DBA Inclusive Design Challenge 2006/7
In partnership with the Design Business Association
Sponsored by the National Patient Safety Agency
The sixth DBA Inclusive Design Challenge was launched on 27 June and has seen two exciting new developments - a new sponsor bringing their own specialist brief to accompany the Challenge’s more open-ended one and a patron for the initiative.
The shortlist of entries was announced on 20 July. More details...
The NPSA Brief
The new sponsor is the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) and their brief centred on STATS - the slips, trips and turns that can have devastating effects particularly for older people. The NPSA invited designers to consider the consequences and contexts in which they occur and design an innovative solution to minimise the incidence or the impact of the consequences. The solutions could take the form of:
- advertising or awareness campaigns
- protective products
- redesigned environments.
Michael Wolff
Challenge Patron
The design luminary Michael Wolff was keynote speaker at the 24 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge in 2005. Impressed by the experience he agreed to take up the role of Patron for the event. As a champion of design and innovation, he is the perfect advocate for the Challenge. In support of his acceptance he said:
Our species is both as brilliant and as thick as it’s possible to imagine. Many man-made things, places and messages around us can be superb, useful, enjoyable and beautiful, but many are crass, insensitive, vain and plain stupid. Many are life-enhancing and many are trying to kill us.
The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge invites the brilliance rather than the crassness, insensitivity, vanity and stupidity of designers to deal with and transform the past work of their colleagues. Some accept the invitation and others continue in the same rut as before. For me it’s a question of being in other people’s shoes. To do that you have to take off your own shoes. To forget who you think you are, to forget being a designer and become the person for whom you want to make a difference. That’s the challenge!
The Awards event will be held at the Royal College of Art on 6 February 2007. More details can be found on the DBA web site.
