Post by Matthias Weber

Design Council was founded in December 1944 through Churchill's initiative: "to support Britain's economic recovery. The Council of Industrial Design had the founding purpose of promoting 'by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry'." I would argue that Design Council had quite an impact on the overall development of the design field in the UK, including product, fashion, graphic design, service design. The impact of their work should not be underestimated, including the RED report series by Hilary Cottam and team which laid out some of the foundations for transformation/systemic design and Mariana Mazzucato and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose's framework for mission-oriented innovation policy. All developed out of the UK. Nesta (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts was founded in 1998. It "was conceived in part thanks to the vision of Oscar-winning director David Puttnam, who recognised the UK’s failure to capitalise on its globally recognised talent for innovation and invention. The country was, in short, bad at turning inventions into marketable applications."). Today, Nesta not only offers funding but a broad set of freely available methods and toolkits. So far, Germany neither had the ambition nor the vision to systemically foster design as a discipline or innovation in a structured way. I fondly remember critical debates with Sebastian Olma et al during Digital Bauhaus Summit in 2014. And a few things have changed for the better, I will gladly acknowledge this including DigitalService Work4Germany #UpdateDeutschland w/ ProjectTogether. But I am still missing a bold, comprehensive approach for Germany, as a large country within the European Union. I am not saying design will save us all, I am not looking for some sort of 'innovation theatre' either. I just believe we could fare much better. Now that we are going through one crisis after another I wonder: it would be the right time to finally build these ambitions, wouldn't it? What do you think? Wolfgang Schmidt Julia Lohmann Debbie Blume Dan Hill Zeynep Falay von Flittner Philipp von der Wippel Martin Jordan Kay Meseberg Joice Biazoto Sebastian Olma Mads Pankow Andy Polaine Peter Benz Prof. Frank Jacob Kira Tschierschke Sean Loomis Milia Seyppel Henrike Schlottmann The Innovation in Politics Institute Creative Bureaucracy Festival Helén Marton Harald Neidhardt Valerie Mocker Inga Wellmann Anissa Carrington Karo Berndt Ninnaya Nilamann #industrialdesign #graphicdesign #design #innovation #capacity #systemicdesign #strategicdesign #systemtssthinking #germany