Building on a history of collaboration between institutions
Design London is a collaboration between Imperial College Business School, Imperial College Faculty of Engineering and the Royal College of Art. It was created in 2007 with £5.8million funding for three years (£3.8 million from HEFCE, £900,000 funding from NESTA for an incubation centre and the remainder from within the Royal College of Art and Imperial College), its HEFCE funding has now been extended until 2011. Design London offers teaching, research, a business incubation unit, an Innovation Technology Centre and a programme of industry services and executive education called ‘Design Connection’.
Multi-disciplinary teaching and learning
Design London’s existence draws on long heritage of multi-disciplinary collaboration in South Kensington, where both the Royal College of Art and Imperial College are based. They had been ‘nosily looking at each other’s washing’ since the the 1960s, and as far back as 1973 there were attempts to create a joint Master’s degree in design engineering.
There was a growing recognition that design and engineering were on converging paths. RC A Professor Frank Height was concerned about the diminished value of engineering, and keen to promote design for need (in the spirit of Victor Papanek), and the synthesis of prototypes in design. He wanted to create a “new cadre of designers” who created designs that were manufacturable and holistic, and products of independent thinking, and he saw a joint course with Imperial as the way forward.’ Nico Macdonald, The Missing Link, New Design Jan/Feb 2002
The Industrial Design Engineering two year Masters course began in 1980 with a cohort of four students. Thirty years later its focus has shifted from the pure ‘design for industry’ vision to a more holistic ‘design for society’ approach, and its acknowledgement of a wider shift from product design to product service systems is detectable in the change of the course’s name to Innovation Design Engineering. Alumni of the IDE course, who gain a double Masters (MA/MSc), can be found in companies across the world including Apple, Nokia and IDEO.
The connection between Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art was further cemented in 2005 with a formal collaboration between the two institutions, including funding for ‘Triangle Projects’ which aimed to unite scientific invention, commercial skills and user-centred design. One of the first to benefit was a project which saw a surgeon at Imperial College’s School of Medicine and Life Sciences work with industrial designers from the RCA to develop new tools for use in keyhole surgery, whose commercial viability was then assessed by MBA students from the Business School at Imperial.
Pro-Rector of the RCA, Professor Alan Cummings, describes the creation of Design London in 2007 as ‘this kind of collaboration extrapolated back into teaching’. Design London currently delivers teaching programmes to MBA, MEng, MSc, PhD and MA students in both institutions.
Central to this is the provision of design-led innovation modules on four MBA courses at Imperial Business School under the heading of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design (IED). By February 2010, Design London had taught its seventh cohort of MBA students, 366 in total. It also teaches a four-day MBA elective on Innovating and Designing Services.
As well as introducing MBA students to design thinking and design approaches, Design London selects MEng and postgraduate students from the Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London and students, Research Associates and recent graduates from the Royal College of Art through its Fellowship scheme. More than 80 of these Design London
Fellows have participated in the IED course, allowing them to enhance their entrepreneurial skills as well as learning how to transform creative ideas into new business ventures.
Following formal lectures, Design London Fellows work alongside MBA students undertaking an 18 week project that explores an emerging innovation in science, technology, design or business. These can either come from the students themselves – in the case of a materials scientist who needs design and business input to commercialise a technology, for example, or teams will work on an idea in development at Imperial Innovations, InnovationRCA or others in Design London’s network. The project culminates in the presentation of a business case – Professor Alan Cummings comments that the students get ‘terrifyingly good at presenting their work’ – and selected projects then have the opportunity to enter Design London’s Incubator via its Entrepreneurial Boot Camp and/or enter the Business School’s business plan competition.
Since October 2009 Design London has also been teaching an option on Design-led Innovation and New Venture Creation to final year MEng students at Imperial’s Faculty of Engineering, and a complementary course for third year engineering students is planned for October 2010. Similar short courses have also reached 160 Bioengineering MSc
and PhD students.
Business incubation
The Design London Incubator, funded by NESTA, aims to bring together multi-disciplinary teams from business, design and technology backgrounds to turn ideas into viable businesses. Applicants need to have a connection to Imperial or the RCA (as staff, students or alumni) and the multi-disciplinary nature of the business idea is a key element of the selection criteria. The Incubator runs matchmaking sessions to help ensure ventures have the right mix of technologists, creatives and business people. After these sessions ten teams go on to complete a week-long ‘Bootcamp’ where they attend lectures and receive coaching to develop their business ideas. This culminates in a pitch presentation to a review board, after which three ventures are selected to go through to incubation.
Eight of the Incubator’s ventures have already launched and attracted follow-on investment or are becoming self-sustaining. These include a revolutionary new method of folding sheet metal using robots, a waterless sanitation system that transforms human waste into power and a folding electric plug design that was named Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2010.
Incubator Matchmaking Event
Design London’s Business Incubator runs matchmaking sessions to help ensure its ventures have the right mix of technologists, creatives and business people.
A Design London Incubator matchmaking event
LooWatt
RCA graduate Virginia Gardiner worked with a team of five MBAs to develop the business for Loo Watt, a waterless toilet designed for the developing world. The system uses a simple hand-operated mechanism to package human waste in biodegradable packaging suitable for transportation to an anaerobic digester. There it can be exchanged for the digester’s by-products, which are energy and fertilizer.
Folding Plug
Min-Kyu Choi’s design for an electric plug which can be folded flat, which won the 2010 Brit Insurance Design of the Year award, was developed at Design London’s Incubator.
Virginia Gardiner's LooWatt and Min-Kyu Choi’s folding plug
Research
Under the direction of Professor Bruce Tether, Design London has two Research Associates who, alongside staff, are conducting post-doctoral research into design-led innovation, the emergence of service design, and the design and innovation of service systems, and analysing the development and competitiveness of the design consulting sector.
Tether is clear that for him and others engaged in multi-disciplinary design research, this area is not without its challenges. While multi-disciplinary research is often seen as ‘a good thing’ by policy makers and research funders, university structures can make it hard to execute. This may be due to the constraints of producing research in individual schools and departments, each of which have different styles or understandings of research, and which favour publication in specific journals with a view to advancing individual researchers’ careers. He adds that, to a large extent, pursuing multi-disciplinary research requires identifying the individuals in various departments who are keen to take a less conventional path. The continuing assessment of multi-disciplinary research’s barriers and challenges as well as its rewards remains an important part of Design London’s work.
Innovation Technology Centre
Alongside teaching, research and incubation Design London offers design visualisation tools to its students and business partners through its Innovation Technology (IvT) Centre and a range of services for local businesses under the banner ‘Design Connection’. Projects include work for Bentley Motors, Honda, the Royal Society and the NHS. As Professor Alan Cummings explains, these executive education and business support services see Design London ‘bringing the same kind of [multi-disciplinary] mentality to SMEs – it enables us to look at the ways in which SMEs are operating and thinking, and lets us see how design, engineering and business is being integrated.’ Researchers will also use the IvT Centre to observe the ways in which multi-disciplinary teams work and study the value and effectiveness of 3D stereoscopic displays, multi-dimensional modelling digital prototyping and manufacturing technologies in the innovation process.
Successful innovation demands a systemic not a component approach to designing new products and services. Edison didn’t just design and patent a light bulb - he created an entire new system that changed our world. Nick Leon, Director, Design London
IvT Centre RCA
Design London’s Innovation Technology Centre enables students and business partners to use the latest design and visualisation tools, including 3D stereoscopic displays, multi-dimensional modelling and digital prototyping and manufacturing.
Design London's Innovation Technology Centre
Industry services and public outreach
In 2008, Design London was appointed by the London Development Agency as the delivery partner for the Design Council’s business growth programme, Designing Demand, itself another recommendation of the Cox Review. Working in partnership with Grant Thornton, it has delivered a range of executive education courses and business support programme to 350 participants from 250 of London’s small and medium sized enterprises. In addition, Design London’s STIR lecture series has seen speakers debate global business, social and cultural issues and has hosted more than 3,500 people.
Cummings, a graduate of Imperial himself, explains his own profession of art conservation as reliant on a combination of disciplines. ‘As a conservator you have to be a scientist, you need to be an art historian and you also have to be a practising crafts person.’ He describes seeing Design London come into fruition as ‘immensely personally rewarding’ for a long-standing advocate of multi-disciplinarity. He recalls ‘nervously’ bringing up the otherwise-ignored subject of design at a Smith Institute lecture on technology and the economy in the early 2000s by brandishing his iPod and explaining the concept of innovation in product service systems.