Creating tomorrow

Yinka Ilori 

Yinka Ilori MBE is a British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist and designer, with expertise spanning architecture, sculpture and furniture, interior design and graphic design – he transforms Nigerian parables and verbal traditions into vibrant, contemporary narratives through a bold and captivating visual language. Ilori regards the RDI award as a validation of his belief that “design has the power to tell untold stories”. 

Ilori’s practice is “shaped by the people and place it’s curated for”. His core focus remains community, storytelling and creating “things that feel open and joyful”, whether through large public installations or intimate pieces celebrating everyday stories. 

“My identity as a British-Nigerian individual has always influenced my work and how I show up in the world, so if people can learn from that or be inspired to tell their own stories, I’ll feel I’ve done my job in making a difference.” 

His recent projects include Transparent Happiness at Helsinki’s Amos Rex Museum and Grow Your Dreams, Ilori’s first-ever watch collaboration with MB&F M.A.D. Editions. This was followed by Cherish Your Magic at Bloomingdale’s flagship store in New York. Most recently, he launched the Yinka Ilori Foundation, a global non-profit dedicated to reimagining how communities worldwide access joy, creativity and opportunity. 

April Greiman 

April Greiman, new honorary RDI, is a transmedia artist and designer whose innovative use of digital technology spans over four decades of pushing at boundaries in the fields of communications, textiles, architecture and new media. Her practice encompasses design, photography, video and animation, environmental graphics and also colour and material palettes for the built environment. And, while her work is often two-dimensional, it also demands consideration of space around it. 

She observes that design and art “play a major role in just about everything in our perceived world; cultural, environmental, psychological, even philosophical” and is currently developing two public art photography commissions for the Belmont Beach Aquatic Center in Long Beach, California, as well as writing a monograph documenting 25 years of transmedia work. She has spoken of having no fear of what she calls the “texture” of technology, “Rather than damning every new technology, I embraced it,” she says, characterising herself as someone who loves “learning and trying things! A big fan of chance, I’m an explorer, with an unabashed adventure spirit.” So how might becoming an RDI influence her professional practice? “No idea,” she straightforwardly announces. “But I’m excited to see!” 

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a multidisciplinary artist who sees her RDI appointment as an opportunity to join a community dedicated to “critically envisioning and creating more responsible futures” as well as one in which interdisciplinary collaboration can “inspire change and contribute to reimagining how we can coexist with the planet”. 

Her climate-positive artwork, Pollinator Pathmaker, designs planting specifically for pollinators (not humans) across the UK and Atlantic and Continental Europe. It deploys an altruistic algorithmic tool that creates planting schemes optimised for pollinators’ tastes and is a technology especially designed and utilised to maximise empathy and care. 

Ginsberg is currently expanding Pollinator Pathmaker to the US and says her work explicitly challenges design’s traditional function within capitalism, arguing it shouldn’t merely differentiate and promote products for consumption. Instead, she brings an artist’s perspective, grounded in care for the planet, to offer a mechanism that can “ask questions of the world we have made and the world we want to make”. 

Philippe Block

New honorary RDI Philippe Block is a professor of architecture and structures at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Technology in Architecture. His research and practice address climate change through computational design and sustainable construction following the principle ‘strength through geometry’. 

He is “truly humbled” by the RDI recognition, he says, as “driving positive change that benefits society through design is something I strive for in my career, wearing different hats – from academic to practitioner to entrepreneur.” 

His work is perhaps best exemplified by the Armadillo Vault at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, in which 399 cut stone pieces are held together, without mortar or reinforcement, through geometry alone. By reintroducing Gothic cathedral structural principles, it demonstrated how good structural form reduces mass while utilising “simple, low-carbon materials” in reversible, mono-material designs. “The project also represents me personally in many ways: pushing the envelope, challenging the status quo, a little bit of provocation, and never taking ‘no’ for an answer.” 

Frith Kerr

Frith Kerr is an award-winning graphic designer and founder of Studio Frith, where she has worked with leading cultural institutions such as Frieze Art Fairs and Guggenheim New York, on projects that have spanned product design, campaigns, packaging, film and more. 

She describes design as “a messenger or a go-between between people and objects, between organisations and future people”. The idea of communities, whether large or small – how they impact the wider world and how they can facilitate real change – is at the heart of her thinking.  

Kerr’s diverse set of recent activities range from producing film titles and a campaign for Joanna Hogg’s film The Eternal Daughter, featuring Tilda Swinton, to a project about worms and regenerative farming and another looking at the history of Amsterdam’s canal system. “Each project I undertake is singular,” she says. “Design is everything. It has the ability to effect real change, even if that is simply asking questions of it. Thinking is always the precursor to positive action.” 

Mona Chalabi 

Mona Chalabi is a writer and illustrator who uses data as the foundation for her work. She has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a fellowship at the British Science Association, a News & Documentary Emmy nomination and recognition from the Royal Statistical Society. Her data-informed visualisations and drawings have been exhibited at the Smithsonian Design Museum, the Tate, the Brooklyn Museum and the Design Museum and she has written for The New York Times and The Guardian among other publications. 

She says the RDI recognition came as a welcome surprise following two years reporting and illustrating the Gaza genocide. “It means that the values I stand for are respected in my profession. It hasn’t always felt that way. I am devastated and unbroken and endlessly grateful every time I remember how many other people I am standing with.” 

Chalabi’s work addresses marginalisation and oppression, examining how “design, art and journalism can hold up the power structures that hurt people”. She is currently finishing a five-year book project on class exploitation. “So much of my work is based in data that I hope an evidence-based approach might bring something valuable to the RSA community. But I’m open to other contributions that the community might deem valuable (just so long as I can keep on learning from other members, too).” 

Teucer Wilson

Teucer Wilson is one of the UK’s leading letter cutters and stone carvers, specialising in memorial headstones, public art, sculptures and other projects using materials including limestone, sandstone, slate, wood, glass and metals. “I’ve always prioritised excellence above financial gain,” he says, and he receives the RDI award as “a signal” of his work being recognised for its quality. 

He cites as representative of his work a memorial sculpture in Highgate Cemetery for Sir Joseph Hotung, a prominent Anglo-Chinese philanthropist who donated ancient jade and porcelain to the British Museum: the creation of the sculpture required a diverse range of skills from client relationships to structural design, logistics, artistic design and bold sculpture balanced with typography. 

“I work with different processes, from wielding a hammer and chisel like the Romans did, to power-tools and digital design. My perspective as an RDI will be that of a designer who works closely with clients, often on a very emotional level, and who makes things himself, albeit with assistants and apprentices. Attention to detail is something I am good at. I will offer the unique perspective of a sculptor often covered in dust.”