The great leap forward

Someone or something seems to be jerking designers into the land of the living just minutes short of the millennium, or maybe designers are pulling their own strings for a change. The entire profession is twitching awake and talking to the world. Glory be.

Edinburgh’s been up to all sorts of Manifesto ’96 design activities, fuelled by the stirling efforts of architect Peter Wilson. Recent events include the Lothian L lectures by Zaha Hadid and Toronto visionary Jack Diamond and 11 exhibitions, including Hong Kong, City of Tomorrow at the City Arts Centre, which runs until January. More than 10 000 people visited the festival centre this year, and plans are already underway for next year’s manifesto which will include an exhibition on Austrian architect Otto Wagner.

Also in Edinburgh, Design Business Association Scotland hosted Design Through a Hole in the Wall with the help of NCR, which makes the holes in the walls that dispense our dosh. Altogether a suitable topic for Britain’s other financial capital.

Glasgow held its 1996 Design Festival displaying the beginnings of a design museum collection (a shameful oversight in a city which was once the world’s workshop and the greatest industrial power in the British Empire). We also had the Paul Smith, True Brit show and Objects of Desire.

The 1996 festival boasted sell-out master-classes by Alberto Alessi, Sir Terence Conran and Richard Seymour, and a one- day conference for industrialists examining how other European countries have gone about developing design-led strategies for industrial and commercial success. Nurenberg, Barcelona, Milan and Helsinki were represented by Iris Laubstein, Conrad Amat, Perry King and Jan Verwijnen respectively.

The Scottish Arts Council held the two-day conference Arts, People, Spaces which brought architects and artists together to discuss how they might conspire to create buildings which will house the arts in the 21st century. Miracles will never cease…

The Design Council hosted its first UK-wide Design Business Week, an ambitious programme of some 40-odd events spread across one week with topics ranging from Doing a Dyson to a ministerial reception with Ian Lang, President of the Board of Trade.

I had the good luck to be at the opening day of The Design Show this year’s most attractive trade show. I can’t understand why designers aren’t naturally easy about revealing themselves on trade stands or relaxed about committing their corporate ideologies to copy in promotional brochures and leaflets. It seems that we still prefer to hide behind client work, letting that speak for us rather than developing distinct personalities. But it was really heartening to see and hear designers in the frontline actively touting for work and spreading the good word, if not the only word, British business needs to hear.

The DBA Design Effectiveness Awards saw the bold James Dyson rightly victorious. Things must be really rocking in the UK if we now have our own superhero, a man who’s making exportable products which proper companies, like Hoover, are probably jealous of. Who knows where all of this might take us? Maybe Labour will give us a powerful Minister for Design?

It seems that design really is becoming a political activity, with our progress closely monitored in the broadsheets and the tabloids. Several Scottish papers carried comment on the progress of Glasgow’s Year of Architecture and Design 1999 Festival. The Sunday Times Ecosse devoted more than 400 column centimetres in one issue alone to asking architects and the city’s many design-literate community groups how they feel about progress so far. The answer was an unequivocal demand for the democratic structure Glasgow’s winning bid promised to deliver to be established forthwith. It seems that non-designers actually want to be allowed to participate in designing the future.

Perhaps we’ve been blessed by space dust from Mars or maybe we’re just experiencing millennium fever. I don’t know the cause – I’m just pleased designers are coming out of the closet in swelling numbers, hopefully to be joined by the off-home-early-HB-pencil-brigade who’ve been slow to help and quick to criticise. With some luck all of this will start a design-led religion which will ensure that Britain is sorted by Christmas 1999.