Dear Friends
Scotland is a small nation on the periphery of a major trading block and at an exciting time in a wider world alive to change.
As visitors enjoying the Creating Industry Panel of our current exhibition will have confirmed, Scotland came late but lustily to the Industrial Revolution, partly on the back of political union and slave trading but significantly propelled by Enlightened thinking and an unrivalled Inventive capacity: Scots were there helping an empire reach peak performance.
Time and the tides have led to a realisation that the global push for product and services of past decades has been accompanied by a threat to the very soil and sea on which so much of that earlier progress depended. No one country survives in isolation yet each can take its part in a global redesign effort so all of us can walk more lightly on the earth.
With a renewed respect for Material and a Circular Economy perspective, Scotland is again leading enlightened thinking and an inventive approach to product and service design. Incorporating novel biocomposite, our Flax Skis made by Dundee graduate Jamie Kunka and featured in Our Linen Stories Panel: Sustaining Futures, are but one example.
In two weeks’ time we welcome you to our latest Twilight Talk about Design in a Sustainable Scotland. You can reserve your tickets and check out detail of all our events in November here. In a cannily repurposed building in central Edinburgh, we host four top notch panellists to debate what part material innovation and community can play in a global design regeneration for good.
With best wishes on behalf of all the team,
John Ennis
Journeys in Design Scotland
Courtesy of Designer Jamie Kunka