BEDA Makes Case for Design in the Call for Evidence on AI Strategy for the Cultural and Creative Sectors
BEDA responds to the European Commission’s Call for Evidence on the AI Strategy for the Cultural and Creative Sectors and makes the case that design cannot be an afterthought in how Europe builds, regulates, and lives with AI.
Why This Matters Right Now
Europe is writing the rulebook for AI in culture and creative industries right now. The European Commission’s Call for Evidence for its AI Strategy for the Cultural and Creative Sectors closes on 11 September 2026, and BEDA has just submitted its final response.
Weeks before this deadline, the European Parliament adopted its resolution on copyright and generative AI, widely known as the Voss Report, calling for mandatory disclosure of training data, a workable opt-out mechanism, and a genuine licensing market for creators. It’s a strong political signal to the Commission. But it names authors, press publishers and journalists — not designers, even though generative image, layout and UX-generation tools expose designers to exactly the same questions, often earlier and with less institutional visibility.
That’s the pattern running through BEDA’s entire statement: design work sits inside nearly every EU strategy priority — public services, healthcare interfaces, GovTech — yet is rarely named. And what isn’t named isn’t counted, funded, or consulted.
“This strategy decides who Europe counts, funds and protects in the area of AI. To be properly represented, design must be named in it now.”
– Mark Illi, BEDA President
What BEDA Is Asking For
BEDA has submitted a formal response built around a clear vision and seven concrete policy recommendations.
The vision: AI that’s human-in-the-loop by default, evaluated for both benefits and risks — legality, ethics, training data, environmental cost, genuine usefulness — with design actively shaping AI to serve people and the planet. AI literacy that strengthens designers rather than replacing them, backed by real investment in the talent and infrastructure that make European sovereignty possible.
The asks:
- Fund transdisciplinary design research as an AI foundation and infrastructure — a dedicated funding line across Horizon Europe, Digital Europe and AgoraEU, protecting existing art–science–technology programmes now at risk.
- Open the skills instruments to design institutions — the AI Skills Academy, “AI for Business” masters, entrepreneur labs and fellowships should be as accessible to design universities as to business and technical faculties.
- Use design as public instrument — embedding design-led foresight into the Commission’s Youth Check, JRC foresight work and AI toolbox, and funding civic AI-literacy formats with universities, design centres and museums.
- Guarantee compute and data access for cultural and design institutions, including non-commercial quotas in AI Factories and EuroHPC.
- Name design explicitly as a sector and a research field across the strategy’s scope, surveys, and the EU Cultural Data Hub.
- Name design in the copyright follow-up to the Voss Report — rather than assume it’s covered by adjacent sectors — with transparent training data, workable opt-outs, and remuneration that reaches freelance designers.
- Establish EUIPO as a trusted intermediary between AI providers and content creators, with BEDA named a standing partner from the outset.
Why The Design Community Should Care
AI has already reshaped what it means to work in design. Image generation tools have made visual production accessible to non-experts. It comes with real consequences, from copyright confusion to a flood of low-effort “AI slop.” At the same time, demand has shifted toward what AI still can’t do: framing the right problem, research grounded in tacit and cultural knowledge, and the curatorial judgment to know what’s worth making at all.
That shift is why this policy moment matters. Europe is deciding how to fund, regulate, and talk about AI in creative work for years to come and design’s absence from that vocabulary isn’t neutral. It shapes who gets research funding, whose labour conditions get protected, and whose visual and cultural traditions get represented in the data training the next generation of AI tools. The Voss Report has just shown how quickly that vocabulary can move on without design in the room.
BEDA’s statement is a call for design professionals, educators, and institutions across Europe to make sure the discipline is named, funded, and consulted as Europe’s AI strategy, and the copyright framework beside it, take final shape.
Read the full statement below for BEDA’s complete analysis, including the case for why design is the “missing translation layer” between Europe’s AI ambitions and the people meant to benefit from them.