…to challenge imbalances and offer ideas

Design Week’s focus, post the Temple Review, on the need to join up the dots and network the networks to co-ordinate design’s considerable assets and aggregate value across the entire UK is timely (Comment, DW 3 February).

Fortunately, the Design Council and Creative & Cultural Skills are already ahead of the game. Their facilitation of the UK Design Alliance, despite the country feeling evermore federalised and the sector more fragmented, is genuinely UK-wide.

Apart from the obvious professional benefits, co-ordination on this scale provides a more coherent platform to influence central, national and regional governments.

This is especially important as responses to the current economic situation differ across the country’s devolved administrations. Likewise, the emerging crisis facing design courses in higher education in England is caused by the decimation of the teaching grant for humanities subjects, from which Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have been spared (so far).

The networked intelligence of the alliance can challenge these imbalances and offer new ideas and thinking from a UK national pool.

Stuart MacDonald, Director, Creative Frontline, by e-mail