DCA is sixty

We are delighted to announce, DCA is sixty. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our clients over the last six decades for trusting us to help them achieve success through great product design. We would also like to thank the hundreds of extraordinary individuals who have been members of our evolving DCA team, whose intelligence, talent and hard work have helped create some of the world’s leading products.

In the late autumn of 1960 David Carter CBE RDI founded David Carter Associates (DCA) as “a multidisciplinary consultancy involved in designing products for mass production”. David retired in 1992 but his multidisciplinary philosophy remains a cornerstone of our approach. For the six decades since then we have consistently helped our clients from all regions and market sectors create products and experiences that users value every day. These have ranged from the Stanley knife to the Eurotunnel Shuttle in the first three decades to more recently helping to create world-class insulin pens for Sanofi and the UK’s new Class 800 high speed train for Hitachi.

The world has changed dramatically since 1960 and the rate of change continues to accelerate, driven primarily by technological advances. Our team has always been multidisciplinary with a very high technical capability. Over the decades this has enabled us to understand and embrace new technologies both for the way we work, and for the clients’ products we help create. Now over 70% of the products we design are connected and part of a larger ecosystem, something we feel excited by and at ease with, being a truly multidisciplinary consultancy and having always considered designing products as part of a larger system or user experience.

As we enter our sixty-first year, we are now harnessing the latest advances in technology to connect our clients to the future and improve people’s lives through outstanding design. We still believe the success of the products and services we help create is dependent ultimately on understanding the needs of our clients’ customers and delivering them exceptional value. Product innovation is complex and requires high skill levels to deliver successfully. Our core mission remains to help our clients achieve success through great product design and we continue to do this through an intelligent approach to design, based on the transparent management of risk, informed decision-making, true integration of disciplines and rigorous development processes.

Sixty years on, every day hundreds of millions of people around the world use the products we have designed to improve their quality of life. These products have won over 100 design and business awards in the last 10 years and since 2000, our innovations and creative work have helped our clients with over 3,900 patent applications and more than 1,700 granted patents worldwide.

As we anticipate the next sixty years, we look forward to helping our clients connect with the future and to creating highly positive outcomes for them, their customers and the planet we all live on.

Rob Woolston, DCA’s Managing Director said “As we look back over the last sixty years we are enormously proud of DCA’s outstanding track record of delivering highly commercially successful products for clients across all the sectors we work in. Our multidisciplinary skill set is especially well placed to continue to do this as we support our clients in tackling the challenges of the next sixty years. The Board of DCA would like to thank all our clients and staff who have contributed to DCA’s success over our first sixty years of design.“