Shaping the Future of Design in Berlin
Our Insights from the UNESCO City of Design Workshop
2025 marks twenty years since Berlin was designated a UNESCO City of Design – a milestone that presents both an opportunity to celebrate achievements and a moment to reflect on how the city’s design ecosystem can evolve to meet future challenges. To explore this, Berlin’s Senate Department for Economy, Energy and Public Enterprises, commissioned us to assess the city’s design ecosystem and develop strategic recommendations for its future. As part of this collaboration, in December 2024, we facilitated a design policy workshop, bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to explore Berlin’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities for growth.
Berlin is part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, which includes 49 Cities of Design worldwide. This network promotes international collaboration and the use of design as a driver of sustainable urban development, economic growth, and social innovation. We’ve worked with several UNESCO Cities of Design, including Kortrijk, Montreal, and Geelong among others, supporting them in developing evidence-based design policies and action plans. Berlin now joins this growing list of cities taking a structured approach to leveraging design for long-term impact.
Reassessing Berlin’s Design Strengths & Weaknesses
Berlin has long been recognised as a creative powerhouse, with a dynamic mix of grassroots initiatives and world-class institutions contributing to its reputation. However, the workshop revealed that many of the city’s strengths also present challenges. Berlin’s diverse design community, for instance, fosters innovation across disciplines but also results in fragmentation, making it difficult to align efforts. The city is a leading hub for design research in Germany, yet there are also limited structures to connect research with industry and policy.
Additionally, while Berlin is home to pioneering public sector initiatives, such as the Digital Service team improving public services through design, broader integration of design into governance remains inconsistent. A common theme emerging from the discussions was the need for stronger leadership, better coordination, and a clearer long-term vision for the design sector.
Leveraging the UNESCO City of Design Status
A recurring recommendation was the revitalisation of Berlin’s UNESCO City of Design status as a strategic tool to coordinate and amplify design efforts. Many cities within the UNESCO network, such as Kortrijk, Graz, and Braga, have successfully developed dedicated offices to manage their design strategies, something Berlin could replicate. The creation of a UNESCO City of Design Office was proposed as a key step to streamline initiatives, connect stakeholders, and provide visibility to Berlin’s design identity.
In the workshop’s visionary exercise, participants embarked on an inspiring journey, collectively envisioning the future of the Berlin’s Design Ecosystem through collaborative imagination and discussions. This exercise encouraged them to visualise the ideal state of the ecosystem and foresee the outcomes of their collective efforts. Over various timeframes - two, five, ten, and fifteen years - participants articulated a shared vision for Berlin as a global leader in design-driven innovation, sustainability, and public sector transformation.
Turning Vision into Action
As a result of the workshop, several short-term actions were identified to drive immediate impact. These include:
- Setting up a UNESCO City of Design Office to coordinate design initiatives and elevate Berlin’s global visibility.
- Hosting workshops to define Berlin’s unique design identity and align stakeholders around shared goals.
- Exploring the viability of a Chief Design Officer to provide leadership and embed design in public decision-making.
- Conducting an in-depth study on design’s impact on Berlin’s economy, society, and environment.
- Mapping global design policies to identify best practices that could be implemented in Berlin.
- Launching design-for-policy demonstrators to test and showcase design-led governance solutions.
- Collaborating with tourism and business development organisations to promote Berlin as a design-driven city.
What’s Next?
The outcomes of this workshop provide a clear roadmap for strengthening Berlin’s design ecosystem, but long-term success will require ongoing collaboration, investment, and leadership. By capitalising on its UNESCO City of Design status, fostering better coordination, and embedding design into policy and economic development, Berlin has the opportunity to reaffirm itself as a global centre of design excellence.
You can read more about the finds in our report Towards the Design Action Plan for Berlin.
At PDR, we are committed to supporting cities and governments in developing evidence-based design strategies. If you're interested in learning more about our approach to design ecosystems and policy development, get in touch!
Image Credit: Anna Freitag