Transcript
Lord Michael Bichard
Good morning. Gosh, that’s better than I used to be able to achieve at the University but good morning and welcome. My name’s Michael Bichard and I’m loosely chairing today and was until recently the chairman of the Design Council.
This is an amazing audience and we’re really so pleased that you’ve been able to make it today. We know it’s a special day because the toilets have been redecorated, David Kessler, our Chief Executive, has got a new suit, and more than that, he’s wearing a tie so, you know, we know this is something really special.
But I wonder what you were thinking as you made your way here this morning. I mean, were you excited at the prospects of hearing so many outstanding speakers? Were you keen to make sure that your particular voice was heard? Or were you actually regretting the fact that you decided to give up a day to yet another conference?
Well, if it was the last then let me reassure you that if this is just another conference then we will have failed. For a start, this is the first of what will be a series of design summits, this one in partnership with Biz and we’re very grateful for their firm support for today. We’re probably going to have maybe three a year like this and we’re going to bring together people from business, people from the design community, the civil society and government.
And we want these summits to think about how design can step up and play a stronger role in economic growth, which is today’s theme, in social renewal and in sustainability. And we want these summits to discuss how design can be better embedded in government policy and simply how we can better realize the huge potential of our fantastic design sector.
We want this particular summit to be, well, we want it to be a day when we genuinely tap into the creative talent that we’ve assembled here. And when I use the term creative talent, I’m not just talking about people in the design community, I’m talking about the creativity we have in business, the creativity we have in our civil society and government too.
We want it to be a day for genuinely generating ideas, a day when we can focus on how the design community and design can make a difference by driving growth in the economy, a day for setting aside our natural scepticism – well, you know, to a degree – and assuming that government will listen to what we have to say.
And we want it to be a day, for those within the design sector, for avoiding our natural tendency to feel that the world just doesn’t understand us and if we just communicated a bit better, they would. As most of you will know, or many of you will know, I’m not a designer. I’m not even, any longer, chairman of the Design Council.
But I am totally convinced that design is key to achieving growth in the economy and, by the way, it’s key to improving our public services and so reducing the deficit. But – and it may be difficult for many here to believe – not everyone accepts that yet and we need to provide policymakers in particular with some strong, focused answers to some pretty crucial questions if they are going to get it.
Not unreasonably, they want to know, just how can business best use design to stimulate growth? How can design help to commercialise our research base? How can design of the built environment create jobs and wealth? How can we best make design available and relevant to small and medium-sized business? And can we improve on the current innovation policy and do we have ideas on how government can achieve better value and greater innovation through public procurement?
I hope together today we can provide some of the answers to those difficult but important questions because this isn’t a debating forum about theories, still less is it a therapy group. It’s an opportunity to provide some practical answers to policymakers and, as I say, hope that they are listening.
There are a few logistics I need to get out of the way. There is today an online audience. It’s a big online audience, actually, and we want to involve them in the discussion as we work our way through the day. And I’m not sure where their representative is but I know she’s here and she’ll have a yellow card when she wants to make a contribution.
I want to make a plea in particular to speakers and chairs to try and keep to time. I know we always say that but it really is a jam-packed day. We’ve got people coming and going and we do need to keep to time so, again, we will be offering you help with yellow cards and red cards and finally we’ll throw you out.
Design Council staff are here to help, as ever. And can I ask particularly – and this is a serious request – this is a private conversation this morning and we’d be grateful; no photos and can you keep, obviously, phones on silent. This is a conversation between ourselves, particularly this morning. It’s a conversation that we’re able to hold because we’ve had some fantastic support from all sorts of people, not least Jaguar Land Rover, Wired and the Gatsby Foundation. And I want to say a big thank-you to them at the outset.