South Australia's Design Services Sector
Economic development with an export focus
- a project supported by the Department of State Development
南澳州 为生活而设计 English Version
Help us to promote the world leading advantages of South Australia's design sector.
Sign up to follow the sector's progress:
ABOUT THIS SITE
In October 2014 South Australia's design sector participated in a workshop on expanding the industry's trade horizons - with a particular focus on exporting to China.
In May 2015 the sector participated in South Australia's largest trade mission to Shandong Province. The attached report captures opportunities for the sector.
This site builds the story about South Australia's design strengths and the talents we should seek to export.
You can help determine the Next Steps here.
Goal 1: Sector outcomes from the Premier's trade mission to Shandong, China
The Premier traveled to Shandong Province in May 2015. Roundtables and business matching were held in Jinan and Qingdao.
Jinan is the provincial capital city and therefore provided an opportunity to speak with Shandong government departments about urban development across the province.
Qingdao is Adelaide's sister city, a large coastal city of around 8 million people.
Many firms in the design sector are not 'export ready' however raising the export capability of the sector and developing deeper relationships with China are part of a longer term strategy to expand the sector's markets.
The President of the AIA - David Homburg - participated in the trade mission on behalf of the design sector. He was joined by Phil Donaldson and Dino Vrynios.
You can read updates about the collateral produced and the mission outcomes.
Goal 3: Extending and promoting leading edge design practice
Innovation is a key to remaining competitive. Collaboration, especially across disciplines and sectors, can support innovation. The sector will only unlock leading edge design projects and learning if it facilitates an ongoing discussion and connection between members of the Architecture and Design sector, government, universities and other sectors. Demanding customers with high expectations of Design is a key element in creating opportunities to stretch the sector’s capabilities.
Clusters are “An organised effort to increase the growth & competitiveness of a group within a region, involving cluster firms, government and/or the research community”.
Clustering can be any collaboration of multiple businesses to achieve economic outcomes that could not be achieved by individual businesses alone.
One option is to support smart specialisation where we identify an area where South Australia has strengths and work strategically to pursue excellence in a quite specialised field.
Goal 2: Input to the state's creative economy strategy
The Government has indicated that it will develop a creative economy strategy. The importance of creative industries cannot be understated with the importance of creative and social skills rising because they are not susceptible to computerisation (unlike 47% of current US jobs).
The creative workforce is made up of specialist creatives and support workers in creative industries (ie many design based businesses) plus 'embedded creatives' in other industries.
A report by NESTA in the UK classified creative occupations by the following criteria:
-
Are novel processes involved?
-
Is there a lack of mechanical substitutes for the work?
-
Is the work non-repetitive and non-uniform?
-
Is the work creative no matter the context?
-
Does the work involve interpretation, not merely transformation – does it require the creation of novel outputs?
Design is a key creative skill that can be embedded across our economy and support South Australia’s well-being and liveability.
Background: 90 Day Project for the design services sector to expand its markets
90
The 90 Day project looked at equipping architecture firms to export services to China, particularly in response to the enormous growth in second and third tier chinese cities.
This narrow brief was expanded to include a broader set of firms under the "design sector" banner and the export focus left open to include any new markets and stronger relationships for benefiting from inward investment too.
A series of useful resources were developed and can be found on the Resources page. Click to download the report from the 90 Day project.
Draft Final Report: Download the draft report and consider the next steps for the sector
what next?
Click to download the report from Sustain SA.
At this stage the report makes recommendations to the sector but the sector needs to confirm its priorities and make its own recommendations to the Department for State Development.
The Next Steps page describes the conclusions of the report and encourages you to help determine the priorities for the economic development of the design sector.
Project Updates
