CREATE

colonialism, where we believe that ‘foreign is always better’. I don’t think that enough emphasis is placed on increasing and improving the output of regional manufacturers of products that are impacted by design and many of these industries are shrinking due to lack of competitiveness. Design is, of course, only one of the factors that affects competitiveness and designers can assist manufacturers in analysing their production to generally improve their products and systems. This can only be good for the region. I’d like to see more initiatives to bring design and designers closer to manufacturers with the aim of improving their products and productivity on several levels – not just aesthetics. There is a stable and economically sound future ahead for design. Design is a dynamic industry and designers very often ‘re-skill’ themselves and move from one area to the next. Personally I love product design and textile design and would love to see more growth in these areas, particularly in printed and woven textiles, and home accessories such as lighting, but there is also a lot of scope for other areas of design such as illustration, motion, app, web and game design. Increasing interest in these areas from students in the design programme at the University of the West Indies bodes well for development in these areas. There is also a place for some of our designers to migrate from ‘artifact-based

design’ to design areas on a ‘higher level’ such as design management, design thinking and user experience design, and to use their design backgrounds to help to create policies and solve management and development problems in the region. *

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