A two days workshop led Daniel Charny and Tord Boontje of the Royal College of Art provided an opportunity for participants to work intensively on design processes. This one off workshop was part of the events and education programme around Ron Arad’s exhibition Restless at the Barbican.

As a response to increasing requests for socially directed design activity, Daniel Charny and Roberto Feo set their design students on the MA at the Royal College of Art  a new project to engage with an organisation that is close to their heart. They are asked to develop their understanding of what this organisation is aiming for and then to design one thing that will help achieve the goals. Among the organisations the students have chosen are the socially responsible business activist Carrotmob, Surfers Against Sewage, South to North Korea peace through food initiative and a Bulgarian local crafts service NZKBG…more info as the project develops.

Daniel Charny was invited to give a talk about curating contemporary design at Barcelona’s Industrial Design Association based in the beautiful FAD complex by the MACBA. Chaired by Dr. Viviana Narotzky of ADI FAD, Charny reviewed his experience from recent years and presented current thoughts of working in the field of curating contemporary design using examples from projects involving Spanish designers in shows such as the group show Conversational Spanish, Stage by Jaime Hayon, Tenerife Design Festival and most recently the solo show of Javier Mariscal – Drawing Life for the Design Museum London. PODCAST OF TALK

Daniel Charny and Roberto Feo take Platform 10 students from RCA to Milan Salone Internazionale del Mobile 2009 this April to assemble Crisis Shop. A display of pieces designed as responses to the question ‘What qualifies as a Crisis?, each invests in the means to respond to crises at large.
Platform 10.

Crisis Shop. Sold Out!:
22nd-27th April 10am to 9pm daily

Seves glassblock showroom
Via Lodovico il Moro, 25/27 – 20143 Milano

Platform 10 takes to the hotel stage once more, this third year of collaboration with Simon Warrington of ANDAZ.

Private View is an insight into the workings of the designers thinking process. A series of short films made as sketches for new designs that are concerned with personal space. Each one is an intimate creative experience that stirs, provokes and kicks off ideas. It is a raw part of the process of young designers thinking about the future of domestic spaces. The projects are presented in speacial locations around the hotel, including staircases and elevator entrances. The show is on and open to public till 14 May.

Signs of Change in Singapore was a five day workshop with the LASALLE University product and interior design students in their amazing new building. The students explored ideas about the future of their city by story-boarding a day in their life when they will be over 50 years old. Each one chose a cultural, technical or social change to follow and imagined the type of institutes that will be part of Singapore in 30 years or more. They then designed a public sign naming the institute and giving it a heritage sign type icon. Some of them looked at the future of housing, other transport and food culture. One of the interesting aspects that came through was the fear of an overload of virtual life which was evident in proposals such as the Meet-for-Real place.

The signs were placed in the vicinity of the campus with prospects of being embedded into the actual city at a later stage. The workshop was commissioned by the British Council Curator Catherine Ince and Dan Prichard, Director, Creativity and Innovation in Singapore. The students were all very much engaged and the workshop enjoyed the great support of Xinwei, an energetic tutor, that helped us get the signs made to a very nice standard. This is the second Signs of Change workshop, the first was conceived and co-directed with Artist Gabriel Klasmer in 2005 with the design students at Lund LTH.

Slow Water was a responsible design brief set by Feo and Charny for the Royal College of Art student group platform 10 and resulted in 14 new design concepts. The research and the prototypes were presented in a unique exhibition, supported by Innovation RCA, that rippled to wide acclaim during the London Design Festival of September 2007.

The students were offered a brief to ’slow water down between the sky and the sea’, and to consider changes to the way people use and think about water in their day to day life. This included ideas about the future of showering with less water and efficient rain water management for private gardening alongside communication projects for raising awareness to the impacts of indulgent domestic water consumption.

Two of the students projects from Slow Water have since been picked up by progressive industry, and the project is still generating attention from press and publishers… for more details check out the report on treehugger or visit the platform 10.

On the occasion of the opening The Royal Institution of Great Britain hosted a talk with Karen Blincoe and Daniel Charny on Designing for Sustainability with a focus on questioning the roles of designers and design education.

Royal College of Art Platform 10 is jointly directed by Daniel Charny and Roberto Feo, and is now in its 4th year.

The 2006 graduates work can be seen in our latest BOOK OF TEN (2006-2007). The Book of Ten includes some of the briefs given from that year (such as to design a Superstition and design a Mythical object from the 21st century, or Culture Shop aimed at initiating museum shop products that reflect the culture of the specific museum). For the first time there was also a reflective collaboration with V&A/RCA History of Design students that noted their take on the Platform 10 work. Five of the 2006 Platform 10 graduates have set up a studio group together – check out OKAYstudio

In 2006 we collaborated with rapid prototyping technology industry leaders 3D systems on a project MADEBYMACHINE , supported especially by Colin Blain, it was exhibited at the 2006 Milan furniture fair in collaborations with Zeus in their wonderful showroom – see here for some of the results.

In 2007, with the whole of Design Products we ran a project with the inimitable Ernesto Gismondi of Artemide in search of a new type of task light to continue the legacy (and diversify the market) started by the iconic anglepoise lamp. The culmination of this project was the New Moves exhibition at the Aram Gallery.