We are living through a boom time for in-house design. With growth in design employment outstripping the wider economy, there are now 1.69 million people employed in design roles in the UK; the vast majority of which are working in-house within organisations in non- design sectors (Design Council, 2018).

In Scotland, evidence illustrates a similar picture to the UK as a whole; with some 137,800 people, or 5.2% of overall employment, in design occupations. Furthermore, with 9% average annual growth in total turnover over the past 10 years, the design industry in Scotland
has been the fastest growing sub-sector of the Creative Industries (Scottish Government, 2019). With the Creative Industries highlighted as one of the Scottish Government’s priority ‘growth sectors’ (Scottish Government, 2015) it seems these trends are anticipated to continue.
Despite the mounting evidence base of the growth of the design economy and the value it creates at both macro and microeconomic levels there has been little large scale work to understand the burgeoning ranks of individual designers working within organisations: Who are they, where do they work and what type of roles do they have?

‘Scotland’s Design Insiders’ is part of an on-going project to shine a light on the population of in-house designers working across the public, private and third sectors in Scotland. It is intended as a starting point for conversation, community connection and continued research.
Following the publication of our first batch of research into Scotland’s top 500 private sector companies (Aitchison, Steiner, Dunne, 2019), this report extends our work to include 226 public sector organisations and provides frameworks for understanding the range of in-house roles and the ways these are concentrated in different organisational contexts.