The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Design Council John Mathers

Design Council CEO John Mathers warns organisations to heed the importance of good design before it's too late

Author

By Gillian West, Social media manager

February 6, 2014 | 5 min read

"Design is no longer the thing that will add a bit of value, it’s the thing that creates value," revealed Design Council CEO, and judge at this year’s The Drum Design Awards, John Mathers.

Mathers is CEO of the Design Council

Having spent time both agency and client side during his career Mathers told The Drum that he believes that brand owners "are increasingly recognising how design can make a real difference."

He continued: "The most successful organisations are now the ones that have design right at the heart of what they do. We’re really starting to see design change and I think both agencies and clients are beginning to move design forwards in quite a compelling and engaging way."

As chief executive of the Design Council it’s no great shock that Mathers is an advocate of the design industry, and off the back of recently announced figures that the creative industries generate £8m per hour for the UK economy Mathers thinks 2014 will be "the most important year yet for design".

With design covering so many facets Mathers admits it can be tricky for people to get a "grasp on what design is," but admits creative industry figures like this do help the general public’s understanding. "When people can look at the creative industries broken down like that, they go ‘oh gaming, I know what that is,’ ‘film, I understand 12 Years a Slave,’ or ‘fashion, I understand the latest Burberry collection’. Design itself is so disparate, but it is the growth engine of all the cultural industries and that’s how we should think of it, as without design nothing would happen," he said.

This belief that design is the "growth engine" of all industries means Mathers is exceptionally impassioned about design education remaining in the curriculum and worries where the UK would be as a nation if we excluded design and art from education. He commented: "What makes Britain great is its humanities, if we exclude art and design and it doesn’t get measured or valued then what makes us great as a nation will fall away. Design education is absolutely fundamental, I’ve been lucky that I’ve been exposed most of my working life to design and creative thinking in one way, shape or form, a lot of people haven’t been as lucky as me."

Of the design education debate, Mathers disagreed with fellow The Drum Design Awards judge David Hillman, and stated his belief that there was a place for design at university level and claimed that business schools were increasingly approaching the Design Council for ideas of how to incorporate design thinking modules as part of MBA programmes. "More and more you’ll find that design and design thinking will be introduced at an even more strategic level in education and that is what we’re [the Design Council] fighting for…we need to maintain the quality of education so that youngsters coming out of college and university and higher education can compete on that world stage," he remarked.

As a judge at this year’s The Drum Design Awards Mathers revealed that he will be on the lookout for "big ideas" more than anything else and the biggest faux pas an entrant could make would simply be “not thinking big enough”.

"We stand and fall on the quality and the way that we deliver things, remember to articulate what this design is doing to make a difference and why it’s so important," he advised.

Joining Mathers on the judging panel at this year's The Drum Design Awards are SomeOne creative director, Simon Manchipp; Hector Pottie, associate partner at Prophet; Jill Marshall, MD of Bloom and more. Information on this year's awards and how to enter can be found online on The Drum Design Awards site.

Design Council John Mathers

More from Design Council

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +