DESIGN is everywhere. It’s in the laptop on which I’m writing this, the mug on the table beside me and the wooden table the mug is on. It’s in the cars I see outside the window, the buildings across the street, the crisp bag lifted up by the wind. It’s the invisible magic behind everything around us.
“That’s why I decided to use the theme Multiplicity,” says Dr Stacey Hunter, artistic director of Dundee Design Festival 2024, Scotland’s national festival of design, which opens on September 23. “The Design Festival strives to show the multiplicity of ways design interacts with your life. We’ve left no stone unturned, tried to pick apart and hold up and shine a light on all the ways design has value and significance.”
DDF24 is the biggest iteration of the Festival to date, the first to be held at the Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc, on the 10,000-square-metre site of the former Michelin tyre factory. A programme of exhibitions, workshops, talks and events in two vast hangar-like buildings, it marks ten years since Dundee’s designation as a UNESCO City of Design, the only one in the UK.
“It felt really important to mark that, and to mark Dundee’s growing reputation for excellence in design,” says Hunter. “The city has demonstrated a lot of leadership in the last 10 years, the two universities have really good design courses, the V&A has opened. We really punch above our weight in Scotland in terms of design. We want to make a festival which is a true snapshot of Scotland’s contemporary design landscape and a real celebration of that.”
The Festival features large-scale interactive presentations by some of Scotland’s top design studios, from a woolly forest by Donna Wilson to a tiny house designed for wellbeing, by Alicia Storie. Exhibitions showcase Scottish design, from students to field-leaders, international design from other UNESCO-designated cities around the world, and 20 bookend designs inspired by a pair of trailblazing female journalists from Dundee. Visitors can expect to see the work of over 180 designers in furniture, interiors, jewellery, homeware, graphic design and fashion.
Creative Scotland estimates that design in Scotland has an annual turnover of £3.4billion and supports nearly 4,000 creative businesses, and Stacey Hunter says she has noticed a growing interest in it from a design-hungry public. “In the past ten years as an independent design curator, I’ve seen an immense appetite amongst the public for design exhibitions and events. Every time I do an exhibition, people say there should be more of this.”
“The Design Festival strives to show the multiplicity of ways design interacts with your life” – Dr Stacey Hunter, artistic director of Dundee Design Festival 2024
Turn the clock back thirty years and it was a very different picture. While affordable modern design for the home was available in shops such as Habitat, the word was little-used in mainstream discourse. Lifestyle TV shows such as Changing Rooms and Grand Designs were still years off, as was the opening of Scotland’s first IKEA, in 1999.
All these things have helped make us design-literate, but social media has played a particularly important role, Hunter says. “Most people now have some online presence and we have become more curatorial about the way we live our lives and approach our homes and gardens. With platforms like Instagram, people’s tastes are more developed in terms of the style of design they like and what they want to have around them. We’re aware of how our taste in design might communicate something about us.”
Image Timorous Beasties
Back in 1990, long before the advent of Instagram and Pinterest, Glasgow-trained designers Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons started Timorous Beasties, making printed textiles and wallpapers for the luxury market. Their reinvented 18th-century toile de jouy patterns flew in the face of the minimalist style which was in vogue in the early 1990s, and they added edgy details, creating a Glasgow toile, for example, featuring tower blocks and homeless people. As McAuley once said: “We made it as hard for ourselves as possible – we started out during a recession, making luxury products nobody wanted, using subjects folk found disturbing.”
However, their distinctive work found an audience which has grown steadily over the years – they have now won many awards and are acclaimed internationally. Glasgow’s year-long designation as UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999 was an important milestone which led to the founding of a design museum, The Lighthouse, and the Six Cities Design Festival in 2006. The following year, Timorous Beasties co-curated a major exhibition of their work, Peacock Among the Ruins, at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
Timorous Beasties founders Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons
While fashions in interior design have cycled through many changes in 34 years, the company has ploughed its own furrow. McAuley says: “There were moments we tried desperately hard to do things we thought were going to be commercial – and they never were! People didn’t buy from us because we were the same as everybody else. We just had to stick to our guns to produce what we wanted to produce. It was a very steep curve for us to hold on to, but that is probably our single biggest achievement. We are now 34 years in business, and still don’t feel much different from when we started.”
Studio Sam Buckley Noodle Stool and Bench in Framework exhibition, DDF24
“We still find it just as much fun and just as interesting as we did back in the 1990s.” – Paul Simmons, Timorous Beasties
Simmons says: “I think people are more design-aware for a whole lot of reasons. Everything’s designed, it’s just who it’s designed by, how it’s made. People are more aware of, more savvy about those things. Things have changed one hell of a lot, not only with tastes and awareness, but with different processes as well. The digital age, being able to make smaller runs of product, has been a big game-changer. It means there’s a lot more competition, but I think there’s a more level playing field. We still find it just as much fun and just as interesting as we did back in the 1990s.”
By keeping their business relatively small – they employ 20 people – they continue to be hands-on designers, and seem equally excited whether they’re talking about their new stores in Edinburgh and London, or their installation for DDF24 – a backlit maze of enlarged white-on-white designs, accompanied by a printing table where visitors can try making a Timorous Beasties blockprint of their own.
Also excited to be invited to make an interactive project for DDF24 is Glasgow-based designer Gabriella Marcella, who is making “a set of uniforms which challenge the idea of uniformity, by showing how they can be canvases for creativity and individual expression”.
“Brands have been attracted by the big bright graphics coming out this little studio” – Gabriella Marcella
Marcella set up her own company, Risotto, when she graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2012. A print studio specialising in risograph printing, it is also the platform from which she works on design commissions in her trademark bright, solid colours for clients such as Stussy, Doc Martens, Apple, Puma, Network Rail and the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“The studio has been an amazing platform for me, we’ve filled a niche for risography and I’ve been able to reach a broad audience through social media from a small studio in Glasgow. Brands have been attracted by the big bright graphics coming out this little studio, I think that’s part of the reason why I’ve been successful, there is that story. I can work on high-end big-budget stuff that is ambitious and challenging me in different ways, and still have a down-to-earth local print business.”
“We really punch above our weight in Scotland in terms of design.” – Dr Stacey Hunter, artistic director of Dundee Design Festival 2024
She has also noticed Scots becoming more design-aware. “Scotland is not like Scandinavia where design is in their DNA, but I think the more the general public are exposed to good design it becomes a standard to be maintained. Everyone can see a lot more care being put into the branding of local shops, restaurants, even food – people like seeking out things which are unique. Instagram and Pinterest help to form people’s taste and that ripples out into the creative sector.”
Part of the shift in design-awareness has meant a closing of the gap between design and fine art. Artists are presenting their work in ways which increasingly reflect an awareness of design, and designers are making objects to exhibit in an art context.
Naomi McIntosh with ‘Potential’, her work for Ash Rise. Photo Ben Addy
Ash Rise, an exhibition organised by the Scottish Furniture Makers Association at the John Hope Gateway, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, showcases just this kind of crossover, with 10 furniture makers and 10 artists and designers making work with wood from trees felled because of the invasive disease ash dieback. Furniture by Angus Ross, Sam Chinnery and the Marchmont Workshop will sit alongside sculptural work by Duke Christie, Richard Goldsworthy and Naomi McIntosh.
McIntosh trained as an architect, then undertook a Masters in Design and now makes intricate sculptures using fine strips of steam-bent wood. She said the same design concerns are present in all her work: the relationship of the body to space, structure, movement and materials. “How to tell a story is key to all my work, whether architecture, jewellery or what I do now.
“I don’t make furniture, I work with tiny, delicate pieces of wood, but they have to be steambent in the same way. I think the boundary between the two has broken down. There are 20 makers in Ash Rise and we are all working in different ways, but also in the same ways because we are all woodworkers.”
“How to tell a story is key to all my work, whether architecture, jewellery or what I do now”– Naomi McIntosh, sculptor
Angus Ross, ‘Clova’ chair, for Ash Rise exhibition
