Last week the Design Council published Design Economy 2026, the latest in over a decade of reporting on what design is worth to the UK economy. We get straight into the question that actually matters to anyone working in the industry: how useful, how relevant and how representative is it?
Brian comes in hot. Martin, who has been through all 57 data tables, spends a fair amount of the conversation trying not to sound like he’s in the pocket of the Design Council. Somewhere in between is what you need to know if you’re an in-house design leader hoping to take some numbers upstairs to back up the value of design. (Short version: be careful which one you pick.)
Inevitably, given the week, we end up on AI and whether we’re all doomed. We’d promised ourselves we wouldn’t get hung up on this one, but there was no avoiding it.
We do leave you with a very calming suggestion for the weekend.
Mentioned in the episode:
Design Economy 2026 - https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/design-economy/
Design Business Association and the Design Effectiveness Awards
Forrester’s Total Economic Impact of IBM Design Thinking
Oli Mival’s integration of OpenAI into Picsart for natural language co-working within an Agentic workflow - https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live-1-in-the-api/#picsart
Kevin Lee & Mauro Porcini @ Samsung - Kevin as an ex Head of Design moving into Product and Digital leadership
Audree Fletcher - https://lnkd.in/p/e6GHp9KQ
Stay Connected:
- Visit www.beingliminal.com for more episodes and to learn about the podcast.
- Share your feedback, suggest future guests, or pose questions for upcoming episodes by reaching out through the website.
- Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review Being Liminal on your favourite podcast platform!
