Keep:

1. Putting the value of design on a stage, ensuring it’s seen as a strategic force to drive the business forward.

2. Focusing on improved efficiency and effectiveness.

3. Nurturing a strong design culture – ensuring we’re doing the right things with the best talent, and processes aren’t getting in the way.

4. Being tightly integrated with cross-functional business and agency partners for deep understanding, collaboration and agility.

5. Staying human-centered, putting customers and human language first.

6. Synthesizing emerging insights to solve complex problems, create clear frameworks, and put new and innovative ideas forward.

7. Building trust through diplomacy and politics to move design forward.

8. Ensuring the entire end-to-end customer journey creates the brand.

9. Infusing design with AI, as a tool in service to humanity.

Stop:

1. Being a victim, complaining; lacking empathy for business leaders.

2. Tearing each other down instead of lifting each other up.

3. Giving no/little feedback, or failing to give feedback in an empowering way.

4. Using dated terminology that diminishes the value of design.

5. Trying to do too much with fewer people – a recipe for mediocrity.

Start:

1. Recharting the mandate for design in your organisation to reflect the need today.

2. Being a constructive change agent within your organisation, expert at bringing people with you.

3. Pausing to think beyond daily demands – you’ve got to collect the dots to connect the dots.

4. Being involved in building the business strategy, speaking the language of business with expert fluency.

5. Defining skill sets for the future of design and training for them.

6. Building clear metrics into every brief to reinforce the value design will bring.

7. Having and reporting qualitative and quantitative ways to measure design impact.

8. Rewarding people for winning behaviors, those that will help the organisation achieve its growth strategy.

9. Choosing where to put our time and energy – where can we bring an elite level of excellence? Where can we be world-class? Where are we not really qualified?

The Future Of… conference was created to inspire conversation and dialogue on the present path and trajectory of design. Where are we now? How did we get here? What might we learn with, and from others? What might we do together to reshape The Future Of… Design.

Speakers at the conference included the DBA’s Chief Executive, Deborah Dawton, GE Healthcare’s Chuck Jones, 3M’s Brian Rice, Whirlpool’s Ken Musgrave, Newell’s Kris Malkoski, and current and former heads of Design from Verizon, PepsiCo, Duracell, J.M. Smucker, Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, Burger King, McKinsey, BP, and more.

The conference took place in Chicago, USA on 12 and 13 March 2025 and was hosted by David Butler, Fred Richards and DBA Board Director, John Gleason.

Reinforce the value design brings

The DBA champions the role of effective design in the creation of business growth.

If you want to convincingly demonstrate and prove the effectiveness and impact of the design work you and your team produce, the unique accreditation of winning a DBA Design Effectiveness Award gives you the ability to do this.

Download an Entry Pack and enter by 5pm BST Monday 14 July 2025.

Events, Programmes and Marketing Coordinator

This is a fast paced, details orientated role in a dynamic and creative industry. Your role will be to administer, coordinate and support our programmes of events, training, member services, marketing and communications. Reporting into the Events and Programmes Manager it will be an important part of your role to ensure that quality is maintained at a very high level. You will also be a point of contact for the DBA’s membership, answering enquiries and providing an excellent level of customer service across the business. And finally, you’ll provide essential support with tasks across the business, as and when needed.

This integral role will support other team members, and as we’re a small team, you’ll quickly be immersed in the design industry and gain exposure to all parts of the business and how we operate. You’ll learn a lot in a short amount of time and be able to contribute ideas and use your initiative, whilst maintaining and developing key processes.

Download the full job description. 

Key details and benefits

Salary: £30k per annum

Salary sacrifice pension: 5% employer contribution

Fully paid Vitality medical insurance

Contract type: Full time, permanent, flexible working environment (see below for further information).

While many of our events are online, we run a series of regional events around the UK which you will be expected to attend, so you would need to be able to get into Central London easily, whilst being willing to occasionally travel throughout the UK.

Reporting to: Events and Programmes Manager.

Download the full job description for further information including how we work.

How to apply

Please email Sally Lukins, Managing Director at the DBA at sally@dba.org.uk attaching your CV and a covering letter which explains why you want this job and outlining how your skills and experience match what we’re looking for.

Please use the subject line: DBA Events, Programmes and Marketing Coordinator application.

CVs without an explanatory cover letter will not be reviewed.

We will not be using any form of AI to shortlist or review your application. Please use your own thoughts and language to construct all parts of your application. Applications constructed by AI will not be considered.

Deadline for applications: Friday 28 March 2025.

Interviews will take place in person in central London.

First stage interviews on Monday 7 April and second stage interviews on Thursday 10 April.

• Measuring productivity in the creative industries is complex, while traditional KPIs and OKRs are useful to see how we’re doing, over-monitoring can stifle creativity and make people feel they are under surveillance.
• There’s no need to reinvent how you measure productivity – simple tools like weekly surveys with just two key questions can provide valuable insights without overcomplicating matters.
• Creativity thrives on both structured and unstructured time. Routines matter, and Alex highlighted the importance of layering deep work sessions (90-mins to 2-hours) with 30-minute breaks whether a walk or a bit of gardening – to allow for reflection. This balance increases the chances of generating fresh ideas.
• As leaders, we need to strike the right balance between where we do our best creative work and be more thoughtful about how we design good routines that enable individuals to thrive.
• Creating an environment that gets the best from people means balancing individual agency with clear expectations. Setting core in-office times for collaboration – rather than scheduling unnecessary meetings – helps teams work more effectively together.
• Efficiency gains, through automation or AI tools, should create space for deeper thinking rather than simply making room for more tasks.
• Meetings should have a clear purpose and an agenda and while AI tools like Otter or Fathom can capture notes, writing things down remains a powerful way to follow through. 
• Rest is critical – don’t wait until it’s forced upon you. Make time for breaks, use your holidays fully, and properly switch off. Investing in rest now will pay off in the long run.
• Alex’s book Work Less, Do More, explores how companies and individuals can better integrate rest, creativity, and focus into their work and lives – well worth a read if this resonates with you.

Coming up

There was much, much more covered in the hour. Our next meeting will be on Monday 7 April, 4-5pm BST where we’ll be joined by Mark Curtis, Head of Innovation and Thought Leadership at Accenture Song. Mark will take us through their latest Accenture Life Trends 2025 Report which highlights how people’s behaviours and attitudes are shifting in relation to the world around them and how these shifts are impacting our businesses.