Insight from Richard Seymour - Seymour Powell

Some of Charlwood Design's team had the pleasure of meeting Richard Seymour, founder of leading UK industrial design consultancy Seymour Powell a few years ago when he spoke at the AGIdeas conference.

He was recently asked on what he thinks the big game-changers will be in industrial design in the next two to five years. His thoughts were really insightful:

“There’s a storm coming. The design world as we know it is separating into the Polymaths and the Guilds. The Polymaths are the broad-bandwidth thinkers who can see across cultural and technical boundaries to find meaning in new future combinations…and the Guilds, the specialist capabilities that can facilitate those ideas once they have been envisioned.
The designer as we know it is already an endangered species. What is a service and what is a product in the 21st Century is up for grabs. Where does the Product end and the Metaproduct begin? How many ‘services’ as we know them today are going to have to migrate to ‘this side of the glass’ and articulate themselves through physical metaphors of their virtual self? Is NEST an object, a service or part of a synthetic-aperture radar gathering big data for the highest bidder? I guess it depends who you are and what your agenda is.
The next five years may witness the most important shift in consumption patterns we’ve seen for centuries. Buckle-up Dorothy, you’re going to have to be on your toes. And if you’re going to continue to call yourself a designer, better work out what that means….”