Arup Digital Studio

Building a different kind of design team at Arup

For the last three years I’ve been creating a new team within Arup, the global engineering and design consultancy (Update: see postscript at the end of this piece). It’s called Arup Digital Studio, and it’s a strategic and service design team. Actually, following Ove Arup’s term, it’s a total design team, an attempt to build a multidisciplinary unit that can address the core questions latent within a project, or opportunity, from multiple perspectives, and invent or uncover new approaches to them. Our particular expertise is in the relationships and interactions between people, place and technology. We design spaces, services and strategies, taking a human-centred approach to all the scales, from the cellphone to the city.

We’re currently around ten people in London—a brew of architects, urban planners, UX designers, user researchers, service designers and strategists—and with a growing ‘family’ of like-minded compatriots across the Arup group globally, with footholds in our offices in Amsterdam, New York, Melbourne, Sydney and Copenhagen. It’s a strong team! Current team-members include Andres Mendoza, Agostino Nickl, Anastasia Vikhornova, Camilla Siggaard Andersen, Anne Frobeen, Chris Green (in NYC), Ellie Pollard, Joe McKenzie, Oli Whittington, Rebecca Chau, and Zung Nguyen Vu (+ one alumnus still in…