SEE at the European Year of Creativity & Innovation Third Flagship Conference

2009 is the European Year of Creativity and Innovation (EYCI). As part of this initiative, 27 Ambassadors have been appointed to support the EYCI objective of promoting policy debate on these issues. Last week the Ambassadors published their Manifesto recommending seven lines of action relating to design, education and the knowledge economy. To coincide with this launch, the European Commission Directorate-General for Education and Culture (D-G EAC) organised on 23-24th November, the EYCI Third Flagship Conference ‘Beyond the Crisis: Design for a Sustainable Future’.

Anna Whicher, Design Wales Research Officer, attended this event in order to collate research and best practice examples for the second SEE Policy Booklet ‘Bridging Design, Sustainability and Innovation in Regional Policy’. This is an output of the SEE project, which aims to lobby regional governments to incorporate design into their policy measures. SEE is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the INTERREG IVC programme.

The two-day event was opened by Odile Quintin, D-G EAC, who was keen to encourage horizontal cooperation between several Commission Directorate-Generals in order to bring design up the policy agenda. Highlights from the first day included the speeches from two of the EYCI Ambassadors, Erik Spiekermann, Designer, and Damini Kumar, Design Professor NUI Maynoot, who spoke animatedly about design thinking in diverse contexts.

The conference was also an opportunity for design stakeholders and policy actors to engage with one another. Anna used the event as an occasion to network with Commission officials in order to disseminate the first SEE Policy Booklet ‘Integrating Design into Regional Innovation Policy’.

On the Tuesday, the theme explored design thinking for sustainability in innovative organisations, processes and services. For the second SEE Policy Booklet, the most intriguing presentation was from Anne Stenros, Director of Design at KONE, who discussed design thinking as a “process between analytical and intuitive thinking”. Richard Hill, Managing Partner of EuroPublic, summed up the session by emphasising the need to “brand Europe as the place to create".

The next issue of the SEE bulletin, featuring an article on EU versus regional policy developments relating to design, will be published in January 2010. The second SEE Policy Booklet will be published in March 2010.

SEE Policy Booklet Launch

On the 9th November 2009, the SEE project launched its first Policy Booklet on Integrating Design into Regional Innovation Policy at the SEE workshop in Copenhagen. SEE is a network of eleven European partners working to lobby our national and regional governments to assimilate design and creativity into public policy. The project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the INTERREG IVC programme.

The SEE Policy Booklet presents an overview of innovation policy priorities in the SEE partner regions. These priorities were identified from national and regional policy documents and contrasted with the strategic priorities for innovation identified by the European Commission. From this comparative analysis six key issues emerged as common across the policy agendas:

- Innovation in Services
- Public Procurement
- Collaborative Clusters & Networks
- Lead Markets & Eco-innovation
- Intellectual Property Rights
- Broadening the Scope of Innovation

For each of these priorities, the SEE Policy Booklet outlines the drivers and obstacles for enhancing the performance of regional innovation policy, explores how design can be used to address the issue, provides illustrative case studies and puts forward policy proposals.

This is the first of four SEE Policy Booklets to be published between 2009 and 2011. An electronic copy of the booklet is available to download from the SEE website: http://seeproject.org/publications. If you would like to receive future SEE Policy Booklets please email info@seeproject.org.

SEE workshop in Copenhagen.

As lead partners in the SEE network we've spent the last two days in Copenhagen at the Danish Design Centre (one of the other 10 SEE network partners) hearing presentations and working on issues related to design and sustainability.

We realised several years ago that getting partners together to simply listen to speeches is not enough to make a network effective. So to make sure we all engage meaningfully with the issues being discussed we prepare a series of activities for the partners to work through, this time facilitated for us by the Bigger Picture from Denmark; who take an interesting approach to recording the proceedings.

The output from the workshop in Denmark will be a second policy booklet that provides guidance to policy makers on aspects of design related to sustainability. The first SEE policy booklet was launched earlier this month and addresses the link between design and innovation policy.

Helping to develop Design Support in Scotland.

Design Wales spent yesterday facilitating a workshop for key design stakeholders in Scotland. At the invitation of Scottish Enterprise we prepared a programme of activities for key stakeholders from the public, private and education sectors to explore the potential need, scope and objectives in developing a design support programme for the Scottish Enterprise region.

Scotland has a strong track record in running design related events, festivals and programmes and could have undertaken the workshop themselves; but Design Wales were brought in to initially provide an overview of the state of design support across Europe as a benchmark and then to prepare activities and facilitate a workshop to explore the potential for design support in the region.

The activities provided a framework for broad and in-depth discussion, which was captured on pre-prepared worksheets that will now be reviewed as the basis for a workshop report to be provided to Scottish Enterprise.

With a mixture of classic and modern architecture, Glasgow is always a pleasure to visit and yesterdays mild weather had plenty of people sitting outside cafes enjoying the sun -even if they were still in their coats. Pictured above: Glasgow City Chambers on George Square and the Clyde Arc Bridge.

Award for Design Wales client

Flying the flag for the UK at last nights Design Management Europe Awards (taking place during the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven) were two companies based in Wales; Nomad Wheelchairs (Aberaeron) and Contour Premium Aircraft Interiors (Cwmbran). Nomad was awarded the winner of the First time users of design Category and Contour received an honourable mention in the very competitive Large companies Category.
Design Wales has special pride in Nomad’s success for playing instrumental role in assisting in their design strategy. In no small part, the advice given by my former Design Wales colleagues Simon Chaytor, Lucy Richardson and Alan Mumby has been recognised by Jon and Mark Owen of Nomad, as well as the invaluable creative work of Elfen, Attic2 and Studio SDA. The DME Award is the first Award gained by Nomad since the two brothers started to work together on developing a new and desirable wheelchair. Their excitement and pride was tangible as at last their hard work and intelligent management have been awarded.
Congratulations!

Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven 17-25 October 2009

In their bid to become a World Design Capital 2012, the City of Eindhoven has shown its commitment to design with its showcase Dutch Design Week Festival. For Eindhoven design entrepreneurship has been targeted as a solution by the City to fill the vacuum left by the relocation of Philips manufacturing. However, the legacy of the Philips heyday is noticeable in the many huge factories left empty, as well as the history of innovation and technical capabilities.
With more than 250 events across 60 locations, the Dutch Design Week is an impressive event. It has taken place in Eindhoven every year since 2003.
Among the highlights of this year’s exhibitions are the Design Academy Graduation show and the Dutch Design Awards. I particularly liked the Paper Zoo exhibition, with very interesting conceptual creatures made of paper, a lot of creativity and clear conceptual thinking, At the Graduation show students were able to show interesting and challenging concepts, presented with functioning prototypes and well written brief justification of their ideas. Also impressive was the attendance to the exhibitions. The student show was buzzing even though it was a midweek morning.
Another fun element of the event’s infrastructure were the ‘design rides’, specially decorated taxis to transport visitors around the many design venues. Great service and good fun adding to the city’s creative atmosphere!
The Week’s key event was the Design Management Europe (DME) Award 2009 (following the DME Award 2008 which took place in Cardiff) on Thursday 22nd. The venue was one of the old Philips factories, the De Machinekamer in the Strijp-S. Being the decommissioned power station for the Philips Factory, the venue provided an authentic experience to the DME Award attendees.

SEE attended 1st European Innovation Summit!

In order to enhance the quality of the research presented in the SEE Policy Booklet, an output of the SEE project (co-financed as part of the INTERREG IVC programme), I attended the First European Innovation Summit held in Brussels on 13th and 14th October.

On the Tuesday morning I met our Belgium partner in order to find out about the new Flemish Innovation Policy being published this month as well as to discuss a case study on intellectual property rights, both of which will feature in the booklet. I also had the pleasure of meeting Prof. Mary McBride, Director of the Pratt Institute Design Management programme (New York) to moot the contribution of design to innovation in public policy and discovered the Catalyst Strategic Design Review.

In the afternoon from 14.00 until 18.30 I attended a series of three lectures focusing on ‘Innovation Policies and Practices Across Europe’ at the European Parliament as part of the First European Innovation Summit. The first panel, moderated by Claus Schultze, Director of the European Regions Research and Innovation Network, centred on the strategic role of the Regions in the European Innovation System. The second panel, moderated by Gernot Klotz, Director of Research and Innovation at the European Chemical Industry Council, discussed private sector participation in the innovation process; while the final panel, chaired by Andre van der Meer, Permanent Representative for the City of the Hague to the Institutions of the EU, centred on future EU innovation policy and concluded with insightful questions from the floor.

The event was a great success and enabled innovation practitioners and EU policy-makers to engage in dialogue. However, design as a strategic disciple for innovation and public policy did not feature on the agenda so the SEE Policy Booklet will be an opportunity to advance the debate.

Anna