Downing Street, UK Government Design Summit

Custom custom executive education design thinking and service design summit for Downing Street, UK Government.

“Thanks so much to the RCA team for all your hard work, energy and creativity in pulling together such a fantastic Design Summit at Downing Street. Senior civil servants from across Whitehall agreed that it was an incredibly productive day, which will help support more effective policy making in the months and years ahead. This really is the beginning of a profoundly important evolution in the way that policy is developed and implemented, and we really appreciate everything you’re doing to make this change happen.”
Rohan Silva Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister (2010–13)

Overview

In 2012, the RCA was invited by the Prime Minister’s senior technology adviser to deliver a design thinking and service design summit at 10 Downing Street, designed to help senior policy advisers and high-flying civil servants from across Whitehall discover new ways to make government services better.

Course structure

The day-long summit was convened by Francis Maude, then Minister for the Cabinet Office, was geared towards introducing design thinking into government and demonstrating how it could be used to reshape the civil service from a user point of view.

We invited Tim Brown, IDEO chief executive and RCA alumnus, to deliver the keynote address, alongside presentations from Professor Jeremy Myerson (Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design), Dr Nick de Leon (Service Design) and Professor Anthony Dunne (Design Interactions).

Outcomes

RCA research associates and IDEO designers ran team-based workshops for 50 senior civil servants, exploring service design principles, visualisation tools and research methods. The summit was officially endorsed by the then Cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood, head of the civil service Bob Kerslake and Mike Bracken, the Cabinet Office’s executive director of digital, who all sat on a judging panel, evaluating project proposals. Go-ahead was given to winning teams to initiate pathfinder projects.

The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design
Executive Education

Downing Street Design Summit
Experience Board at Number Ten Design Summit

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Custom Executive Education

Custom Executive Education Masterclasses and Workshops

Through our portfolio of innovation masterclasses and workshops, the RCA provides senior-level professionals and business leaders with critical business skills. We deliver courses for businesses, organisations and universities on design thinking, service design, creative leadership, disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship, human-centred design, artificial Intelligence and healthcare design.

We can tailor the curriculum for a day, a week, or several weeks over the course of a year with interrelated projects. Courses can be delivered online, on-campus, hybrid or at partner organisations. Previous courses have been delivered in Dubai, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Germany and Mexico.

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Please get in contact with us if you would like to discuss developing a custom programme: