About Iain
Iain Aitchison is director at London-based product strategy consultancy, Plan, where he consults for clients including Bacardi, British Gas, Lenovo, Mars, Samsung, Unilever, Wrigley’s and Yamaha. After years spent directing design research projects in over 15 countries across Europe, Asia, North America and South America; for the past 2 years he been focussed on developing internal education programmes to enhance innovation capabilities of multi-national organisations.
This experience has led Iain to further explore the the challenge of educating designers for more strategic roles, both in the organisational context of mutli-nationals companies and in the traditional university setting. As a result, he is working with the DMI to develop the European leg of their FutureEd programme, advising the D& AD’s New Blood awards on their future scope and structure, and researching new curriculum models for a part-time PhD at the Open University.
In his ‘spare time’ he lectures on design strategy at universities in Finland, Germany, The Netherlands and UK; is external examiner for the MA Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins London and a visiting lecturer on Glasgow School of Art's Master of Design Innovation programme.