Donkey Kong 2 scaled model: January 2009

All text is from Design council and can be found at:http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/Live-Issues/

What’s the issue?

If the UK is going to have a competitive economy driven by innovation, business and creative disciplines need to be brought closer together. And the place to do that is early, within the education system.

That way, tomorrow’s companies will be run by managers who understand creativity and creative specialists who understand the business environment.

But what would that kind of education look like?

In the Cox Review, former Design Council chairman Sir George Cox proposed a number of ways in which higher education could play a bigger role in ensuring that designers, entrepreneurs and business leaders speak the same language.

* Universities and small businesses should work together more closely.
* Higher education courses should better prepare students to work with and understand other specialists.
* Centres of excellence should be established, where multi-disciplinary courses combining management studies, engineering and technology and the creative arts are taught. taken from http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/Live-Issues/What-might-an-education-system-that-brought-business-studies-and-creativity-together-look-like/

The creative industries play an important role in the UK – we have the largest creative sector in the EU and our creative industries accounted for 7.3 per cent of total UK Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2005.

And recent research by NESTA finds that 34% of the creative workforce is employed in non-creative sectors, making creative activities as embedded in the economy as financial services.

So far so good. But the government is keen to ensure that the creative industries– which, in addition to design, cover advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, and television and radio – reach their full potential.

As emerging economies like the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) grow and their rates of production increase, the need for design to differentiate will rise as well.

But are emerging economies using design strategically enough, and if they are, does this pose a threat to UK designers? Or does it present opportunities for our design industry?
Facts and figures about the current state of design in emerging economies:

* The economies of the four BRIC countries now account for 35% of the world’s economic growth.
* India has a national design policy which aims to produce 5,000-8,000 designers a year through investment in new design centres. Design is expected to be worth one per cent of India's GDP, an estimated £56million, by 2009.
* China has plans for its creative sector to grow by 20 per cent year on year. The country opened its first specialised design school 23 years ago: now it boasts more than 400 and a vast new design facility has opened at Guangzhou’s Academy of Fine Arts to teach up to 3,000 industrial design students.
* Just behind BRIC come the TVT countries - Thailand, Vietnam and Turkey - which have a combined population of 230million and a collective GDP of £305billion

‘What is impressive – and worrying – about the emerging economies is not where they stand today but how they are positioning themselves for the future’, says Sir George Cox, Design Council Chairman, in the Cox Review of Creativity in Business.

Crucially, says Cox, ‘The UK has a window of opportunity.' While other countries seek to replicate our existing strengths (such as awareness of consumer rights and needs, brand focus), the UK can continue making its creative processes stronger. UK businesses must consider how countries like China, India and Russia have benefited from design in order to understand how the UK's creative economy can withstand competition from these emerging economies and take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the global marketplace.

For UK designers worried that emerging economies will take all their work, the Cox Review cites Finland as an example of how design and investment in R&D can help a nation’s economy withstand competition and become a worldwide design and manufacturing leader.

UK design – and UK designers – are highly valued around the world. But do we have the right skills to to help the economy stay competitive into the future?

After all, competition is intensifying as emerging economies are focusing fresh attention on developing creative capabilities to match their low-cost manufacturing.

In addition, rapid social and economic change is likely to put designers under increased pressure. As an industry, design can’t afford to rest on its laurels.

The Design Council is working with Creative and Cultural Skills – the sector skills council for the creative industries. Together, we’ve set up the Design Skills Alliance, an expert group of design employers and educators.

They have spoken to more than 4,000 designers, design managers, teachers and students to find out how design education could better meet their needs. The Good Design Practice campaign has evolved from their responses. It will help designers and design teachers by:

* Creating a Design Mark for primary and secondary schools who can demonstrate excellence in design teaching and learning
* Encouraging design univeristies to offer business study modules and business MBAs to learn about design
* Setting up a mentoring scheme for designers to meet other creatives from different disciplines and at different stages in their careers
* Improving access to the best professional development resources by promoting new and existing courses
* Creating a Designers Business Knowledge Base, an industry-led set of guidelines of best practice in key areas of design business
* Providing the latest information about the design industry and its skills needs compiled by analysing specially-commissioned and existing research to promote the benefits of professional skills for all designers.

all from http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/Live-Issues/

the below text is taken from: http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.242

Blog: Creative Transitions
Training Creativity
By Sian Prime , 25 Aug 2008, 12:00 GMT

When I was interviewed for the post of Training and Development Manager for the Creative Pioneer Programme I can remember being asked whether I thought that creatives required particular approaches or training techniques. I answered very emphatically “No”, and while I still stand by that answer, my answer is now "No, but".

It is always dangerous to generalise, of course, but the "but" rests for me in the area of self-confidence versus self-belief. By this I mean that the creative people I have worked with all have strong self-belief in the medium that they work in, their skills as practitioners, their level of ambition and the impact they want and feel able to make with their work. Their confidence that they will be able to achieve that is often very low, this leads to a very strong tension, and can lead to paralysis – it is better to do nothing than fail. Overcoming this is the key and tends to be the focus of much of my training delivery. I have tackled it through developing a coaching style of delivery and very often just through the simple technique of "naming" it.

In developing training programmes, briefing other trainers and delivering material myself I have learnt about and used lots of different approaches, and I am sure most trainers have incorporated elements of these in to their work: Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences or Five Minds for the Future; Myers Briggs Type Indicator and Honey and Mumford. This is of course, about being a professional and ensuring you create a dynamic programme suitable to the group you will be working with.

The question I return to when preparing material for any group is "what is the edge" – where is there a lack of confidence, or comfort, what needs to be developed here and to support the amelioration of this edge. When working in other sectors, the "edge" might be to develop a more creative approach to problem solving, or develop the confidence of the staff in their creative skills – in which case my approach will include a lot of creative training techniques. When the "edge" is commercialising creativity, building a business around their own talent, having the confidence to charge people for a creative product or service, negotiation with venues, galleries, clients, then the "edge" about understanding the client’s needs and how to reassure them of the positive benefits of their work. So my approach will be to develop the skills of empathy, how to communicate in a different language to their aesthetic one. The need to bring the audience/customer/client/buyer in to the creative process and to find ways to develop a relationship with them, rather than insist on one is key, and an aspect I spend a lot of time on when developing business skills.

The following have been useful techniques to ensuring that the materials are appropriate make a strong impact and take the participants on the transformative journey they have engaged with, or simply teach them some necessary facts and approaches:

* Relevant, applicable now and credible.
* Many creative people have a very particular “working memory”, engaging with this is key and there are a range of techniques that can support this:
o Multi-sensory approaches to learning – ensuring the auditory, visual and kinaesthetic elements reinforce one another;
o Ensuring that they timetable, agenda and learning objectives are very clear so the structure is articulated and unambiguous – the structure can then allow for creativity to take place;
o Ensuring that the participants become, if they are not already, aware of the way they learn and can influence the programme’s delivery style and – more importantly – transfer this to other situations;

* Creative people often use “global logic and reasoning strategies” so it is may be important to capture the whole picture, and relate every element clearly to that, rather than working through a process in a set of sequential steps. To support that I use:
o Mindmapping – I often present training sessions through a mindmap rather than a more linear powerpoint – allowing participants to see the whole journey as well as the individual elements;
* Encouraging participants to feel more comfortable with "closure"; in Myers Briggs terms many artists and designers tend to be “perceivers” – they are great at generating alternatives, at being flexible and will tend to prefer to keep their options open. Developing the preference to create and respond to deadlines and to make a decision quickly has been an important element to include.