The Recap: A weekly update from Architecture and Design Scotland

Welcome to the Recap - a short weekly update blog from Architecture and Design Scotland. This is based on our internal blog that is shared with staff and board members on Fridays. This blog is for the week commencing 24 June. 

School may be out for summer, but the Blog's work is never done… This week our Audit Committee and Board met, and we saw the launch of our Value of Design campaign. 

Value of Design

This week the Value of Design campaign went live on Thursday complete with our showcase (videos): https://www.vimeo.com/showcase/arcdessco-value-of-design-2024

We would be very grateful if you could all help us spread the word across your networks or channels in the hopes of furthering the Value of Design campaign's reach across your networks. 

June Audit Committee

The first in-person meeting for some time took place on Wednesday morning and got through all the performance papers as well as a lengthy internal audit report and various other things in good time. Ahead of the Board meeting, it was acknowledged that Audit Committee's scrutiny role will become increasingly important as we look to capture the value we add and the impact of our work.

June Board meeting

Following Audit Committee, the full Board then gathered for their first meeting in our new home at Edinburgh Futures Institute for what turned out to be a very busy day indeed.

We kicked off the morning with a presentation on the digital place project from Ian Gilzean and his colleague Tom from the Scottish Government. This demonstrated both the value of data and digital mapping to our work and its potential to support wider collaboration within EFI.

Following a short tour round the building (led by our board member Caroline Parkinson), we were joined by Kev Dhaliwal and Douglas Graham from EFI to hear about the ambitions for the building and its unique mix of users. Safe to say that they are as excited to have us here as we are to be here, and they are very keen to hear more about how we can help them. 

It was very timely therefore that the next paper on their agenda was an overview of how each of our activity areas is set up this year. Also on the agenda was a sneak preview of the Value of Design campaign as well as an update on our key stakeholder strategy work. Despite the lengthy agenda and a last-minute change of venue, we finished bang on schedule at 4pm. Kudos to the chair and thanks to everyone for their contributions.

RTPI Scotland Awards 2024

Board member Kirsty Macari and Chief Executive Jim MacDonald were at the Charteris Centre in Edinburgh on Monday evening to find out who won this year’s various awards. However – as they were both on the judging panel this year they already knew the winners! 

Header image courtesy of Kirsty Macari, featuring the evening's winners.