The RSA Blog

Ingenious Friday Fun

Blog

24 Sep 2010

Back by popular demand, here are a few more of John Flanagan’s ingenuity problems from the 1960s. As the instructions say:

The Need for Design and Designing for Need

Blog

23 Sep 2010

Sevra Davis

“Design isn’t radical enough.”

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).

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.

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?

In praise of the IFS

Blog

24 Jun 2010

Matthew Taylor

In my annual lecture I spoke about the need to create a 21st century public sphere, a modern equivalent of the flowering of new spaces for discourse and civic invention which took place in the eighteenth century Enlightenment. This was a time which saw the opening of coffee houses where the growing middle class could talk about philosophy and current affairs, the creation of learned societies like the RSA, and the emergence of mass publishing, especially in the form of newspapers.

Enlightenment thinking can inspire "new politics"

Blog

22 Jun 2010

Last week Matthew Taylor launched the new RSA strapline: 21st century enlightenment. The accompanying speech and pamphlet asks whether Enlightenment principles that have shaped the way we think about society – and on which the RSA was founded – can be reimagined for the present.

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).