Design Week asked me for a comment on the changes to the Design Council:

On first impressions, it doesn't look so bad. Allowed to continue to exist and a report that highlights the Council's successes and good return on investment. The loss of NDPB (not Quango, please) status seems ok given the close relationship still promised with BIS and other departments. So just a bit leaner and smaller and more focused.

But I think the reality is that the Design Council has been radically reduced in power and influence and has lost the ability to roll up it's sleeves and makes things happen. Here's why:

We have to look at the wider context to see how many of it's highly succesful channels have been damaged or removed as well. The two great successes in the last 10 years have been the rolling out of Designing Demand across the nation through the network of RDAs and the role in developing exciting, tangible, innovative solution busting projects with funding directly from government departments such as Health, Education and Crime. These have created proof points and real behaviour change.

But the RDA's have gone and Designing Demand is being closed down around the country. Projects from Government departments are not going to be funded, no matter the successes so far.

The new Design Council is painted in the report as a charity that will advise more but do less. As an organisation that was inexpensive and punched massivly above it's weight, I fear it will be a shadow of it's former self. It will even have to loose it's building, which serves as an excellent living example of how design effects how we work, collaborate and share knowledge. Countless organisations hold their events there and come away thinking differently, the building is an important part of the interaction with the Design Council.

In a leaner, cut down government, I could see a case for an expanded, more active Design Council, but that consideration was never on the table. There are some good points in the report which the Council has said it will act on. I hope they do create a more robust understanding and relationship with the design community, who seem to want it to be some sort of campaigning force for the industry but forget that it was always set up for businesses, to help them succeed, and now public sector too.

I believe the Design Council will rally and be very creative and determined to succeed but I remain hugely dissapointed at the report and government's inability to see the bigger picture. Design helps business and public sector be more successful. Our global competitors copy the Council and place deisgn high on their strategies for success, just as we lower it in ours. I fear the Design Council, whose funding was a relatively small amount used to such great effect, will be whittled away, possibly to the pont of invisibility.

The head of an international design organisation emailed this week to say that this was bad for the whole world. That may seem over the top but I don't think it is. This historic UK organisation, showcasing creative excellence and pushing the very nature of design that the Design Council represents and evangelises is seen as being weakened and the ripples are felt further than Bow Street or Whitehall.