Design Council in partnership with the Greater London Authority, London Office of Technology & Innovation and CUSSH Cat Drew, Melissa Bowden, Sandy Tung, Catherine Glossop & Ahmad Bismillah Back in April 2020, Design Council sent a short document to national and local Government setting out how design could help create…

In response to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ White Paper, this blog post explores how design can support the Levelling Up agenda Frederik Weissenborn, Senior Programme Manager, Design Council Yesterday, the government published its long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper, which sets out a plan to improve opportunities…

Design thinking tools and methodologies help address challenges relating to physical activity Lesley Gulliver, Darren Evans, Melissa Bowden, Simran Chadha, Sport England The Ideas to Action programme, delivered by Design Council and supported by Sport England, with funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, was launched to help some of…

In 2019 transportation became the highest contributor to the UK’s carbon emissions, comprising 27% of our total carbon usage annually. And despite improvements to our vehicles and transport systems, transport use has increased over the last 30 years, meaning we have not yet reduced its environmental impact. In fact, it’s…

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ So wrote Charles Dickens, Victorian serialist and general caricature of nineteenth century figures, in opening ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. The novel was set in the 1790s to the tumultuous upheaval of the French Revolution tearing through country’s…

This is the second year that we’ve been a proud partner of the Festival of Place, and sole sponsor of The Pineapple Awards, the celebration of the best of placemaking, shaping and … shaking up. It’s a refreshing twist on conventional property conferences which is why we love it, and…

Written by Cat Drew — our Joint Interim Chief Executive. Although it’s not quite the end, one of my highlights of 2020 is a colleague saying that our awayday was the best they had ever been to — despite it being a whole day (almost) through a screen. That, in…

Written by Cat Drew & Laura Williams, with Jon Flint, Dr Makayla Lewis & Phillippa Rose 2020 will be remembered for one major thing, but one of the side effects of the pandemic was supercharging our reliance on digital, and the data and machines that drive it. And continuing a…

We believe that design needs to reflect the diversity of the world it shapes. Our national, published research shows that many people working in the design economy do not sufficiently represent the people they are designing for. …