RSA takes spinal cord injury programme to the next step

Article in Design Week, Mon, 18 Jul 2011 | By Angus Montgomery

The Royal Society of Arts has received funding to take forward its Design & Rehabilitation initiative, which aims to educate people with spinal cord injuries in design principles to increase their resourcefulness and self-reliance.

The project stems from RSA director of design Emily Campbell’s 2009 Design & Society manifesto and sees the RSA working with people with spinal injuries with the aim, Campbell says, that ‘people who are not professional designers might acquire some capability to design for themselves.’

Following a workshop held earlier this year, Campbell says the Sylvia Adams Charitable Trust will now fund a series of design training workshops for patients at Stoke Mandeville, Sheffield Princess Royal and Glasgow Queen Elizabeth spinal injury centre, which will run from September.

The RSA will partner with Bucks New University, Sheffield Hallam and Glasgow School of art to deliver these workshops. The RSA will then produce a report on all three programmes in March 2012 and hold an event to discuss the findings in April 2012.

Campbell says the RSA chose to work with people with spinal cord injuries as ‘we wanted to find a group of people who needed to learn to be resourceful. Spinal injury results in a very sudden loss of resourcefulness. It’s all about learning to be resourceful.’

21/07/2011