I really wanted to like it. I wanted to take it to heart. After all, it’s almost within walking distance of home, and in 2024 it has been hosted in a factory which I visited on a school trip around 1990, whilst it was still in operation. But 2024’s Dundee Design Festival reinforces the impression I took from its previous iterations that “design” is a clique controlled by a handful of gatekeepers.
Dundee Design Festival suffers from many of the same issues that the V&A Tartan exhibition did, and which magazines like The Skinny buy into, too. Their view is that “design” is primarily the production of craft objects by recent graduates from the Scottish art schools. “Designers” are a self-selecting group who work individually, or in tiny collectives, producing quirky one-offs. Somehow, airliners, cans of beans, cars, computer software, vacuum cleaners, mobile phones and buildings aren’t “designed” in a way those gatekeepers can acknowledge.
There’s no interactive software or UX design, no architecture, no computer games, no sound design, no vehicles, and nothing mass-produced or popular at the Dundee Design Festival. Some of what’s on show here is bad art rather than design, and there’s a powerful emphasis on the identity and individuality of the designer, rather than the needs of end users. That’s the wrong way round. I counted several dozen mentions of “self expression” – but only one or two about ergonomics or functionality or user needs.
Dundee Design Festival in 2024 is a glaring lost opportunity. Within a few miles of here, you could have visited several computer games companies such as Tag Games or Rockstar North. NCR employ 500 people in Dundee, many of whom are working on interface design for sophisticated electronics. Rautomead design high-tech continuous metal casting machines. Wemyss Textiles and Strathmore Woollens design textiles. OSD-IMT are naval architects who design ships. Design is integral to them all, as it was to Michelin, which once designed and manufactured car tyres in Dundee.
What’s on show at the DDF isn't inclusive, either. I didn’t see any design for people with physical disabilities, hearing or sight impairments. Similarly, given the prevalence of autism, dementia and other conditions, it would have been great to see how designers carried out research then worked with people who live with those conditions to improve their lives. That would have helped to demonstrate how design is crucial, how it can change lives for the better, and how it plays an integral part in creating a more equal and fairer society. Inclusivity is something architects and interior designers deal with every day.
Ironically, the Dundee Design Festival isn’t good on Dundee, either. Other than an A5 flyer, the festival doesn't acknowledge the history of its venue, the former Michelin plant at Baldovie which employed 1000 people until the start of the 2020’s. While local textile firms Halley Stevensons and Scott & Fyfe are mentioned in passing, we don’t discover anything about their design process, nor their products or production methods. Did you know that Halley Stevensons make all the waxed cotton for Barbour jackets? I knew that already, but there was nothing more to learn about it here. Nor was there anything about Dundee’s long history of furniture design and manufacturing, which included Thomas Justice, Francis East & Co., and East Brothers. The tradition continues today with firms such as JTC, Dovetail Industries and LamArt.
At the entrance to the festival, there was a display of “cassies” made from stone supplied by Denfind Stone at Monikie – but cassie setts were made from Aberdeenshire granite or Cunmont whinstone – so if outsiders are going to try to speak the Dundee vernacular, please ask a local to translate for you. Not me, because I'm no expert, but I do know that the so-called cassies here are actually the much larger “plennies” or slabs hewn from the Carmyllie flagstone beds which Denfind Stone has begun quarrying again. They join a rich vocabulary of Scots and Dundonian terms including the "pavey" or pavement, immortalised by Michael Marra's song, The Word on the Pavey. Then you have "cassies" or causeway paviors, "cundies" or road drains which derive from "conduit", "plennies" or stone paving slabs planed by the world's first stone planing machines which were invented at Carmyllie, and "pletties" or tenement landing slabs which derive from "platforms". Another missed opportunity to connect with local folk, by speaking their language.
A more universal issue is that the Dundee Design Festival concentrates on designer-makers, but largely ignores small, medium and large commercial companies based in Scotland which employ hundreds of design graduates from Scottish universities each year. I don’t understand why they’ve been ignored. Is this an expression of anti-capitalism, given the references to Marxist-feminist design in some for the exhibits? Is it a reaction against consumerism, against the mass-produced things that we all buy and use, because we can’t afford to fill our house with hand-crafted one-offs, even if we wanted to? Or this simply another example of the Scottish Cultural Cringe?
Rather than leaving on a total downer, I tried to be positive: Morton Young and Borland’s cascading lace sheers at the very back of the second hall were a subtly understated play on light. Ploterre (Rebecca Kaye) displayed an intriguing data-driven screenprint. Among the exhibits from other UNESCO Design Cities such as Osaka were genuinely good pieces of design, while Muirhead Leather's airliner seats were beautifully finished, and it was fascinating to discover the record-pressing plant which Jack White (of The White Stripes) has built in Detroit.
So it troubles me to write a negative review, because this festival should have been something positive for Scottish designers and architects. It should have been about the renaissance of manufacturing in Dundee, given the many millions of pounds spent trying to regenerate the Michelin site. It should have made an effort to connect with the place it's in. Instead, the Dundee Design Festival is not about design in Dundee. It has a completely different agenda which ignores most of what Dundee, and Scotland, designs and makes.
I wonder whether anyone will stand up to challenge the approach which the V&A Dundee and Dundee Design Festival have decided to take? They may be in Dundee, but they’re certainly not of Dundee.
