The Google Design Lectures: Chris Sanderson

The Google Design Lectures are a new event in the London Design Festival’s calendar, challenging design thinkers and practitioners to experiment with new ideas and products with the active participation of a live audience to challenge conventional wisdoms and explore new products and concepts. The lectures are supported by Google.

Living and Designing in the DIY Age
DIY – Design It Yourself is the new mantra of the collaborative age. Traditional rules of creating, marketing and doing business are being broken. A new DIY economy (as in Design/Download It Yourself) and era of anarconomy is taking hold as free access to information, open-source, open-book policies become the norm. Bloggers, open-sourced software, FabLabs and 3D printing are all giving rise to hacker culture in which everyone can become a creator of their own products or brands. The recession has forced individuals and brands to reconsider how they consume and engage with consumers.

Attendees of this lecture will receive a hacking kit for use during the lecture, containing a sample of sugru and a Technology Will Save us Electro-Dough kit.

Christopher Sanderson is co-founder of trend forecasting and brand innovation consultancy The Future Laboratory, where he is responsible for delivering the company's extensive global roster of conferences, media events and in-house briefings. Clients include Design Hotels, the Ministry for Tourism Australia, and Women's Wear Daily's CEO Summits. He also sits on Heimtextil's Trend Table, one of the world's principal panels for forecasting key trends in the global textile industry. Chris has a monthly column in UK luxury bible The Luxury Briefing, and was previously contributing style editor at British Esquire. Before co-founding The Future Laboratory, he was UK communications director for surfwear brand Quiksilver, and a lecturer in visual communication at the University of the Arts in London. He has also served on the advisory panel for the British Council's Creative Industries Unit and he is the presenter of Channel Four's latest trends and technology show, Future Family.

Technology Will Save Us is the first Haberdashery for technology and education space. They aim to help everybody experience the joy of making technology work the way they want it to. They show people what they're capable of with their DIY technology kits, their workshops and support services. They enable them to understand how to build new things for themselves and be more creative and resourceful with the technology in their lives.

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh is the founder of sugru (www.sugru.com). Sugru is a new material designed to give people an easy way to hack and repair their stuff.