UWIC DFIM - Nick Gerrard

E&PP - Design Partners

Of the UK design industry’s 4.6 billion pound turn over in 2005 0.5 billion was generated by overseas income. The statistics are quite startling but maybe, given Britain’s history of exporting innovations and ideas; from William Morris to the telephone today’s designers are just following in a proud tradition. The UK government is certainly aware of the success and huge potential for growth in this area. Through the UK Trade and Investment Department they set up ‘Design Partners’ in 1999, an organisation dedicated to coordinating efforts to sell British design abroad. Design Partners have a wide ranging set of plans to maximize export potential and provide as much assistance as they can to new and established exporters. They research foreign markets and share that information with UK industry, help to forge partnerships with relevant companies abroad, offer long and short term programmes of support and provide an opportunity for liaison between government and industry where new legislation or support may be required. They support two fields of UK design, described on their website as ‘Design Makers’ which covers product design in all its forms and ‘Design Consultants’ which includes print and new media. An example given of the a successful design export transaction was in Bionic Media’s winning of a contract to provide a complete branding strategy and range of graphics for ‘The Pepsi Chart Show’ which was intended to be shown across Latin America. They worked with the production team in Miami and the producer of the channel set to air the show.

Digging a little deeper I found a discussion on merits of Design Partners on the Design Council’s website as it had arisen during one of their meetings. The consensus was that the sheer breadth of the organisation was as much a strength as a weakness, in that while bringing together such a broad range of different companies has been very beneficial for the profile of UK design abroad there had been difficulties in reconciling the priorities of Design Partners and those of the actual design companies. For example some of the regions and markets identified by the organisation as important for British design to move into were unattractive to the companies who would actually have to work there. They also criticized Design Partners for being unrepresentative of the whole industry as ‘in-house’ design teams were not represented by the group. The point was raised that Design Partners is only one of fourty similar ‘UK Trade Partners’ and greater collaboration with these other organisations could reap rich rewards for all concerned.

posted by nick_gerrard @ 9:25 AM