Report on design for Glasgow Development Agency, 1994

Glasgow Development Agency (GDA) wants quickly and visibly to help Glaswegian firms improve the calibre of their design.

To give a flavour of the ‘Report on design for Glasgow Development Agency, 1994‘, here is the first section republished. The full PDF copy of the report can be opened and downloaded by clicking on the link below.

A worldwide trend toward local intervention in product design

GDA wants to see Glaswegian firms implement design programmes which are not just cost-effective and distinctive, but which can really help move Glasgow into the realm of ‘advanced industrial’ cities. Many of these programmes will be programmes of product design, conducted by local manufacturing companies. In adopting them, Glasgow will not be alone.

Of all the different disciplines of design, product design, in partnership with technology and marketing, has done the most to move city-based firms into an ‘advanced industrial’ arena of improved trade performance. As early as 1986, Christopher Lorenz, management editor of the Financial Times, identified a number of fundamental reasons why managers of manufacturing companies needed to take product design seriously. Here, updated for 1994, are the ‘Big Picture’ reasons why manufacturers in Glasgow, as elsewhere in Scotland and indeed worldwide, can expect product design to continue to play a major role in their future success:

Table 1.1 Eight agents of change which make product design vital to competitiveness

1. Product / market maturity: the need to differentiation in the product
2. Fragmentation of markets / users calls for differently designed products
3. Tougher competition – especially from the more quality conscious Far East
4. Impossibility of sustaining competitive advantage by technology alone
5. Shortening of some product lifecycles, slower obsolescence in others
6. The demand for shorter ‘time to market’ in New Product Development (NPD)
7. Globalization: designing ‘world’ products which nevertheless meet local needs
8. The call to cut costs in manufacture and increase value for money in the product

Source: Lorenz (1986), Henley Centre

The significance of design to business and thus to urban competitiveness has been recognised both by governments and by cities. In May 1993, Japan’s MITI announced that, next to confronting a ‘new breed of end-users’, design in general and Japan in particular had above all to develop fine products among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and ‘regional design centres to act as the nucleus in promoting regional economic growth’ (MITI, New design promoting strategies for the changing needs of our time, 12 May 1993). From Bremen, Barcelona and Milan to New York City, Toronto and Vancouver, support for design has become a growing part of urban economic development. More and more of the world’s cities boast Design Centres, as well as public/private partnerships to research, publicise and celebrate design.

The Danish Design Council, Copenhagen; the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation, Stockholm, and the International Design Centre, Nagoya, show how focussed but directed public intervention in design can play a positive role in boosting the competitiveness of city-regions (see Appendix 1 for more on these three). Add to this the April 1994 formation by Scottish Enterprise of Scottish Design Ltd, a company which will dispense product design advice to Scots companies and spread awareness of design in Scottish education, and the trend toward a particularly Scottish intervention in design matters has already proved inescapable. In this sense, the question facing GDA is not whether to sharpen Glaswegian and Scottish expertise and practice in design, but how.

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To open and download a PDF copy of the full report, click on this Report on design for Glasgow Development Agency, 1994 link.