The RSA tutor briefings took place on the 23rd of September in London at the RSA headquarters. It was an amazing opportunity to get the inside scoop on what each brief was asking for. There were various speakers each giving in depth presentations. It was an amazing opportunity to hear from Russ Camplin from RBS, Sean Hughes from Philips, Abid Khanlodhi at Unilever, Ian Hunter from the Materials Council, Julie Fleck from the DWP and of course not to mention members of the RSA team who have also written briefs for the competition, Abi Stephenson spoke about the Moving Pictures challenge and filled us in on the success of passed winners and informed us about the popularity of the RSA moving pictures youtube channel. Sevra Davis the director of the SDAs spoke with us about the AfricaPack project and did an amazing job at keeping the whole event running smoothly.
After the briefing sessions, we then had an opportunity to attend a lecture by Ben Terrett ‘From Persuasion to Usability: Design Meets the Internet’ it was a fantastic lecture, Sevra chaired an audience Q&A afterwards which was extremley interesting. Ben is Director of Design at the Government Digital Service where he leads a multi-disciplinary design team working across government on GOV.UK …
The design team which Ben led, won a black D&AD pencil for the GOV.UK website, and Ben is also an advisor to the London Design Festival.

Ben spoke about the value of an agile design process and how the design team benefited from trusting each other’s decisions. It was inspiring to hear about design departments that aren’t segregated. Ben spoke about how healthy it is for designers and developers to not only work together but also sit together and learn from each other. The main theme running through the talk was how users should lead design not designers and how everyone on the design team is accountable to the end-user. Ben encourages all young designers to work within the public sector. The photo above illustrates how open and transparent a design team must be when designing for the general public. The picture above shows a page from the website in question which demonstrates their commitment to the public.