THE FUTURE PERFECT COMPANY
The Future Perfect Company supports and promotes creative businesses and has a focus on ageing through its flagship student design project, Designing for the Future.
Founded by former lawyer, Philippa Aldrich in 2009, the company has run the Designing for the Future project for hundreds of UK design students and supported many graduates and start up creative businesses through the DFF Network.
Kindeo – a home for your stories
I was fortunate a couple of weeks ago to meet up with Seb Royce of Kindeo who demonstrated this new story telling app. Your family’s memory box With the Kindeo iPad app, you create short videos about your life with questions and helpful prompts to guide you. We store all your videos safely for you, to keep and share with your family whenever you like. I really like this app. I have seen numerous other attempts at this sort of story capture but Kindeo has a nice feel to it, with non-stigmatising, intuitive design and an accessible price point. My family
Lost footage from the original SAGE project from 1970s
I was recently sent this fascinating film about the groundbreaking SAGE project by Ken Dychtwald from Age Wave (who features in the film). Ken explains : "In the very early 1970s, two remarkable women came together in Berkeley California to midwife a grand vision of the future of aging intertwined with the future of mind/body health. Gay Luce, a brilliant psychologist and science writer joined forces with Eugenia Gerrard, an impassioned family therapist and mental health pioneer, to consider all the ways in which we might more deeply and respectfully understand and improve the aging process. They were soon joined
The Hospice Biographers
One of our Designing for the Future judges, Ruth Rose, told me about an exciting new charity yesterday, the Hospice Biographers. The Hospice Biographers is a nationwide charity that offers terminally ill patients the chance to have their life stories professionally recorded on audio for their relief and pleasure and so that their families will be able to hear their voices and memories for generations to come. Patients' life stories will be recorded by trained interviewers free of charge and year round at some 200 hospices across the UK. This sounds like a very worthwhile project which deserves supporting. For
Vote for Pop Up Pottery!
We were very excited to learn that talented potter Finola Maynard has been chosen to be a part of ITV's The People's Project supported by the Big Lottery Fund. With her community organisation Pop Up Pottery Creative Healing, Finola plans to offer free pottery workshops to people experiencing isolation, social anxiety or some form of emotional upheaval in their lives. Finola, who has a Masters in ceramics from the University of Brighton, started Pop Up Pottery two years ago in community spaces : When I realised the medium was helping people communicate their emotions more freely, I vowed to treat
DFF 2017 gets underway
We were excited yesterday to launch Designing for the Future 2017 at the University of Brighton's newly refurbished Edward Street building. Now in its eighth year, hundreds of UK design students have taken part in this project devised by Philippa Aldrich of The Future Perfect Company to encourage designers to consider the challenges of ageing and produce products and services which will meet the needs and aspirations of our ageing population. This year's project will focus on dementia which is projected to affect 1,142,677 people in the UK by 2025 and 2,092,945 by 2051, an increase of 40% over the
Stunning new work from DFF alumnus Jack Durling
Designing for the future alumnus, Brighton-based artist Jack Durling has just unveiled his latest body of work, "Oil Slick, Sea Birds". Having a passion for conservation and the preservation of wildlife, Jack has used clay to highlight and explore the very real problem of the consumption of oil, focusing on how this directly affects sea birds. Oil slicks, such as the BP Gulf Oil disaster, have become one of the greatest man made disasters affecting the environment. To this day the clean up continues and the damage it has caused is unprecedented. As Jack explains : These pieces seek to