Meetings at the Design Council and the Parliamentary Group for Design

On Monday 27th July, Gisele and Anna went to London for meetings at the Design Council and the Parliamentary Group for Design. The objective of the trip was to discuss the best format for presenting policy recommendations, in order to ensure that the Policy Recommendation Booklets that we will be producing in cooperation with other SEE partners provide the best support for drafting design policy.

The first meeting was with Mel Taylor (Head of Knowledge & Research) and Sara El Nusairi (Head of Government Relations) at the Design Council. The meeting was an opportunity to gain an insight into effective methods of lobbying the government. Sara described how they are encouraging the government to adopt a more systematic approach to design policy and provided us with examples of policy submissions they had produced on various topics. Mel discussed her work on evaluating the impact of their design support programmes, which we are keen to include as a case study on the SEE library. The meeting gave us real food for thought on how to achieve our policy objectives.

Our second meeting was with Jocelyn Bailey, Manager of the Associate Parliamentary Group for Design and Innovation (APGDI), which is the leading advocate for design in Parliament. We learnt about some of the group’s projects including a series of recommendations to improve public procurement, which will be presented to Parliament in October. As Jocelyn will be preparing her own policy suggestions, she was able to give us insightful tips on what strategy would be best for presenting our booklets to policy-makers in the SEE partner regions.

Having done our research, we are looking forward to collaborating with the SEE partners in developing a blueprint for our first Policy Recommendation Booklet on ‘Integrating Creativity and Design into Regional Innovation Policy’.