Latest thinking

Feeling Ingenious?

Blog

20 Sep 2010

Dan Pink spoke recently on Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. The RSAnimate of this has been watched (at the time of writing) 2,844,309 times, although I confess I had to be scolded into watching it by Matthew Taylor. In his talk, Dan draws on the well known study of the Candle problem, devised by Karl Duncker, who devised the term functional fixedness to describe the way that people don’t immediately realise that the matchbox could also play the part of a shelf for the candle (click on the link if that last sentence made no sense).

RDInsights: Paul Smith

Video

06 Sep 2010

Sir Paul Smith became an RDI in 1991, listen to this interview with Mike Dempsey as part of the RDInsights series.

Happiness is an original iPhone app

Blog

01 Sep 2010

The news that doctors are increasingly using their iPhones to measure their patients' heartbeats is a great reminder of how a device can be engineered for one purpose and used in a completely different way (a disruptive innovation, to trot out the well-worn phrase). Bet Apple didn't see iStethoscope coming.

RDInsights: David Gentleman

Video

08 Jul 2010

David Gentleman, well-known book illustrator and stamp and poster designer has been a RDI since 1970.

What is embedded design?

Blog

25 Jun 2010

The transcript of this seminar held last month at the RSA is now available here. The trend for embedding design means that more and more organisations are employing designers as a source of unspecified but strategic problem-solving capacity. The underlying question was, if you take away design's obvious 'effects' - products, publications, brand marks and communication devices - what are we left with to call design?

Notes on narrative: Sennett and the arts

Blog

09 Jun 2010

Benedict Dellot

Asking what binds human beings together, Richard Sennett recently offered two ingredients that act as cultural glue: ritual and narrative. Speaking at a great lecture with Dr Rowan Williams just a couple of weeks ago, Sennett argued that, “without shared rituals and narratives society has no purpose. The everyday relations between human beings risks falling apart. And yet modern society courts just that risk. The cultural glue of ritual and narrative is weakening.” Williams seemed to strike the same chord - referring to his latest book on Dostoevsky he pointed out that storytelling as ritual allows us to bond with one another as well as with a “realm beyond ourselves” yet it too is being washed away.

Frugal innovation

Blog

07 Jun 2010

When I studied product design as a student, I loved the combination of thinking about people and how they interact with technology. One of things that makes product or industrial designers distinct from engineers and other technologists is that they don’t start with what the technology can do, but with what people want (or moreimportantly I suppose, what people need).

In-house or out: embedding design

Blog

26 Apr 2010

As little as a year ago it seemed that in-house design teams, in both the public and private sector, had practically vanished. So had senior civic roles in design: Leeds City Council was often named as the last remaining local authority to employ a Civic Architect. With a handful of notable exceptions – Apple and The Guardian, for example – it seemed to have become conventional for organisations to buy design services in from outside consultancies.

RDInsights: Sir Kenneth Adam

Video

31 Mar 2010

Sir Kenneth Adams, renowned production designer and RDI, talks to Mike Dempsey about the industry.