‘Ready for the Foyle’ is a familiar saying among residents of Derry-Londonderry in Northern Ireland, a city with a long history of sectarian tension and violence. Whether said in jest or with deadly seriousness, the saying refers to a bleak six-mile stretch of the River Foyle which is a well-known suicide black spot. In this presentation, Jeremy Myerson looks at one the flagship community engagement and research projects of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art: Our Future Foyle. This set out to reimagine conditions along the river and transform an area associated with poor emotional wellbeing into a more lively and lived-in place.

Speaker: Jeremy Myerson (Helen Hamlyn Professor of Design, Royal College of Art, Director, WORKTECH Academy, Visiting Professorial Fellow, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, Oxford University)

Jeremy Myerson is a design writer and academic. He is the Helen Hamlyn Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art, a Visiting Professorial Fellow in the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing at the University of Oxford, and Director of the WORKTECH Academy, a global knowledge network on the future of work. After a career in journalism and design research, he co-founded the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art in 1999 and was its Director for 16 years, helping to pioneer the practice of inclusive design in response to population ageing. The author of more than 20 books in the field, his Design Museum exhibition New Old: Design for Our Future Selves is now touring internationally and visited the Pratt Institute Gallery in New York in early 2020. Myerson is the academic convenor and chair for the Healthy City Design International Congress in London and a member of the advisory board for design schools in Switzerland, South Korea and the UK.