Designing What Matters: How Applied Design Innovation Shapes Futures, Systems and Society

What happens when design moves beyond shaping products and begins to shape decisions, behaviours, services and entire systems?

On Thursday 19 November, Professor Jarred Evans, Managing Director of PDR and Professor of Applied Design Innovation at Cardiff Metropolitan University, will explore this question in his Public Professorial Lecture, Designing What Matters.

Design is often understood through the things it produces. In this lecture, Jarred will argue that its most important contribution now lies further upstream: in how problems are framed, how evidence is interpreted and how choices are made.

From healthcare and public services to sustainability, digital trust and emerging technology, many of today’s most pressing challenges are not simply technical problems. They are human and systemic ones, where the consequences of poor decisions are very real.

Drawing on more than 30 years of experience across industry, government and academia, Jarred will reflect on how design has evolved throughout his career: from form to use, from use to behaviour, and increasingly towards systems, policy and experience.

Through examples from PDR’s work, Jarred will explore how applied design research can move beyond commentary to become an active means of creating change.

Jarred has led the design and development of more than 200 products and services and received over 100 international design awards, including iF, Red Dot, IDEA and GOOD DESIGN awards. During more than two decades at PDR, he has helped develop the organisation into an internationally recognised design consultancy and applied research centre, bringing together commercial practice and academic research to create measurable value for businesses, public services and society.

His belief in design as a practical form of responsibility has deep roots. Growing up in South Wales, Jarred saw through his father – a miner, maker and self-educated man – how learning and making could create agency and tangible change, even within constrained circumstances. That idea continues to underpin his work: design is not simply about making things look better, but about understanding what matters and acting upon it.

The lecture will consider what this means for designers, organisations and universities. It will make the case for design as a leadership capability, for practice and research as mutually dependent, and for universities to participate directly in change rather than observe it from a distance.

Ultimately, Designing What Matters will ask not simply what design can do, but what it should do – and who remains accountable for the futures being created.

Event details

Thursday 19 November 2026

5.00pm – Welcome refreshments, Gallery Café
5.30pm – Lecture and Q&A, A0.31
6.45–7.30pm – Drinks, canapés and networking, Gallery Café

Cardiff Metropolitan University, Llandaff Campus

Register your place

The lecture is open to colleagues, collaborators, partners, alumni and anyone interested in the changing role of design and its potential to shape business, public services and society.

Register your place