Each year the Glasgow School of Art holds its Winter School program, an incredible multi-stream couple of weeks for designers and students to extend and improve their skills and to hear from a wide range of speakers from across the globe.

This year, like everything else, it was held remotely, which meant my invitation to speak sadly did not come with an invitation to the Highlands. Och well.

It’s a testament to Iain Reid at the GSA that the program was able to continue at all, and he managed to successfully draw together a diverse range of speakers, educators, and students from across the globe for a rewarding couple of weeks.

And for the first time I was asked to speak. It clocks in at a little over an hour, including Q&A, but it encapsulates quite well my view is that to be a design that is useful to the world, you need to be engaged with the world — especially the world as it exists beyond what we think of as ‘design’.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed doing it.