do in some cancers. Many biotechnologists believe there’s not a cell in the body that couldn’t do with tweaking to optimise its performance, eventually allowing us to cure the condition known as ageing.

Our bodies are the physical starting point for almost everything we make; this means we use them to redefine the scale and proportion of the whole shooting match, from buildings to theme parks and golf clubs. In this way we ensure that our manufactured goods work for most of us most of the time, both physically and ideologically.

But what shape the world will be if we stop being ugly, old or individually different?

Plans

In the past, if we wanted to know how something worked we could draw it, or physically take it apart then put it back together again. But drawing or dismantling won’t help us understand the inner workings of a television or a mobile phone because modern machines use components too small for our eyes to see, or invisible technologies we can’t detect with our senses. In order to understand how these things work we need specialist tools and professional help. In fact we’d probably need a whole group of technical advisors because it’s unlikely that any one person could explain the detailed parts and processes of even a humble fax machine.

Designing something was once a straightforward process that required simple tools and little investment. But since the industrial revolution increased mechanisation and global markets, the rise of manufacturing conglomerates and increased legislation make it almost impossible for the creative amateur or lone inventor to develop an idea and take it to the marketplace while still retaining ownership the original idea.

Today teams of people with different skills design new products using special software ‘tools’ that allow them to see, manipulate, plan and sometimes prototype intangible components. The configuration of the software and its interface; the bit that allows us to perceive invisible things ‘face to face’ are beginning to have an acute impact on the tangible appearance of finished products.

As products continue to lose physical mass and weight we grow increasingly dependent on the intervention of software and machines to render the intangible tangible and give us a grip on the invisible stuff we use to make them. However in the race to plan new products with mega and nanotechnological tools, and in many diverse dimensions, it’s easy to overlook our human condition and our most basic needs. So it’s not surprising that many of the things we make will exhibit an unprecedented aesthetic. In fact, if God is in the details of things we make, he must be a machine determined to diminish our human condition and alienate us from a world so perfectly constructed we no longer recognise any trace of ourselves in it.

Most of us accept that it’s only a matter of time before the functions of many products are integrated within our bodies. While we’ll no longer be able to blame each other for losing the car keys, we’ll only have ourselves to blame for losing our genius to speak through object, without using words and all of the silent intelligence that words can’t express.

The creative cycle moves forever onwards without end, deepening our knowledge while revealing the depth of our ignorance, but all the time providing us with the means to die for our ideals or live with the truth of our imperfections, and who knows what tomorrow may bring.

Patent laws, originally created protect the invention of machines during the industrial revolution, are now applied to new biotechnological inventions, with profound results.

Our own creativity and our private spaces have already been commercialised. Now nature is being named and claimed. It’s now possible to own the blueprint for a living organism. Our world is being privatised and our access to it controlled for commercial gain by a minority of global organisations that transcend geographical boundaries and national legislation. They can afford to identify and protect the knowledge they own.

“Wherever there is no vision the people perish.”
Bible, Hebrews

It seems the only vision of our future is a corporate commercial vision, and that’s no vision at all.

So, what can we do to protect our creativity?

The start of a new millennium is a good a time to rediscover what we’ve forgotten or taken for granted. To learn how we can apply our ancient knowledge help understand and control the shape of tomorrow. Because in tomorrow’s world the gap between our stone age bodies and space age aspirations has widened as our biological destiny to reinvent the wheel catapults us into a new age of invisibility that has no obvious tangible shape or conclusion.

Our addiction to speed allows technology to transcend laws designed to protect us, our ideas and our genetic inheritance. Law has already decreed that we don’t even own our genetic material or our bodies. Computers have become patenting machines, embedding our ideas in someone else’s software and turning public creativity into private profit.

In this new age of invisibility, intangible laws and corporate confederacy reduce us to the status of animals; a resource to be used. The natural creative legacy that shaped our ideas and plans is now named, owned and assigned to others through patent laws. But creativity is no longer at the centre of human civilisation, neither is the free exchange of ideas. Ownership is everything.

But we can stop ourselves from getting lost in the future by learning how we civilised ourselves the first time round. We can re-learn lost knowledge and learn how yesterday’s powerful creators shaped their world. Before we rush to recreate a tomorrow’s world we must pause and understand the changes happening around us, and to us, today.

Design has always been about controlling creativity. But what shape will tomorrow’s world be if we don’t resist the temptation to change the very thing that gave it scale, shape and variety in the first place: ourselves?

We must fight for our right to create tomorrow’s world, or it will be created for us, not by us. And the most valuable things at stake are our genetic legacy and our most basic human birthright: our creativity.

I’ve become more interested in the changing cultural and economic values of creativity as I’ve seen my life, my environment and the way in which I work change beyond belief. Many of my assumptions about the future of creativity are directly based on my experiences of working in Graven Images and in collaboration with other creative organisations, here and abroad.

* Established 1985 on graduation from GSA with Ross Hunter

* multi-disciplinary, employing 15 people in Glasgow, including musicians and film-makers, architects, interior and graphic designers

* Scottish base for international company, but not nationalistic

* important to give tangible shape to contemporary life in Scotland and make ourselves visible in the European and global marketplace

* interest in culture and identity and irritated by the puerile polar visions of Scotland that permeates tourism and the media: tartan or Trainspotting, at one point we founded a range of simple furnishings with retailer Nice House called Home Produce—to show what we could produce locally, we called our brand Tartanalia

* gradually more clients in throughout the UK, more than half of work comes from London

* frustration at general lack of ambition in Scotland and ability to think outside of one tiny country

* frustration at lack of confidence and lack of intellectual base in design professions who’re too happy with superficial style and less concerned with why things work. We like scientists and technology and try to create opportunities to work with new people and learn new things

* met Larry Keeley at Doblin Group in Chicago, asked if we were allied to academic institutions—we are because that’s how we remain intelligent and relevant, straddle spaces between specialisms, arts and sciences etc because cross disciplinary collaboration is what the future is about