David Hieatt

David Hieatt is an entrepreneurial figure that delegates to POINT’s Authenticity will find of great interest. A one time market stall trader, advertising creative, brand leader, company founder, town rejuvenator, conference instigator – the list of descriptors here doesn’t really encompass the broad array of talents, roles and ‘involvements’ to describe David’s life to date.

David steps onto the podium as founder of the much feted Do Lectures where he normally sits audience side as organiser and curator of an increasingly eclectic list of speakers at events in Wales and California. As if that were not enough he is also the Founder and principle of Hiut Denim – the name is a hybrid made from David’s sir name and the word ‘utility’ – the jeans brand set up in Cardigan, Wales. The brand boasts that it is set up to “do one thing well”, which given David’s multifaceted career is clearly no reflection of the many things he achieves.

Huit Denim is an extroadinary idea that on the one hand aims to establish an upscale hipster fashion brand and also create jobs in Cardigan employing people with incredible expertise and craftsmanship who had become unemployed following the closure of the town’s Dewhirst jeans factory when it moved production to Morocco.

David previously founded the action sportswear company Howies with his wife Clare in 1995, while working with Adidas. Howies was sold to Timberland in 2006. His background in advertising saw him cut his teeth at Saatchi and Saatchi where he began his relationship with sportswear brands pitching for Adidas work. One of Hiut Denim’s tags on their site says “Yup, we just make jeans. That’s all folks”. That may well be –  but what is clear is that David Hieatt is anything but a one venture, one idea creative.

Nathan Webb and Sean Rees

Sean Rees and Nathan Webb are two young designers who have come to our attention for their work at Purpose and most notably for their initiative to rebrand The McGuire Programme and create awareness in the Programme’s mission to assist people who stutter and to help them become more eloquent and articulate in their speech.

McGuire Programme

Sean suffers from a stutter and so the initiative has a strong bearing on his life as he seeks to return the support he received in his early days. He has made significant advancements through his involvement with the programme and has recently undertaken training to become a coach on the programme.

At a recent four-day event in London, McGuire Programme participants gathered from all over the world (1% of the world’s population is afflicted with stuttering for which there is no cure, only therapeutic treatments) and challenged themselves at one of the toughest speaking environments, Speakers’ Corner, not as observers, but as participants.

McGuire participants at Speakers Corner, LondonMcGuire Programme

You can find out more about the McGuire Programme on the current website at www.mcguireprogramme.com - the newly designed site launches in May.

Rhonda Drakeford

Rhonda Drakeford is the co-founder of the design consultancy Multistorey which spans the divide between interesting cultural projects and corporate assignments. Rhonda is also the co-founder of Darkroom, the independent store and online shop located on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury, London, which has built up a cult following since its formation in 2009.

Parlour Culture 2009. Multistorey

Rhonda co-founded Multistorey with Harry Woodrow in 1997, following their graduation from Central St. Martins Art College. The studio has developed an eclectic mix of clients and projects across many disciplines and industries, united by work that has a conceptual core, but is also accessible to client audiences.

Unpackaged London Cafe bar, 2007. MultistoreyConstructive Lines store, 2008. Multistorey

Darkroom explores several concepts within its store and is positioned at the crossover between fashion and interiors. The store holds functional pieces that also hold sculptural qualities. This means “a necklace may be worn traditionally or hung on the wall as an objet d’art”. Rhonda’s interest in Africa art forms is also explored with new takes on textiles and jewellery and present them in new contexts.

Hand-held mirrors. DarkroomAfrican patterns. Darkroom

Darkroom designs its own collections and also favours work by emerging and unknown designer and craftspeople.

Whinnie Williams “You Don’t Love Me”

POINT is delighted to announce that Get Mullered and Dance have agreed to speak at the Authenticity Conference, 2-3 May at RIBA.

Niyama – A Paper Island

Get Mullered and Dance takes its name from the collaboration between Robert Muller and Jessica Dance that has spawned a number of innovative projects based on the duo’s combined skills of film, animation, live action and set design.

Hanson of London

Having built up a following from projects for a wide variety of clients including Mulberry, Whistles, Selfridges and Hanson of London, the duo appear regularly in London’s creative blogs. Their unique style of stop frame animation has won many admirers and is a strong feature of their work. The recent Vimeo music video for Whinnie Williams at the top of this article references Robert’s love for French New Wave Cinema and features Jessica as Art Director.

Nick Couch

Nick Couch has one of those great ideas that’s so simple you wonder why it hasn’t been around for years. The Open Studio Club website is a free listing for artists and designers that enables people to find affordable space, while studios who host ‘guest’ designers enjoy the opportunity to place diverse talents into their business environments.

Free desk looking for stimulating partner

The breadth of possibilities are of course endless, with design studios taking artists and illustrators as guests within their studios while one creative advertising agency is understood to have placed a scientist within their environment.

Desk here

Nick’s versatility is evident in his resume, having worked with a long and impressive list of clients at branding agencies and client side with corporations.

He is an enthusiastic evangelist for the Open Studio Club and is convinced that the concept will change the way people see the work place and design working practices.

A gnome for somebody

Open Studio Club
@openstudioclub

Dr Beau Lotto

POINT is delighted to inform readers that globally renowned neuroscientist Dr Beau Lotto has agreed to speak at the Authenticity Conference in May. Delegates may well be familiar with Beau’s work as he has been widely published and broadcast on the BBC’s Horizon, the RSA, National Geographic, PBS in the United States and has had the rare honour of speaking twice at the TED Conference.

Dr Beau Lotto at the Hayward Gallery

Beau’s latest initiative, Beautiful Mind, the world’s first neuro-design lab. It is ­a collaboration between leading designers and neuroscientists in association with London brand communications consultancy Purpose. Beautiful Mind is pioneering the understanding of perception and applying it to create transformational experiences that aim to foster a creative, compassionate and courageous way of being.

Lottolab Bee experiment

Another initiative, his Lottolab Studio, has been described as the world’s first public perception research space. Through its high profile collaboration with the London Science Museum, Lottolab set out to:

i. Deepen the understanding of human perception, advance personal and social well-being through perception research that places the public at the centre of the process of discovery;
ii. Create unique programmes of engagement that span social and personal boundaries between people, discipline and institutions.

Gary Aspden. Photograph @kipricephoto

Gary Aspden has been credited as an instrumental force in defining the “collaborative culture that has fueled street and sneaker culture in the past decade (think Peter Saville, Kazuki Kuraishi, A Bathing Ape, and Ian Brown)” as a result of his work for Adidas and in particular the development of the Adidas Originals range.

A northern soul. Gary Aspden on the BBC Street Style documentary

Gary has  featured as a commentator for social documentaries of ’80s and ’90s fashion culture with appearances in the BBC British Style Genius series on Street Icons, presenting the view from the North West of England where the London term “casual” meant little in local popular culture.

Adidas Fac 51 – Y3

Gary has been a regular around the Manchester music scene, is known to DJ on off-nights and is friendly with local beat combos, The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. It is therefore not really surprising to see a special release of a limited edition Factory Records (Fac 51) Haçienda monogrammed Adidas-Y3 shoe featuring many of Ben Kelly’s design signatures for the interior of the nightclub.

While it’s easy to think of Adidas in terms of trainers and the ubiquitous brand with three stripes, Gary has helped to develop the way Adidas is understood through social impact, most notably at the London Olympics where he orchestrated a series of  events exploring the potential of the identity through experiences.

Barber Osgerby’s Tip Ton Chair for Vitra

Barber Osgerby’s Tip Ton Chair for Vitra. Tipped position

Vitra describe Barber Osgerby’s design for the Tip Ton Chair as defining “a whole new chair typology”. The solid plastic chair with forward-tilt action has two types of sitting experiences – from a normal position, or tilted a few degrees forward where it then stays in place.

Unveiled at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, the design has caught the imagination and Tip Ton was recently selected for a 2013 German Design Award from the German Design Council.

Little Printer

The Designs of the Year awards, ‘The Oscars of the design world’, as our friends at the Design Museum call them, showcase ‘the most innovative and imaginative designs from around the world, over the past year’. BERG are not surprisingly in the running for their Little Printer.

You can see nominations from the world of Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Transport and Product Design until 7 July 2013 exhibited at the Design Museum. Category winners and the overall winner will be decided by a jury and announced to the public on 17 April 2013. You can also share your comments and tweet #designsoftheyear and of course see Matt Webb, founder of BERG, speak at POINT in May.

In the early Spring of 2005, POINT’s Patrick Baglee and graphic designer Quentin Newark met at Notting Hill Gate station and took the short walk to the mews studio of Alan Fletcher. Camera in hand, Baglee and Newark were to make a short film with Fletcher in which they hoped he would discuss – amongst other things – his work in progress, his studio space, his seemingly never ending appetite for design and who would win in a fight between a shark and an alligator.

Fletcher had been due to speak at a student conference, but illness meant he had been forced to cancel – the film being a substitute for his appearance. The film, ‘An audience with Alan’, assumed an even greater significance following Fletcher’s death just a year and a half after it was first shown.

Rarely seen in public to date, it remains one of just a handful of films that feature Alan Fletcher in conversation. It appears at POINT with the kind permission of Paola and Raffaella Fletcher, after a re-edit from Baglee and Newark – who as well as appearing in the film was Fletcher’s senior designer at Pentagram for five years and a regular collaborator for the following ten.

Phil Lewis

POINT is delighted to announce that Phil Lewis, founding partner at London Strategy Unit, has agreed to speak at our inaugural conference in May. Phil comes from a background working in strategy and planning and deals with questions of authenticity on an almost daily basis.

In point of fact our conference theme “Authenticity”, seems to frame a persistent desire in the client world with manufacturing, product and service based corporations approaching London Strategy Unit with business propositions that require their businesses to grow to be just like other company models – ‘me-too’ successful, established market leaders – the next Apple or some such.

For Phil, successful businesses operate authentically by developing their own strategies and not by trying to be the next thing in an already defined space. Only Apple can be the next Apple. London Strategy Unit operate in a unique space between product and service design companies, developing new ways of being and shaping the way organisations live and behave.

Milton Glaser & Mirko Ilic in the Milton Glaser Inc studio

Just over a week ago the POINT team returned from New York after shooting the first sequence in what we hope will be a series of movies. In a trip of many contrasts, the crew shot footage with grandee of the design world Milton Glaser and legendary Magnum photographers Elliot Erwitt and Bruce Gilden. The first rough cuts of these films are in approval stages and viewers of these pages and POINT’s social media channels will soon be able to see previews of some extraordinary moments.

Bruce Gilden gets wired for sound

Jonathan Ellery and Bruce Gilden take the F to Coney Island

Shooting began on the subway with a journey to Coney Island and a meeting of old friends, Bruce Gilden – the Magnum photographer – and Jonathan Ellery – the London artist and founder of Browns. Gilden and Ellery have worked together for a number of years, with Browns designing several books for the Brooklyn born photographer, including their first project together, “Coney Island”. Filming developed around a conversation between the two acolytes, with Gilden explaining how he became interested in photography and the themes he likes to shoot.

Gilden and Ellery on the Boardwalk

As the conversation continued subjects included the people that Gilden likes to associate with, his view on street photography and some of his basic philosophy in life. On what was a bitterly cold day on the Coney Island Boardwalk, Gilden returned to the scene of some of his most famous pictures, ending the shoot in conversation with Ellery in a post Hurricane Sandy reopened Turkish restaurant on the site of one of Al Capone’s former restaurants in Sheepshead Bay.

Elliot Erwitt

On camera

Day two was spent in the confines of Elliot Erwitt’s apartment and studio on the Upper West Side overlooking Central Park, where Erwitt talked openly about his hobby and profession: photography – a convenience for him in that “they both used the same materials”.

An early member of Robert Capa’s Magnum photography agency, Erwitt’s gentle and lyrical narrative has been at odds with clients over the years as he became the focus of his agency and profession’s desire for proper accreditation and copyright to be observed by clients. This stance led Erwitt to be black balled by Time Inc., his major client, during the 1960s.

In the studio

Erwitt is renown for collections of images that he turns into books, most recently children and dogs. A future plan is a book on women. The theme of humour in his work is generally close to the surface, “…they tell me that some of my pictures are funny – some of my previous wives didn’t think I was funny at all”. This humour also surfaces in pictures published under Erwitt’s alter-ego, André S. Solidor who “represents all the things I don’t like… My interest in photography is rather narrow… what photography moves me? It’s the kind that has to do with the human condition, that has opinion, that has form”.

Milton Glaser in conversation

The director’s view

Delegates at POINT’s London Conference in May will also be first to see a not-to-be missed film interview shot with Milton Glaser in his East 32nd Street studio. In the footage Glaser talks expansively about the difference between design and art and the education process, reflections on admired designer and friend Alan Fletcher, the city of New York and one of his favourite clients – The Brooklyn Brewery. In a candid final moment Glaser also reveals the rarely shared secret of his mother’s recipe for spaghetti.