[Music]
every morning on my way to work I step
on the graves of Robert and Andrew
pholis / buried beneath the pavement an
Ingram Street in 1752 these brothers
created what’s probably the world’s
oldest and it’s most famous design
school we now know it as the Glasgow
School of Art whose original purpose was
to transform the innovations of 18th
century industrial revolution into
useful products that consumers wanted to
buy and without the foulest brothers we
may have no Glasgow School of Art nor
design industries and no design led
companies like Apple and the UK would
have had a much less profitable
industrial revolution I’ve got much to
thank the pholis brothers for because
while and school taught me about it
taught about numbers it taught me about
words it didn’t teach me about images
about objects about environments or
about culture that invisible glue that
sticks us and our surroundings together
to create this thing that we call
civilization
my very first term at art school taught
me what 13 years of school did not it
taught me how to see and buy see I don’t
mean just look I’m talking about the
kind of vision that allows you to
penetrate the skin of the world to strip
back the layers of visual and verbal
material information and uncover the
motivation behind their creation and I
remember I will always remember the
first day I could see I was walking down
Renfrew Street and it felt like a veil
was lifting and I honestly felt like neo
in the matrix there mount and the volume
of information that was revealed to me
was utterly overwhelming and as I grew
accustomed to this new vision
I became quite angry because I realized
how much I had missed and I resolved to
use my design education to get really
good at understanding the world using
all of my senses and when I graduated
art school in 1984 I walked out of the
front door and entered a brave new world
while I had been enjoying the clashes
impromptu lunchtime gigs in the art
school Kathy Thatcher had come to power
there were a record three and a quarter
million people standing in the UK’s door
queues the miners were in strike and we
sat down in sake Hall Street in
solidarity with them the only prospect
of work was to employ ourselves which is
what we did while 5,000 miles away in
California the first Apple Macintosh
computers were rolling off the
production lines in 1986 I co-founded a
studio that designed logos for bands and
theatres and we sometimes called these
things brands but they weren’t really
brands they were just random bits of
communication visual and verbal flotsam
and jetsam bobbing along and the crest
of a vast looming wave this storm that
no one saw coming
the storm had been gathering for over
35,000 years since early humans first
started sketching animals in caves and
art school gave me a really useful
education we could analyze stuff we
could make stuff we could draw we could
also manipulate people to feel and to
behave in predictable waves in
predictable ways but we were just a
little tiny design studio we were in an
unconnected analog world and we had no
influence so as the first wave of this
communication storm hit we stared at our
Apple Macs playing with our lovely
software marveling at the
interconnectedness of the internet
blindly aware of this huge second wave
that was gathering just offshore and
this second wave was the multi
dimensional language called brand no
longer the lifeless analog label on a
can of cork this was the real thing the
industrialist
wet dream and the fastest way in history
to convert ideas into cash
unlike the 18th century Industrial
Revolution this new language extended
the designers territory can modifying
not only the things that we could see
here taste touch and smell but those we
could not every aspect of the invisible
cultural glue that bound us together and
friendships and families in communities
in nations would be teased apart
productized and monetized we uneducated
in the ways in which brands worked
unwittingly welcomed corporations into
our lives and they profited by serving
our hard wild need for comfort unfair
status in every conceivable way and no
one stood in their way our old-fashioned
governments and laws couldn’t keep up
with the currents of change and the
banks and the corporations disengaged
themselves from the physical world
anchoring their interest offshore
virtually for the pools of liquid cash
and the prophets were deepest I had my
first glimpse of hope brand actually
meant in Edinburgh zalto
I was on my way to a meeting near the
yet-to-be-built site of the Scottish
Parliament and it was early so I went on
a 15-minute stroll around the
construction site which was bounded by
this really tall wooden hoardings and
decorating the holdings were head and
shoulders portraits of schoolchildren
drawn by schoolchildren all over
Scotland they had been asked to draw
each other typically they had the the
Rome faces smiley mouth cartoon here but
one thing stopped me dead while they
couldn’t draw a face they could draw the
logo types of adidas LS Kappa Kumar Nike
and Reebok
and in this new era toddlers
unconsciously learn to speak brand being
smart humans they align themselves with
stuff that gives them a port they need
to get on in life whatever our age our
circumstances we crave brands that
increase our social or economic traction
social media thrives on this
constellation of brands that surrounds
our online profiles helping others
pigeonhole us and also pressuring us to
hang out with or to purchase and consume
higher value brands that further elevate
our position this is the brand game and
there’s no top wrong on the brand ladder
because new levels are added infinitely
brands can commodify anything water
words relationships experiences people
animals plants places love hate religion
disease and even death they are the
ultimate natural resource the require
only gray matter and a little bit of
designing to create their also immensely
powerful and school college university
will not prepare you to understand them
or control them brands are so successful
because they communicate deficit
devastatingly quickly across all
dimensions and they use all of our
senses simultaneously 90% of the
information we lead to our brains is
visual we are essentially visual
creatures we process images 60,000 times
faster than words and over 50% of our
brain capacity is involved in visual
processing but we are not taught to look
never mind see instead education
considers visual stuff to be art and
something that you do if you can’t do
stem subjects or something that you buy
if you’ve got too much money education
hasn’t actually caught up with 18th
century
nevermind the 21st century and it still
hasn’t got to grips with the concept of
design in this age of Apple 250 years
after the foulest brothers created their
prototype design school and by lagging
this far behind education has
inadvertently allowed global
corporations to groom us and future
generations of unwitting consumers who
won’t know how to judge if a thing is
good or bad in this world or in any
virtual world fake news fake handbags
fake friends
fake life who knows in just 10 short
minutes I can’t teach you to be a
designer but I can tell you how to
become a player and a leader in the
brand scape rather than a powerless fan
or follower of brands firstly you are
already an unconscious expert you have
spent your whole life knowing what to
buy where to go and who to stand next
secondly to become a brand player you
need to unlock your unconscious
expertise and you do this by slowing
down and unpicking the motivation for
wanting that thing you’re about to click
and Collect what’s the context within
which is displayed which brands does it
rub up against everything means
something so ask questions scratch its
surface better still shop without buying
anything and pick apart the visual
variables there’s a cool cultural layers
of the brands that you’re attracted to
thirdly you get from designing what you
take – and no experience is wasted if
you take time to think and think hard
learn to judge the integrity of a thing
how it’s made and the craft time and
effort that went into its production
develop your critical skills and be
objective about what you’re buying or
what you’re buying into if you can do
this it will give you power it will
give you power over corporate profits
and it will give you power over your own
lives when the foulest brothers closed
their eyes over two centuries ago they
couldn’t have imagined the part that
they played in creating a designed world
that was controlled by global brands so
you need to open all of your eyes learn
the brand game and rather than being
blind followers of browns let’s teach
yourselves to become empowered rad
players and enlightened brand leaders
thank you
you
every morning on my way to work I step
on the graves of Robert and Andrew
pholis / buried beneath the pavement an
Ingram Street in 1752 these brothers
created what’s probably the world’s
oldest and it’s most famous design
school we now know it as the Glasgow
School of Art whose original purpose was
to transform the innovations of 18th
century industrial revolution into
useful products that consumers wanted to
buy and without the foulest brothers we
may have no Glasgow School of Art nor
design industries and no design led
companies like Apple and the UK would
have had a much less profitable
industrial revolution I’ve got much to
thank the pholis brothers for because
while and school taught me about it
taught about numbers it taught me about
words it didn’t teach me about images
about objects about environments or
about culture that invisible glue that
sticks us and our surroundings together
to create this thing that we call
civilization
my very first term at art school taught
me what 13 years of school did not it
taught me how to see and buy see I don’t
mean just look I’m talking about the
kind of vision that allows you to
penetrate the skin of the world to strip
back the layers of visual and verbal
material information and uncover the
motivation behind their creation and I
remember I will always remember the
first day I could see I was walking down
Renfrew Street and it felt like a veil
was lifting and I honestly felt like neo
in the matrix there mount and the volume
of information that was revealed to me
was utterly overwhelming and as I grew
accustomed to this new vision
I became quite angry because I realized
how much I had missed and I resolved to
use my design education to get really
good at understanding the world using
all of my senses and when I graduated
art school in 1984 I walked out of the
front door and entered a brave new world
while I had been enjoying the clashes
impromptu lunchtime gigs in the art
school Kathy Thatcher had come to power
there were a record three and a quarter
million people standing in the UK’s door
queues the miners were in strike and we
sat down in sake Hall Street in
solidarity with them the only prospect
of work was to employ ourselves which is
what we did while 5,000 miles away in
California the first Apple Macintosh
computers were rolling off the
production lines in 1986 I co-founded a
studio that designed logos for bands and
theatres and we sometimes called these
things brands but they weren’t really
brands they were just random bits of
communication visual and verbal flotsam
and jetsam bobbing along and the crest
of a vast looming wave this storm that
no one saw coming
the storm had been gathering for over
35,000 years since early humans first
started sketching animals in caves and
art school gave me a really useful
education we could analyze stuff we
could make stuff we could draw we could
also manipulate people to feel and to
behave in predictable waves in
predictable ways but we were just a
little tiny design studio we were in an
unconnected analog world and we had no
influence so as the first wave of this
communication storm hit we stared at our
Apple Macs playing with our lovely
software marveling at the
interconnectedness of the internet
blindly aware of this huge second wave
that was gathering just offshore and
this second wave was the multi
dimensional language called brand no
longer the lifeless analog label on a
can of cork this was the real thing the
industrialist
wet dream and the fastest way in history
to convert ideas into cash
unlike the 18th century Industrial
Revolution this new language extended
the designers territory can modifying
not only the things that we could see
here taste touch and smell but those we
could not every aspect of the invisible
cultural glue that bound us together and
friendships and families in communities
in nations would be teased apart
productized and monetized we uneducated
in the ways in which brands worked
unwittingly welcomed corporations into
our lives and they profited by serving
our hard wild need for comfort unfair
status in every conceivable way and no
one stood in their way our old-fashioned
governments and laws couldn’t keep up
with the currents of change and the
banks and the corporations disengaged
themselves from the physical world
anchoring their interest offshore
virtually for the pools of liquid cash
and the prophets were deepest I had my
first glimpse of hope brand actually
meant in Edinburgh zalto
I was on my way to a meeting near the
yet-to-be-built site of the Scottish
Parliament and it was early so I went on
a 15-minute stroll around the
construction site which was bounded by
this really tall wooden hoardings and
decorating the holdings were head and
shoulders portraits of schoolchildren
drawn by schoolchildren all over
Scotland they had been asked to draw
each other typically they had the the
Rome faces smiley mouth cartoon here but
one thing stopped me dead while they
couldn’t draw a face they could draw the
logo types of adidas LS Kappa Kumar Nike
and Reebok
and in this new era toddlers
unconsciously learn to speak brand being
smart humans they align themselves with
stuff that gives them a port they need
to get on in life whatever our age our
circumstances we crave brands that
increase our social or economic traction
social media thrives on this
constellation of brands that surrounds
our online profiles helping others
pigeonhole us and also pressuring us to
hang out with or to purchase and consume
higher value brands that further elevate
our position this is the brand game and
there’s no top wrong on the brand ladder
because new levels are added infinitely
brands can commodify anything water
words relationships experiences people
animals plants places love hate religion
disease and even death they are the
ultimate natural resource the require
only gray matter and a little bit of
designing to create their also immensely
powerful and school college university
will not prepare you to understand them
or control them brands are so successful
because they communicate deficit
devastatingly quickly across all
dimensions and they use all of our
senses simultaneously 90% of the
information we lead to our brains is
visual we are essentially visual
creatures we process images 60,000 times
faster than words and over 50% of our
brain capacity is involved in visual
processing but we are not taught to look
never mind see instead education
considers visual stuff to be art and
something that you do if you can’t do
stem subjects or something that you buy
if you’ve got too much money education
hasn’t actually caught up with 18th
century
nevermind the 21st century and it still
hasn’t got to grips with the concept of
design in this age of Apple 250 years
after the foulest brothers created their
prototype design school and by lagging
this far behind education has
inadvertently allowed global
corporations to groom us and future
generations of unwitting consumers who
won’t know how to judge if a thing is
good or bad in this world or in any
virtual world fake news fake handbags
fake friends
fake life who knows in just 10 short
minutes I can’t teach you to be a
designer but I can tell you how to
become a player and a leader in the
brand scape rather than a powerless fan
or follower of brands firstly you are
already an unconscious expert you have
spent your whole life knowing what to
buy where to go and who to stand next
secondly to become a brand player you
need to unlock your unconscious
expertise and you do this by slowing
down and unpicking the motivation for
wanting that thing you’re about to click
and Collect what’s the context within
which is displayed which brands does it
rub up against everything means
something so ask questions scratch its
surface better still shop without buying
anything and pick apart the visual
variables there’s a cool cultural layers
of the brands that you’re attracted to
thirdly you get from designing what you
take – and no experience is wasted if
you take time to think and think hard
learn to judge the integrity of a thing
how it’s made and the craft time and
effort that went into its production
develop your critical skills and be
objective about what you’re buying or
what you’re buying into if you can do
this it will give you power it will
give you power over corporate profits
and it will give you power over your own
lives when the foulest brothers closed
their eyes over two centuries ago they
couldn’t have imagined the part that
they played in creating a designed world
that was controlled by global brands so
you need to open all of your eyes learn
the brand game and rather than being
blind followers of browns let’s teach
yourselves to become empowered rad
players and enlightened brand leaders
thank you
you
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