Reflections from the BEDA General Assembly 2025
As the design community gathered in Brussels for the BEDA Design Forum and General Assembly this May, our Design and Innovation Policy Manager—and BEDA Treasurer—Piotr Swiatek reflects not only on the inspiring conversations, but also on his journey with BEDA over the past five years.
This past week I had the pleasure of joining the design community from across Europe at the BEDA Design Forum (15 May) and the BEDA General Assembly (16 May) in Brussels. The Forum was packed with fresh thinking and passionate conversations - from the ethics of digital transformation to the power of design in democratic resilience and lifelong learning. If you missed it, I highly recommend checking out the speaker presentations and photos on BEDA website.
But it’s the General Assembly that left me especially reflective this year.
As I enter my final year on the BEDA Board, I’ve been thinking a lot about the journey. My professional interest and expertise lie in design policy, hence when I first joined the Board in 2020, my ambition was to lead a dedicated working group on that topic. However, I was also entrusted with the role of Treasurer - an unexpected but ultimately rewarding challenge. Managing the finances of an international association like BEDA requires a great deal of day-to-day oversight, cross-border coordination, and persistence. Fortunately, I’ve been able to draw on my early academic background in finance, which has proven surprisingly useful.
When I took on the role, BEDA was facing significant financial strain - two consecutive years of losses and a growing deficit. Over the past five years, I’ve worked closely with the Board to stabilise our finances, keep spending under control, and make strategic investments in BEDA’s future: from a much-needed website redesign, to revisiting our vision and mission, and developing a new policy and position paper that clearly articulates the value of design to Europe’s major challenges.
Those efforts are paying off. At the start of 2025, BEDA holds a significant reserve, and we are more active than ever - both behind the scenes, through our advocacy work with EU policymakers, and on the stages. We’ve successfully completed projects like DAACE - Design as a Competitive Edge (EUIPO-funded, with Ornamo, focusing on IP protection for designers), SACCORD (bringing design into Europe’s skills agenda), and have just launched MADres - a major new initiative to build capacity in the design sector around AI, sustainability, accessibility and ethical practice, and to push forward a new design policy agenda.
It's been an honour to support BEDA in this role, and to represent PDR on the Board during such an exciting and challenging period for design in Europe. I'm looking forward to the year ahead, and the next chapter for BEDA.
Interested in collaborating on design policy or innovation projects?
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