Six sexy cities in Scotland

Scotland now has style, or so the mantra goes. Gone are the days when the best commercial product a visitor could buy was a tin of shortbread fashioned into the shape of Mackintosh roses. Now an eager tourist can shop for jewellery, browse through work by Turner Prize-winning artists or even buy themself a carbon-neutral camper van. Look around a little, and Scotland's vaunted creative confidence is very much in evidence. From a slow-ish start, Scotland now has the greatest concentration of creative industries in the UK outside the South East of England.

Six Cities design festival was the first attempt to harmonise the work taking place in Scotland's major cities. Reflecting the different personalities of the six cities, its remit is to publicise the work of the creative industries, engage and educate the public by demystifying the processes behind design and raise Scotland's international profile by showcasing talent under the Six Cities rubric. First minister Jack McConnell launched the £3million festival, driven by his recognition of the dual cultural and economic importance of the creative industries in Scotland. He said: "An investment in creativity is an investment that pays dividends. The creative industries support thousands of Scottish jobs and generate billions of pounds for our economy."

As opposed to initiatives like Scotland with Style, which primarily focuses on fashion, Six Cities has an unashamedly high-brow agenda blended with its commercial imperatives. Without diluting the intellectual content of its contributors' work, it aims to engage the public with designers, architects and creative thinkers, asking and answering the question 'what does design have to do with me'? More than this though, it wants to bring together design and business under the guidelines set by the 2005 Design to Business programme, which promotes design as a integral tool for Scottish industry. The creative cash-cow, the festival suggests, is waiting to be saddled.

Scottish creatives have hardly been ignorant of the financial world, however. Trent Jennings, of eco-friendly furniture designers Blue Marmalade, recognises he is not "working in one of the international design hotspots," but due to the benefits reaped from the new ease of global communications, can exhibit and sell all over the world. The attraction of Six Cities for Jennings, who sells more work internationally than at home, is that it gives Scottish designers a "chance to show off a bit." They are masterminding a show called 3d in Edinburgh, at Princes Street Gardens, which will show anything designed in three dimensions, ranging from computer cases to jewellery. "This is the first time Edinburgh has had a show like this," he says, "we want to showcase the under-known or under-publicised designers in the capital."

The eyes of commentators and buyers are ineluctably drawn towards Glasgow and Edinburgh, the antagonistically entwined centres of Scotland. Six Cities challenges this by holding some of the best shows outside the two cities. Inverness for instance, a fastness so far-flung it does not even appear on The Skinny's distribution list, has a show of sustainable housing from the Finnish museum of Architecture. Aberdeen will have a show called Extreme North, which will show how architects and designers have adapted their work to the extreme climates of Northern Europe. Even world-renowned design firm Timorous Beasties are stepping outside their usual stomping ground, hosting a show called Peacock Amongst the Ruins in Dundee. Known globally for their provocative Glasgow Toile, which replaces the pastoral imagery of 18th century French wallpaper with scenes of destitution, drug-taking and architecture, they want to give the Dundonian public a whistle-stop tour through their slant on the history of interior design. They, more than any other company, typify the view of design as a buyable art, straddling the divide between commercial viability and artistic blue-sky thinking. Surely the sort of image the organisers of Six Cities want to portray to the world.

In an age of carbon cost juggling and consumer guilt, it makes sense to engage with what's happening in your own backyard. A situation like that of Blue Marmalade, where overseas customers buy more than domestic customers, seems not only undesirable, but scandalous. What Six Cities seems to be calling for is a situation where Scottish consumers buy locally designed products whilst at the same time those products are sold internationally. It's a noble goal, possibly even a naïve one considering the price difference between cheap, mass produced tat and well-designed products. But it's a start, and that's something.