Senior Tutor
School of Design
Innovation Design Engineering Programme and Design London

ide@rca.ac.uk
www.seedfoundation.org.uk

For many years Clare Brass was a prominent product designer, who, early in her career, began to explore ways of using design to help people adopt a more pro-environmental behaviour. Leader of Sustainability at the Design Council until 2007, she is recognised as an outspoken champion of design and sustainability and is currently exploring new ways for designers to use their professional abilities while addressing social and environmental challenges. She took up a part-time role at Design London to bring social enterprise and sustainability thinking to business, design and engineering students of IDE at the RCA and Imperial College.

Clare Brass was born in the UK and moved to Milan in 1985, where she began a product design consultancy in 1987. As a design consultant for industry, her clients included Alessi, TVS, Domo by Guzzini, San Patrignano, Ritzenhoff, Glaskoch and others.

Alongside her design work Clare Brass initiated and developed a number of social and environmental projects, tackling issues such as recycled plastic, water and dog fouling. She began to work on the idea that problems should be viewed as opportunities, and began to develop some of these projects into business enterprises.

Clare Brass moved to London in 2004 to become Campaign Leader for Manufacturing at the Design Council, developing a business support system at the core of the Designing Demand programme to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) use design more profitably. She became Leader of Sustainability in 2006, writing a research paper identifying design’s role in the sustainable development agenda.

Clare Brass left the Design Council in 2007 to set up a new organisation that could realise some of the thinking around design’s new role: SEED – Social Environmental Enterprise + Design explores new avenues of cross-collaborative entrepreneurship for designers. SEED Foundation has just concluded a Defra-funded design research project about food waste that saw a pilot food waste and food growing system being co-designed with residents of a London housing estate. A new Defra-funded project is now underway, looking at the role of plumbers and intermediaries in the water industry to inform and advise the public on ways of using water more responsibly.