Royaldesigners

When I was invited to attend this year's Royal Designers Summer School as the event’s “scribe”, I assumed that a rare triple error had been made on the part of its organisers. 1) I am neither a designer, nor do I see myself as a scribe, on account of not being a monk working before the advent of the printing press. 2): The session was to be hosted in October, which is stretching the meaning of “summer” to breaking point and intruding upon the rightful province of harvest festivals. 3) I am already in possession of a complete suite of GCSEs (to my mind, still the gold standard in mid-teen education) and am therefore “Fully Educated”, as rubber-stamped by the august AQA exam board. In addition to this, I have recently learned that the event is not called a Summer School; has not been called a Summer School since mid-2013; and is now properly referred to as a “Summer Session”. I have little choice but to concede that I have been getting its name wrong for 12 years. A rare quadruple error!

Thankfully, error is something that is embraced within the context of the Summer Session, an annual event organised by the Royal Designers for Industry (RDIs). The Session serves to bring together some 40 early-career designers, researchers and engineers, in addition to a coterie of RDIs and associated “wildcard” guests (an assortment of people working in design-adjacent fields). Across a three-day summer residency at Dartington Hall in Devon – a 14th-century historic house and estate that is, I must say, absolutely ravishing in deep Autumn – participants are encouraged to embrace the potential for the spontaneity, uncertainty and happenstance generated by the collision of different approaches, ideas and perspectives. There are group workshops and games geared up to encourage participants’ curiosity around design, which are ably supported by the overarching sense of liberation that comes from a congregation of strangers having been plucked from around the country (as well as a handful from further afield) and relocated to rural Devon for a weekend. “The most beautiful part of being here is meeting everyone,” as one participating designer reflected. “It has been fascinating to have such lovely conversations and produce such a lot of intense work together.” Having never previously visited Devon, I can only assume that this feeling of creative liberation is something the area naturally engenders in all its guests. As such, kudos to the RDIs for harnessing the county’s innate capacity for creative dislocation – something that the neighbouring likes of Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset can only dream of, although I don’t actually have any evidence for that claim as I’ve never been to any of those places either. Crucially, my school did not offer a GCSE in Southwestern Creative Displacement.

This sense of dislocation, however, is key to the Summer Session, given that a central aim of the programme is to provide participants with an opportunity to break away from the structures and complacencies of everyday practice. “This [event] feels almost like a time machine, because it seems like I've been here for two weeks and I would love to stay another two,” one designer explained. “Something happens when there's no agenda – it’s the art of doing nothing together, but at the same time so much has been done.” In place of clear briefs and measured outcomes, the session values unexpected connections and open-ended exploration. Rather than a well-defined working process, it allows design to manifest as something stranger, more nebulous and, happily, rather more delightful – a receptivity to new ideas and a mode of everyday engagement with the wider world. “For me, time is the topic of the Session,” reflected one designer. “It’s the possibility of being here and having a parenthesis on our work and our lives; having time to embrace ideas, embrace our own thoughts, is not very common, even in creative professions.” Across the session, participants are free to find their own meaning within the event, to shape it to their individual needs, and draw whatever reflections or connections may feel profound or useful to them – “a space of vulnerability,” as one designer remarked, “that lets you play.” It is an event that even the esteemed AQA exam board, superb as they may be, would find difficult to assess within the strictures of their iron-clad grade boundaries, which is, however, not to say that they should not try. In fact, they absolutely must, and I am open to working for them as an invigilator at all future Royal Designers events, entirely free of charge. I am, you need to understand, deeply committed to atoning for my error and turning this Session back into a School.

Unfortunately, I have my work cut out for me, because the Summer Session is slippery by design. The 2025 session was loosely themed around the idea of “Squeak and Bubble”, a phrase rich in culinary connotations of working with whatever is to hand, as well as the potential for unexpected combinations and frictions to create new sources of value and meaning. “It's about finding value in what's normally discarded,” one designer proffered. This theme was, as the opening address from the RDIs set out, an attempt to get at the mutualism, interconnections and reciprocity that surround us (“the idea of relationships between people, between objects, and between us and the planet”), as well as the potential for design disciplines to conceive of themselves not solely as forces shaping systems, materials, objects and communities, but as interlocutors who can, in turn, be shaped by the mess, contradictions, complexity and everyday realities entailed by their operation. Across the three days in Devon, we would explore these entanglements freely, tangentially and, crucially, together as a group, buoyed up by a bubbling undercurrent of wider thought around the field: what does it mean to practice design outside of the trappings of briefs, budgets and deadlines, and what social values might shape not only our professional practice, but also our wider relationship with the world? The weekend was not, as one participant explained, “a matter of solving anything or creating something,” but rather an opportunity for “creating the conditions for something else to grow.” In this respect, the Summer Session could be seen as something akin to a school trip: an escape from daily routine in favour of a cross-country jaunt that is variously playful, enriching and illuminating for future work, all made significantly better by the absence of any requirement to write it all up afterwards as part of some godawful homework assignment. Well, bar for this godawful homework assignment which I, as the event’s official scribe, am contractually committed to provide.

Commitment more generally, however, is one of many things that shifts across the course of the Session, which is a sentence that I now realise makes it sound as if extramarital affairs were rife across the weekend. I must stress that that is not a claim I have any evidence for, and for which I feel any effort to establish either way would step outside of the agreed remit of a scribe. Where commitment did vary, however, was in a series of personal objects brought to Dartington Hall by the event’s participants, which would prove central to the operation of the Summer Session. These objects were selected by each person on the basis that they somehow embodied the theme of the session, or offered a route into its theme, however it might have been interpreted. From wooden spoons to conkers, fossilised plants to decomposing vegetation, cinema tickets to broken cameras, the objects arrived with anecdotes and explanations that ranged widely across the group. Whereas some touched upon the profound and personal, others explored the bizarre and comic, all the way through to those whose reflections captured some of the key issues facing design today: the need to better conserve natural resources and work in greater concert with nature; the desire for meaning and connection in an increasingly alienating and fragmented world; the challenge of creating things of value in societies already choked with waste, redundancy and excess. As curator Glenn Adamson remarked in his 2020 essay ‘Covid Curating’, objects “condense social and political complexity within themselves. They are remarkably sensitive witnesses, registering more than we can hope to fully grasp on first encountering them.” I, for instance, brought a small ceramic model of a cat.

Over the three days of the Session, different exercises would bring these objects and their owners together in constantly shifting constellations and arrangements, stimulating new conversations, reflections and ideas, as well as challenging our commitment to many of the narratives with which we had arrived – a fraught but fruitful process, which one participant described as an invitation to “explore creative discomfort” within a “safe and generous atmosphere”. A piece of flint was chipped into cutting tools, while also providing a percussive soundtrack for an audio piece reflecting on the natural environment. An acorn transformed from a symbol of gentle growth and renewal into a powerful projectile, launched from a designer’s mouth as they sprang from a fireplace – the culmination of a performance that felt highly moving and profound at the time, but whose precise meaning, now that I have left Devon’s tractor beam of creative liberation, somewhat escapes me (and which makes me love it all the more). A wooden spoon was suspended from the ceiling by a ingeniously engineered series of entangled pulleys, each tied to a different individual whose movements needed to become synchronised with the wider group in order to successfully lower the utensil into a glass of water – all soundtracked, inexplicably, to the theme from Jaws. Every idea was gleefully spontaneous and unexpected, and completely irreverent of where the Session had started or any preconceptions around where it might end. It served as a welcome reminder of the intellectual potential for reinvention and whimsy, and the pleasures of entering into collaborations with no predefined agenda or preconceived outcome: a clear rebuttal, as one designer noted, of the temptation within practice to “feel like you need to stay in the same place, and pursue specialism, safety, and a logical path.” Instead, they reasoned, design can embrace “new people, new ideas and new challenges – it can take risks.” Despite agreeing wholeheartedly with that sentiment, I do think it is worthwhile to sound one note of caution: the aforementioned wooden spoon game amounted to a spectator sport of such breathtaking elegance and tension that I am convinced its creators have been playing it at home for years, and they all simply lied about having invented it on the day. Perhaps this is the kind of trade-off we need to make, however, in order to design more freely. Once we embrace risk, spoon lies invariably follow.

If all of this sounds silly, and hard to envisage, it’s because it was – and rightly so. The challenges facing designers and engineers today have never been more serious. Every decision that we make around materials, processes and production has a real-world impact. We live in a time of rapidly polarising politics, fragmenting communities, decaying social systems, rising intolerance, a collapsing climate, and technological alienation. The stakes in practicing design feel higher than ever, which means that the role of the designer has itself become freighted with ominous significance – how can the output of the profession hope to grapple with issues of this scale and severity? As critic Silvio Lorusso noted in his 2024 book What Design Can't Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion, “design is polarised. It feels either all-encompassing, infrastructural, planetary, big, baffling – or improvisational, ad-hoc, tiny, volatile.” From within this mess, however, designers need to plot some kind of meaningful course, which is, I should note, not a new sentiment. In 1831, Mary Shelley wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein that any act of creation was, in essence, an attempted reordering of the mess in which human existence swirls. “Invention, it must be humbly admitted,” she wrote, “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. We can't make something out of nothing.” Design as a field needs to face this chaos and establish a relationship with it. We need new designs that can be more efficient, more considerate, more unifying and, wherever possible, offer greater dignity and care towards their users, but it is also worthwhile acknowledging the limitations of the discipline’s impact, and ensuring that we remain aware of the everyday entanglements within which it operates. As Lorusso notes, “One way to look at design is by the capacity of its action, that is, the order it imposes. But design is also, more simply and fundamentally[…] what we are left with, the mess we're in.”

That may sound pessimistic, and perhaps on some readings it is, but there are positive things to be said for mess too. Mess can be chaotic, and dispiriting, and overwhelming, but it can also be silly and euphoric and nourishing and liberating. “Chaos precedes design and operates inside it,” writes Lorusso. “[It] is the manifestation of the Real beyond the designedly illusion of a stable and durable order.” Reality can be difficult and distressing, which contemporary design practice ought to grapple with, but it can also be beautiful, strange, and wonderful, which design ought to embrace with equal urgency. Throughout the Summer Session, there was ample opportunity to see what happens when designers do engage with and delight in chaos, and what occurs when they allow for the odd, the unexpected and the uncontrollable to have a say in not only how they work day to day, but also how they might choose to live and practice more widely. “Making something out of anything means that it's not anything anymore,” wrote author Natalie Lawrence in Enchanted Creatures, her 2024 study of monstrosity and meaning, and this is the nature of design too – an imposition of temporary order on a shifting background of chaos. This is good and valuable work for society, but there are also things to be said for sometimes allowing something to remain anything, and sitting longer within the realms of possibility and potential. Design can be serious and responsive to the wicked problems of the world, but it can also exist in the moment and stay alert to the joy, irreverence, and delight that surround us – mess is not a condition we can escape from, but this need not be a dispiriting thought or a heavy limitation on the work of design. “I've enjoyed a lot about this weekend, but one thing that's been special is the way that it has been organised to leave loose threads, not to want to nail things to the floor like a cockroach to the table, but to leave straggly bits,” one participant reflected of the Summer Session. “I wouldn’t want to try and resolve those, because things are sometimes unresolvable. We all have different viewpoints about things, and to have ragged edges is really far more beautiful.” Existing within mess is a prerequisite of what it means to be a designer, and what it means to be a human too.

With this in mind, and with the unofficial but presumably tacit endorsement of the AQA exam board, I am delighted to award the RDI Summer Session the highest honour possible in recognition of all its efforts: an A*. Or I would do, had I not just checked the AQA website and seen that A*s have not actually been awarded since 2019, and have instead been replaced by a numeric system that presumably allows for even finer and more superbly delineated grade boundaries. As such, I must concede that the rare quadruple error has snowballed into an unprecedented quintuple. Clearly, I need to reeducate myself, which is something the RDIs could perhaps facilitate for next autumn. That is, after all, when the schools go back.