This week in SIT, students on our MDes Design Innovation programmes were joined in the Glasgow Studio by Professor Clive Grinyer for a highly informative and engaging talk about the past, present and future of design. Clive is a highly influential British designer with a career spanning more than thirty years, primarily focused on human-centred design, service design, and design thinking.
He started in design consultancy with IDEO in London and San Francisco, having previously worked with Moggridge Associates, founded by Bill Moggridge who would go on to co-found IDEO. He then co-founded Tangerine with Martin Darbyshire where they were later joined by designer Jony Ive. Tangerine initially designed for international companies including Apple and LG and went on to become one of the UK's most successful international innovation consultants
Starting as a product designer, he moved across digital, customer experience and service design, leading global design teams at Samsung, Cisco, Orange, and Barclays. At Barclays, he set up the service design team within Barclays UK Retail Customers, drawing on customer data and insight and using design methods to create transformational change and the development of new services.
As Director of Design of the UK's Design Council, he created the Design Demand programme, taking design into over a thousand UK companies. Clive was also Head of Service Design at the Royal College of Art from 2019 to 2023.
Creative Review placed him in their Top 50 Creative Leaders, describing him as "a passionate advocate for the transformational potential of design for some three decades," noting that today's focus on digital product design and design's value in customer experience in the UK is in large part due to his work.
His book Redesigning Thinking: How Service Design is Solving Our 21st Century Challenges was published by De Gruyter in 2025. In it, he argues that design is a way to think more humanely, to create better business, and to navigate through complex systems to achieve successful outcomes.
In short, Clive is a well-respected figure in the UK design world and someone who bridged product design, digital innovation, and service design before those disciplines were widely understood as interconnected.
