Hasta La Ideas

London’s Royal College of Art has been hit by more senior staff changes, with Ab Rogers (above) stepping down as head of the Interior Design programme, Clare Johnston retiring as head of Textiles and Jeremy Myerson departing as head of research institute the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design.

The announcements follow last week’s news that Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are stepping away from their teaching positions on the Design Interactions course.

Myserson said the school was witnessing a “changing of the guard” but denied that the departures were related.

“There’s quite a few people leaving the RCA but I think we are leaving for slightly different reasons,” he told Dezeen. “It’s a generational thing. There’s a changing of the guard at the RCA and that’s no bad thing.”

There have been grumbles recently from staff and students about the changing culture at the college, which has traditionally championed experimental design but has been forced to become more business-like due to cuts in state funding.

“Higher education is now a very, very tough business,” said Myserson, who headed the RCA’s inclusive design research institute for 16 years . “The college has gone from having a high degree of state funding to having to be more reliant on other sources of income.”

“That hasn’t affected the Helen Hamlyn Centre because we have always had to rely on commercial funding and we have always gone out and got money from industry,” he added. “So in a sense we’ve been piloting the more entrepreneurial culture that the rest of the RCA is catching up with.”

A spokesperson from the RCA< said the announcements were "natural movement" in a specialist sector, and that a number of staff would remain associated with the college in different roles. Rogers will be a visiting professor, Johnston will become an emeritus professor, and Myserson will oversee Phd students in a part-time role.

“The only one who’s moving on for now is Tony Dunne, who’s been here since 1991 and head of programme for the past decade,” the spokesperson added.

Student numbers at the college are increasing, the spokesperson said, but investment in new staff means the staff-to-student ratio will remain the same.

“Having had several years with a lower than average staff turnover, we now have a year where we see a number of staff who are due to retire or decide to move on,” said the spokesperson. “It happens like that.”

The departure of Dunne and Raby was announced last week, with figures from the design world paying tribute to the way their Design Interactions course had influenced contemporary design culture.

“They have seriously changed the course of design,” said MoMA senior curator Paola Antonelli. “I do not think that in the future designers will accept to be called simply ‘problem-solvers’. Their job will be to frame the best questions and help us all provide answers. Tony and Fiona are superstars.”

A few days later the college announced that Clare Johnston, who heads the textiles department, is to retire at the end of the academic year. Myerson’s departure was announced the same day.

News of Ab Rogers’ departure came yesterday. The designer said that his reason for leaving was to focus on his London-based studio Ab Rogers Design, whose clients include Condé Nast, Comme des Garçons and Price Waterhouse Cooper.

His team has also designed exhibitions for the Tate Modern, Barbican, Science Museum and the V&A in London, as well as multiple museums and galleries abroad, and completed a host of residential and hospitality projects.

“My design practice has become increasingly demanding in recent years,” said Rogers. “Sadly I have had to make a choice between the studio and the college.”

Rogers joined the RCA to set up the Interior Design programme in 2012, which sits within the college’s architecture department, led by Alex de Rijke. He will continue to participate as a visiting professor.

“I am very pleased that although Ab is in demand and has had to focus on his business, RCA students will continue to benefit from his involvement and inspiring creative vision as a visiting professor,” said the RCA’s rector, Paul Thompson.

The college, which was founded in 1837 as the Government School of Design, is one of the world’s most influential postgraduate-level institutions devoted to art and design disciplines. It offers Masters, Phd and MPhil programmes in subjects including fine art, design and communication.

Other recent changes at the college have included the departure of Tord Boontje as head of Design Products in September 2013. Boontje, who inherited the course from Ron Arad in 2009, was eventually replaced by academic Sharon Baurley.

Last year, students from the Design Products course posted an anonymous open letter around the RCA’s buildings, stating that they were “deeply concerned and frustrated with the evident and undesirable deterioration of education” at the institution.

The letter said that the abrupt departure of tutors, a lack of space and equipment, and increasing student numbers and fees were among the issues directly affecting existing students.

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This is the seventh of our ten Tech Specs interviews. Previously, we talked to Ram Trucks’ Greg Howell.

Name: Andrew Kim

Job title: Designer at Microsoft, and design blogger at Minimally Minimal 

Background: I went to Art Center College of Design, did a couple of internships and worked at places like Google and Frog Design, and then started my first full-time job here at Microsoft about two years ago. For most of my first year, I worked purely on Xbox projects. Now I’m working on general Microsoft projects, including Windows 10. 

Computer setup: I have two computers on my desk. One is a Surface Pro 3 running Windows. That’s the workstation I use for rendering in programs like Keyshot and SolidWorks, and I also use it for general corporate stuff like getting on the internal network. And then for the graphics work I do, I have a 15-inch MacBook Pro that I use for most of the Adobe programs, like Illustrator and InDesign.

I have a 30-inch cinema display that I use for whichever computer I’m working on. And then when I really need some extra horsepower for CAD, I also have an HP all-in-one workstation that I’ll use occasionally. It used to be on my desk but now it’s elsewhere in the studio. For most everyday jobs, the Surface is good enough for my needs.

How much of your workday do you spend in front of the computer? Basically whenever I’m not in meetings, so that’s about 75 percent of the day.

Andrew Kim

Most used software: Illustrator would be number one, followed by InDesign, Photoshop, Keyshot and, lastly, SolidWorks. That’s pretty much it for creative tools, but then of course you have other productivity software—PowerPoint for presentations and Outlook for communication.

Software that you thought you’d use more often than you do: Apps like Evernote. When I graduated, I liked the idea of having a digital scrapbook or mental diary, so I started using Evernote. But my use just tapered off, and I reverted back to using a physical sketchbook and having random piles of things that I collect in different locations—whether it’s on Pinterest or bookmarking links or dragging images onto my desktop.

Phone: iPhone 6

Favorite apps: I’m completely addicted to Instagram right now, so that would be number one. VSCO is a brilliant photo-editing app; I love the way it works. That’s possibly the app I use the most. Along with that, there’s an app called SKWRT. It’s a perspective tool for photo editing that I also really like. 

Other than that, I just use stock apps—Mail, iMessage. Of course, being in Seattle, I use Dark Sky a lot, because you never know when it’s going to rain and you have to be ready at all times.

Apps that are actually useful for your work: As mundane as it sounds, I think the camera app and the photo app. A lot of times instead of taking notes, I will just take a photo of something. That’s actually something I use all the time at work, whether it’s taking a picture of notes on a whiteboard or a material sample that I want to reference later.

Other devices: Not any that come into my workflow. There was a period when I wanted to move all of my sketches over to digital. I have an iPad, so I tried using Paper, and I’ve also considered using Surface Pro to do sketches on—but I’ve come back to just doing sketches in a notebook.

Other machinery/tools in your workspace: We definitely utilize 3D printers and CNC machines, but those are not directly in my workspace. We’re sending files off to the model shop and they prepare them for the following day. Otherwise, we do have a couple of MakerBots around the studio, but I haven’t utilized them yet.

Kim’s desk at Microsoft

Tools or software you’re thinking of purchasing: I’ve actually thought about learning Rhino, just on a personal level. We have quite a few Rhino users in the studio, and being someone who’s purely about SolidWorks, I always get jealous when they’re able to create sketches of 3D models at an incredible speed.

How has new technology changed your job in the last 5–10 years? I’ve only been at this job for a couple years, and I don’t think there’s been a massive shift in that time. One big difference between being in school and being at Microsoft, however, is that at Microsoft you’re able to print anything you want—money isn’t a boundary like it is when you’re a student. So just on a personal level of making models or developing ideas, there’s definitely a level of freedom here that you don’t get in school. 

In his first year at Microsoft, Kim worked exclusively on Xbox projects.

Now Kim is working on general Microsoft projects, including Windows 10—which will feature holographic computing.

Microsoft’s HoloLens

When it comes to new tech, are you a Luddite, an early adopter or somewhere in between? Somewhere in between. I like to try out new tech, but I’m also someone that doesn’t like to mess with a lot of things. I like to have things that work, and have a workflow that works the way I like it. But I am always fascinated by new technology.

Do you outsource any of your tech tasks? Yes, especially when it comes to model making—a lot of that is outsourced. We have a couple of model shops that we use all the time, because our shop doesn’t have the ability to do things like VM or machining at a more delicate scale. 

What are your biggest tech gripes? I think right now it would be that I still can’t have a digital notebook and have it feel as intuitive as a physical one. That’s an idea I’ve always liked, hence my experiments with things like Evernote, Sketchbook Pro and Surface. But I think we’re still a ways away. Even an app like Paper—there’s still that difficulty of getting out the tablet, turning it on, going into the app, opening your notebook, creating a new page. It’s not the same as just opening your sketchbook and putting down an idea. So for now I’m still 100-percent sketching on paper.

I think the root of my dissatisfaction with software right now is the lack of immediacy. We’ve grown immensely in terms of speed and performance, but it’s still not the same as paper.

What do you wish software could do that it can’t now? I think the root of my dissatisfaction with software right now is the lack of immediacy. We’ve grown immensely in terms of speed and performance, but as I mentioned before, it’s still not the same as paper. There’s still something so raw and tactile about paper that I miss when I do anything in software. Even the difference between cutting things out and gluing them down on paper versus using Illustrator—I think once we can get that level of tactility in software it will be really incredible.

Finally, we’ve all had instances of software crashing at the worst possible moment, or experienced similar stomach-churning tech malfunctions. Can you tell us about your most memorable tech-related disaster? The biggest tech trauma that I’ve had was when I was a student and I was on vacation in Korea. It was the first time that I had a laptop hard drive fail, and I lost all of my data. I was so stupid back then—I didn’t even have a backup, so I lost all my music, all my photos, everything. I ended up having to scavenge through different external drives and thumb drives, looking for anything that I could save. That was the worst tech experience for me, personally. The only positive aspect was that I had to start again with a new computer, and it was like having a blank canvas—it was sort of refreshing to have this completely new start. But now, of course, I religiously back up everything in two locations.

Cheer up George, everyone has forgiven you for Star Wars Episode I, II and III. Well, almost. Give us another decade or so.

With their latest weapons demonstration, Lockheed Martin is proving that laser beam canons aren’t reserved just for science fiction. Using the Advanced Test High Energy Asset (or ATHENA), Lockheed burned a hole through a stationary, running vehicle……

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La lampe « Spyder » est un luminaire flexible et aimanté conçu par les deux designers australiens Andrew Southwood-Jones et Alexander Kashin du studio Daast. Faite en aluminium laminé avec trois pattes malléables et aimantées, cette lampe peut s’accrocher à vos meubles et murs à la manière d’une araignée. Le projet reposait sur l’idée de réaliser une lampe facilement transportable et rapidement fixable.