Design Counts: Driving economic growth in the Philippines
“Imagine if the Philippines was a design leader not only in Southeast Asia but around the world. Imagine if communities in the Philippines were empowered through design to make better decisions for their municipalities. Imagine if every department in the Philippine government had a design team and took user-centered approaches to service and policy development.”
These are just some of the statements that encapsulate the objectives of WDO Promotional Member Design Center of the Philippines for the desired use of design across all areas of Philippine society. As the country’s only national agency for design, they have spent the better part of their 50-year history enhancing the Philippine design industry. More recently, they turned their efforts to map and analyze the use of design to inform the development of the Philippine’s first-ever National Design Policy.
As noted by the Design Center’s Executive Director Rhea O. Matute, “design is traditionally seen as a creative practice. However, new policy approaches are increasingly recognizing it as an important economic driver and an effective approach for national and local development.”
For just under two years from 2020 to 2022, Design Center worked in collaboration with several partners including the British Council, Nordicity, Bayan Academy and PDR International Centre for Design & Research as part of their flagship project Design Counts. Before this, data on design’s value in the Philippines was limited and so the organizations relied on both quantitative and qualitative tools to map the country’s design economy as a whole, as well as across nine select cities.
“Design Counts aims to nurture strategies that drive innovation, sharpen national competitiveness, and uplift the Philippine design economy to a global scale.”
The project focused on four main areas including profiling the design economy, measuring design’s economic contribution, mapping the design innovation ecosystem and developing strategic design policy recommendations. Through sector scoping, workshops, interviews, public consultations and surveys, a more comprehensive picture of the Philippines design economy slowly started to emerge.
In 2020, the Philippine design economy employed around 705,000 people and generated PHP 1.2 trillion (20.4 billion USD) in Gross Value Added (GVA). This accounted for 1.8% of the total national employment and 6.6% of the national GVA. Research demonstrated that Philippine design is dynamic and predominantly focused on image-making (35%) and object-making (19%). It is also urban, young and scalable, with 39% of organizations reporting that all their revenues came from their intellectual property (IP).
From these research insights, the team at Design Center was able to develop ten strategic design policy recommendations to enhance the design landscape in the Philippines (as highlighted in the visual below). These findings were also shared during a presentation at World Design Capital Valencia’s World Design Policy Conference in 2022, as well as in a report published in 2023.
“With data and successful case studies that provide both qualitative and quantitative data on the impact of design, leaders from business and even from the social, cultural, and political spectrum of society are starting to recognize design, not just due to a subjective preference but from an objective evidence-based point of view that make compelling arguments for design,” states Matute.
Before the end of 2024, Design Counts will enter its final stages. With the goal of launching the country’s National Design Policy this September, Design Center recently convened a Design Advisory Council to support their engagement with government departments and help integrate their ten recommendations into the formulation of the policy. The policy’s publication will mark the culmination of more than four years of work and the team at Design Center recognizes that “without such a national design policy, the tremendous social impact and economic value of Philippine design will continue to be underestimated, and its true potential will remain untapped.”
For countries looking to embark on a similar project to tap into the economic potential of design in their community, it’s important to start by making space for diverse experiences. Create platforms to encourage local designers to share their voice, as well as welcome external perspectives from across the global design community. In the end, the key is to not “be afraid of the strength of your design conviction and the gravitas of design ambition.”
To learn more about Design Center of the Philippines and their work, follow them on LinkedIn.
