Articles
Search previous Design Council news and articles.
Breaking the curse of knowledge
16 May 2013
The second round of Never Mind the Buzzcocks (the BBC2 pop quiz) is the Intros Round. Two team mates act out a song a cappella for the other one to guess. In their minds, it’s a rich tapestry of melodies and riffs. In reality,...
Women in engineering: better by design?
9 May 2013
You’re probably familiar with the great men of engineering, if I mentioned the name Thomas Edison I bet you could even list some of his achievements. However, if I were to say Elsa Garmire, then I expect, like most people, you...
TILT on codesigning the Whittington Hospital pharmacy
24 April 2013
Dermot Egan from design and architecture agency TILT talks about their work with our Design Leadership Programme clients, Whittington Hospital, to improve the user experience of their outpatient pharmacy. Every now and again you...
Cabe at Fit Cities 2013
25 March 2013
The Fit Cities 2013 conference, hosted by the Mayor of London and supported by the Cabe team was a great opportunity for us to share the thinking on our upcoming Active by Design campaign. The event brought together more than 150...
Introducing the Knee High Design Challenge
6 March 2013
We are entering the last stage of research and scoping for a new Design Challenge. A Design Challenge is typically an open competition that brings talented people together to use design to tackle complex social challenges. We are...
The 5 key principles missing from Design & Technology education
27 February 2013
I am not a huge fan of the Government's new proposals for the Design & Technology curriculum. I am disappointed that the Department for Education didn’t pick up on our proposals (after inviting us to input into the process) and...
Getting better at growing older
18 February 2013
The conversation raised some of the big questions about what it means to grow older with dignity, engagement and self-esteem – and showed how design can develop some of the answers. We need to address perceptions of ageing and...
Social enterprise is good for design
14 February 2013
Very few of the teams that take part in our challenges come away with their design practice unchanged – mostly it is more urgent, with a deeper skill and passion for understanding what people really need On the 30th January we...
Working Well Design Challenge: the final pitches
7 February 2013
Over the last year, we’ve been running a design competition with Nominet Trust to find better ways of using the internet to help young people learn new skills and find work. After months of designing, coding and learning their...
Getting feedback from my toaster
7 December 2012
This morning I turned on my toaster at the wall and it flashed into life. The toast popped out, I turned it off again and its lights went out. All normal. Then I had an epiphany about my own behaviour. Next to the toaster is the...
Better design for A&E
16 November 2012
It’s safe to say that we’ve all ended up in A&E at some point, whether by skewering a finger whilst cooking, or for something more serious. While providing a crucial service, the experience can often be a less than pleasant one;...
Designing our Future
6 November 2012
This year I’ve been thinking a lot about ageing – not so much my own accumulation of years but the fact that our life expectancy is increasing so much in the UK. World Bank data indicates an increase of nearly 10 years average UK...