A collaboratively designed cohousing scheme, created from low-energy passive design principles and an innovative custom-build strategy.
Marmalade Lane, Cambridge
Mole Architects 2019.
image: David Butler © Mole Architects
Take a look around you.
Everything you see has been designed. Your coffee cup, jacket, office, phone... this booklet.
From architecture to fashion, products to graphics, transport to technology, it all begins with design.
Design shapes the world, and our lives are made better –or worse – by it.
Design is at the heart of innovation and reimagining better ways to do things.
Brompton bicycle, winner of the Design Council Prince Philip Designers Prize 2009.
Design plays an instrumental role in shaping the world we live in; transcending across all sectors including automotive, aerospace, architecture and consumer goods.”
Rt Hon Lucy Frazer KC MP
Today, the challenges facing Britain are immense. As well as being a force for good, design has been part of the problem. Throw-away products are clogging our landfills and depleting our natural resources.
Roads designed to cut through communities are driving emissions and social isolation. Poorly designed services are excluding communities and undermining trust.
image: iStock.com / Panasbordin Pimsin
Single-use plastic items need to be redesigned.
image: Fairphone/Closing The Loop
E-waste – mobile phones being collected for processing in Ghana. In 2022, the UK generated the second largest amount of e-waste per capita in the world.
Design can deliver the solutions. Design is a critical enabler of innovation. It turns ideas into action and uses applied creativity to solve problems. Designers work with users to ensure innovation works for people. Harry Beck’s iconic tube map radically simplified the complex underground system into a clear and comprehensible chart, improving journeys since 1933 and inspiring transport diagrams around the world ever since.
The London underground tube map. Designer Harry Beck rationalised a complex system to produce a simple, easy to follow tool. 1960.
image: iStock.com / JacobH
Batch.sheild an efficient, reusable 3D-printed face shield produced within a month of lockdown by additive design studio Batch. Works and healthcare design studio Cellule in April 2020.
image: Batchworks
The iPhone was co-designed for Apple by British designer Jony Ive.
Design is crucial whatever you do in the United Kingdom, whether you’re in business, the civil service or education.”
Lord Bilimoria
UK design industries are world leading.
For over a century, design has been a British success story: Sir Jony Ive’s iPhone, Zaha Hadid’s stadiums, Vivenne Westwood’s clothing, Chris Van der Kuyl’s video games, and James Dyson’s vacuum cleaners.
Design contributes £97.4 billion a year in GVA – that’s almost the value of the hospitality and real-estate sectors combined.
And the design economy is growing at twice the rate of the UK economy overall.
For every £10 of UK exports, £1 comes from design.
Design industries will help power the shift to a prosperous green economy.
1 in 20 of us work in the design economy, with 1 in 7 of us relying on design skills as a part of our jobs. Design skills are prized across the economy. 77% of designers work in nondesign industries such as accommodation and retail.
This is because designers apply customer or citizencentered approaches to creativity and invention to ensure more successful outcomes.
But skills shortages, particularly for skills like circular and low-carbon design, are severe. And there has been a 68% decline in the number of Design and Technology GCSE students in the last decade.
The government must repair the talent pipeline and resource designers to upskill for the green transition.
image: Matter Studio
Product design development at creative design & innovation studio Matter.
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
image: All rights and accreditation: Pattern Project 2023
Pattern cutting at The Pattern Project, a network of neighbourhood micro textiles factories for ondemand production.
The revolution in wind energy will create jobs for engineers, scientists and designers.”
Rachel Reeves, MP
Flourishing digital design industries are driving growth in Belfast and Reading, while product design expertise is powering industrial renewal in Tameside and East Renfrewshire.
Design strengths build on local histories, industries and specialisms that help forge a sense of place and identity. And designers bring great value to the places they are a part of.
From providing meaningful employment to creating affordable and beautiful homes, or co-developing more empathetic local public services.
Some places need more leadership and investment to harness this potential.
Design should be at the heart of driving jobs, skills and regional prosperity across the UK. Designers bring immense value to the places they are a part of.”
Andy Haldane
Chief Executive of the RSA, Former Bank of England Chief Economist, & Head of the Levelling Up Taskforce
The climate and nature crisis is the greatest threat humanity has faced.
Design gives us the power to repair and restore our world: from retrofitting buildings to developing infrastructure for electric transport, improving products’ energy efficiency, and creating a secure, circular economy.
Designers can make every day environmentally positive choices affordable, inclusive, and attractive for citizens.
The Government needs to align regulations with environmental targets to ensure a level playing field for sustainable design pioneers, and invest in design-led green innovation which can easily commercialise and bring down the cost of sustainable living.
Sustainable development demands good design. We won’t win the battle against climate change unless we design the solutions.”
Lord Deben Chairman of the Climate Change Committee and Design for Planet 2022 speaker
The Design Council has been the UK’s National Strategic Advisor on design since 1944, when it was founded by Winston Churchill’s government. Then, design helped to transition the UK from a wartime economy to a consumer society.
Today, design needs to help us fast-track the transition from a consumer society to a sustainable society.
Design is an incredibly powerful tool. Whatever challenges matter most to you, design can help.
From levelling up the country to forging the green transition, boosting productivity to driving inclusion. We are here to support you.
If you would like to explore how design impacts the things you care about, and how it might be part of the solution, we would be delighted to talk.
Minnie Moll, Chief Executive of the Design Council
Minnie.moll@designcouncil.org.uk
designcouncil.org.uk
