Over the last five years, members of the Think Up team have taken a leading role in shaping the RSA Royal Designers for Industry Summer School. At the summer school, 24 young designers and 12 ‘wildcards’ join 12 Royal Designers over four days and three nights to inspire, challenge and provoke designers and those who use design, sharing experiences and searching for insight.Royal Designers have designed, amongst other things, the iPhone, the Harry Potter film sets, the mini-skirt, the Millennium Bridge, the London taxi,and the World Wide Web. Over the years, many of them have attended the school.
For many years, Think Up’s founders Chris Wise and Ed McCann, and Associate Tim O’Brien have played an important role in the design and facilitation of the Summer School. At the event teams formed of experienced and young designers are set a very open-ended brief designed to help them understand their motivations and explore the impact that they have on society. For many the School is a highly transformative event, leading in some cases to life-changing decisions among the participants.
The creation of the Summer School taught us a great deal about how to orchestrate learning in a way that maintains appropriate levels of curiosity, jeopardy and excitement to achieve maximum impact.