TY - JOUR

T1 - Design for Europe

T2 - employing scenarios to benchmark the effectiveness of European Design Policy

AU - Evans, Martyn

AU - Chisholm, Richard John

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - Effective design innovation policy is increasingly recognized as a driver for competitiveness and prosperity of nations. Policymakers in Europe face a challenge when evaluating the effectiveness of design innovation policies due to a lack of reliable and comparable data. The European Commission has demonstrated its commitment to design through investment in a number of initiatives that seek to place design at the core of national policy agendas. This paper provides an overview of the policy for design agenda in Europe, discusses the challenges of evaluation, offers a proposed approach to macro design innovation policy indicators and presents a scenario based approach that helps to benchmark the relative national performance of design innovation policy. The use of a scenario based approach links available data through a narrative approach to an overall picture of the relative performance of design innovation policy at a national level. While our research has demonstrated that there are no reliable and comprehensive data sets currently available for design across Europe, we conclude with a consideration of the challenges and limitations of a scenario based approach to evaluation design innovation policy at a macro level.

AB - Effective design innovation policy is increasingly recognized as a driver for competitiveness and prosperity of nations. Policymakers in Europe face a challenge when evaluating the effectiveness of design innovation policies due to a lack of reliable and comparable data. The European Commission has demonstrated its commitment to design through investment in a number of initiatives that seek to place design at the core of national policy agendas. This paper provides an overview of the policy for design agenda in Europe, discusses the challenges of evaluation, offers a proposed approach to macro design innovation policy indicators and presents a scenario based approach that helps to benchmark the relative national performance of design innovation policy. The use of a scenario based approach links available data through a narrative approach to an overall picture of the relative performance of design innovation policy at a national level. While our research has demonstrated that there are no reliable and comprehensive data sets currently available for design across Europe, we conclude with a consideration of the challenges and limitations of a scenario based approach to evaluation design innovation policy at a macro level.

KW - design innovation policy

KW - benchmarking

KW - scenarios

KW - policy for design

U2 - 10.1080/14606925.2016.1130362

DO - 10.1080/14606925.2016.1130362

M3 - Journal article

VL - 19

SP - 253

EP - 268

JO - The Design Journal

JF - The Design Journal

SN - 1460-6925

IS - 2

ER -