Our ‘Design Serving Life’ materials are not a fixed set of tools, and they offers no easy answers or step-by-step solutions. Instead it’s a way to stimulate debate and facilitate questions about the wider dilemmas we face when designing.

Contemporary designers think in systems. They develop ideas that go beyond dealing only with materials, or products, or addressing symptoms, and instead grapple with the root causes of why things are not working.

Creative Directors from design agencies across Bristol and Bath gave their insights on how best to reach out to them.

With users in mind, role play the journey they will take in relation to your product or service.

Design delivers more for a business when you invest in a relationship with the right designers. Do you have a process in place to find them?

Before rushing to speak with designers, take a step back and capture what you hope to achieve, the challenges you have, and why success is important.

Design thinking helps to work through scenarios for a company structure and what success will look like at different stages.

Embracing diversity in all sorts of ways is particularly vital for the design industry, because diversity fuels creativity. It leads to better decisions and a greater level of problem solving.

Poole Pottery introduced their ‘Free Time’ policy of 1964, where production workers were allowed to explore their own creativity alongside their routine jobs.

Any design project is about facilitating change.

People buy people. The best design projects come from a good cultural match between the right clients with the right designers.

Clients need design services that give them value for money and return on their investment - a ‘business case’ for design.

What makes a good design pitch?

There is something special that designers add.

‘Responsible’, ‘ethical’ and ‘good’ design draws us into philosophical debate and the need for change.