Design Serving Life: a values workshop in Stroud, an hour from Bristol
Updated: 4 days ago
If you make things for a living, design them, build them, sell them, decide what a business puts into the world; you'll have had the moment where you look at a piece of work and can't quite say why you made it that way.
Not whether it's good. Whether it's yours. Whether it reflects anything you actually believe, or whether it's just what the brief asked for and the deadline allowed.
That's what this evening is about and it's happening in Stroud rather than requiring a trip to Bristol, which is where this kind of session usually lives.
What it is
Design Serving Life is a practical values workshop led by Lynne Elvins of Design Rally, at Emergence Commons in Stroud on Tuesday 29 September, 6–8pm. Tickets are £40.
It's a taster session rather than a lecture — two focused hours built around a values framework for makers, designers and small-business owners.
The workshop moves through six connected themes:
Issues
Money
Values
People
Nature
Time
The idea is to look past the immediate to-do list and think more clearly about the kind of work, or the kind of business, you're actually building.
Who Lynne is
Lynne Elvins is an independent design strategist based in Bristol and the founder of Design Rally.
She's spent over twenty years in design management and sustainable design advocacy, working with business owners, senior teams and entrepreneurs on how design gets commissioned, managed and turned into results. Her own description of the role is the useful one: as an independent advisor rather than a design agency, she has no stake in what design services you end up buying. That independence is the whole point.
Her work spans Innovate UK's Design for Growth programme, brand and service design for software and manufacturing companies, and teaching — she delivered Design Serving Life to graphic design students at Bath Spa University. She's listed in the D&AD creative directory.
Design Serving Life is her own framework, developed as a set of six materials covering Issues, Money, Values, People, Nature and Time. This session is your chance to work through it with the person who built it.
More at designrally.co.uk.
What you'll leave with
Three things, all concrete:
A Design Serving Life question set — the framework itself, to keep using
A compass self-assessment — where you currently sit across the six themes
One practical action you can put in place over the following month
That last one matters. Two hours is enough to change one decision, and one decision is worth more than a notebook full of intentions.
Who it's for
Makers
Designers
Artists and creatives
Freelancers and solopreneurs
Small-business owners
Anyone working in or interested in values-led and sustainable business, graphic design, design or marketing
You don't need a business, and you don't need to be a designer by title. You need work you care about and two hours to think honestly about it.
Part of Sustainable Fashion Week
This session runs during Sustainable Fashion Week at Emergence Commons. We're a circular fashion community interest company — a second-hand and reworked clothing shop with a makerspace above it — and the whole week is about the same question from different directions: what are we making, why, and at what cost?
Where you'll be
Emergence Commons sits above Emergence Restock on Kendrick Street, in the middle of Stroud. It's a makerspace — sewing machines, tables, good light through the old windows — not a conference room. That matters for a session about values. It's easier to think honestly in a room where things are actually made.
Getting here
Work like this usually means a trip to Bristol or London. This time it's ten minutes from the middle of Stroud.
From Stroud; we're a few minutes' walk up from the station, in the centre of town.
From Gloucester; about 25 minutes by car down the A46 or the A419, or a short train ride into Stroud station.
From Cheltenham around 35 minutes by car.
From Cirencester, Nailsworth, Dursley, Tetbury or Painswick; 15 to 30 minutes.
Parking is free in the evening. Cheapside car park next to Waitrose is free from 3pm, and Church Street, just off the High Street behind Costa, is free from 6pm to 8am. Both are a couple of minutes from the door.
Come a little early if you can; the shop downstairs is worth twenty minutes. Everything is second-hand or reworked, and there's one of each.
What to bring
A notebook, and a piece of work or a decision you're unsure about. Nothing else.
Book
Tuesday 29 September 2026 · 6–8pm · £40 Emergence Commons, 1 Kendrick Street, Stroud, GL5 1AQ
Refunds available up to seven days before. Places are limited
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