Over the last few years, design protection has assumed an ever greater prominence on the national and international policymaking agenda. As countries strive to create or revise design protection regimes to encourage creative design that is thought by many to be central to economic or industrial growth, a number of models are being considered. Foremost among those models are those found in the European Union and the United Kingdom, as well as that seen in the United States.

The situation is fluid. In Europe, in July 2016, the European Commission published its Legal Review of Industrial Design Protection. And, as part of the response to the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office is considering options that the United Kingdom might pursue in Brexit negotiations or after Brexit. Singapore’s registered designs review was completed in March 2016 (after nearly 2 years). It was aimed at enhancing support to the design industry, as well as complementing the Design Masterplan 2025 which had recommended that businesses capitalize on IP in value creation through design innovation. At the international level, design protection has been included in the intellectual property chapters of trade agreements (such as the TPP), and discussion of a design treaty is moving apace at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

This major public conference is part of a research project to explore the role and shape of design protection. The conference was organized in Singapore in September 2017 by EW Barker Centre for Law & Business and co-hosted by the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (Oxford). It brought together a group of leading scholars, experts from the legal profession, academia, policymakers, and industry design leaders from Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong (China), Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, United Kingdom, United States among others. We had leading speakers who are academics, policymakers and legal practitioners in the field of designs and attracted very high stellar group of speakers and participants.

We believe that the legal policy debate benefited from incorporating designers and business persons who contributed to a preliminary sessions that helped to identify the challenges that they see in current design protection. We narrowed down the range of topics that we would explore with legal and policy participants after the preliminary session with design and business leaders. Those topics would fall broadly into 3 main categories:

• Designs embodying a technical function: a central question in modern design regimes deals with technical function and the conceptual ways in which design laws can incorporate protection for intefrated design features etc.
• Subject-matter of design protection: this is one of the key areas of Singapore law reform with particular focus on virtual design and grace periods.
• International framework: Important international developments such as the developments in the World Intellectual Property Organization towards a Design Law Treaty; fate of unitary rights after Brexit etc.

The research papers will be published in a special issue of the Oxford Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice which will be edited by David Stone, Graeme Dinwoodie and Elizabeth Siew-Kuan Ng.