DCA Design International is a

product design Product design is the process of creating new Product (business), products for businesses to sell to their customers. It involves the generation and development of ideas through a systematic process that leads to the creation of innovative products ...

and development company based in

Warwick Warwick ( ) is a market town, civil parish and the county town of Warwickshire in the Warwick District in England, adjacent to the River Avon, Warwickshire, River Avon. It is south of Coventry, and south-east of Birmingham. It is adjoined wit ...

, England. The company was founded in 1960 and now employs more than 130 people.

History

Founded in 1960 by David Carter RDI

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

, David Carter Associates grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s, becoming DCA Design Consultants in 1975Companies House, details of DCA Design Consultants – and later renamed itself DCA Design International Ltd in 1986. It is still operating out of its historical home of Church Street, Warwick in the UK, having now grown to four sites within the town. Now employing in excess of 130 industrial designers, mechanical engineers,

electronics engineers Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other electrically charged particles. It is a subfield of physics and ...

software engineers Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

, interaction designers,

design research Design research was originally constituted as primarily concerned with ways of supporting and improving the process of design, developing from work in design methods. The concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of ...

ers, strategists, (amongst other disciplines). DCA is considered to be one of the UK's most established product design and development consultancies.“Design Week – Top 100 Surveys”, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 (Ranked as UK’s number 1 product design consultancy 2005–2017).

Work and awards

DCA works across many market sectors including Consumer, Medical/Scientific, Industrial/Commercial and Transport. DCA worked extensively on rolling stock for both

British Rail British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. Originally a trading brand of the Railway Executive of the British Transport Comm ...

and

London Underground The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or as the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent home counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in England. The Undergro ...

throughout the 1980s and in 1985 began working on the " Le Shuttle" locomotive for the

Channel Tunnel The Channel Tunnel (), sometimes referred to by the Portmanteau, portmanteau Chunnel, is a undersea railway tunnel, opened in 1994, that connects Folkestone (Kent, England) with Coquelles (Pas-de-Calais, France) beneath the English Channel at ...

between Britain and France. More recently DCA with pharmaceutical company

Sanofi-Aventis Sanofi S.A. is a French multinational pharmaceutical and healthcare company headquartered in Paris, France. The corporation was established in 1973 and merged with Synthélabo in 1999 to form Sanofi-Synthélabo. In 2004, Sanofi-Synthélabo merg ...

have designed SoloStar, a disposable pen-type injector for insulin. This device took Gold, International Export and Grand Prix at the 2009 DBA Design Effectiveness Awards in recognition of its improved performance compared to competitor pens and its significant commercial success, as in 2008 it had accounted for 41% of all growth in the global injectable insulin market. DCA have won various other design industry awards with their clients, for a variety of products. For example, the 3M Versaflo S655 Premium Hood (a protective respirator) won a 2010

Red Dot The Red Dot Design Award is an international, annual design competition for product and industrial design, brand and communication design as well as design concepts, in which the Red Dot quality label is awarded to winners. The Red Dot Design A ...

Award for Product Design within the industry and Crafts category. This was followed up the following year by the 3M Versaflo M-Series headgear (a range of powered and supplied air respiratory protection systems) which won a 2011 Red Dot Award in the industry and Crafts category. Meanwhile, the TR-300 "Turbo Pack" which powers both the S and M Series headsets achieved an Honourable Mention also in the 2011 Red Dot Awards. The M-Series also won an

IDEA In philosophy and in common usage, an idea (from the Greek word: ἰδέα (idea), meaning 'a form, or a pattern') is the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophe ...

Bronze Commercial Award from the

Industrial Designers Society of America The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is a membership-based not-for-profit organization that promotes the practice and education of industrial design. The organization was formally established in 1965 by the collaborative merger of t ...

(IDSA) in 2011. Other recent awards have included a 2010 Good Design Award for the GBC QuickStart Laminator and a 2009 Good Design Award for Sanofi Avents’ ClikStar reusable insulin injection pen.The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design website, Good Design Awards 2009 – http://www.chi-athenaeum.org/gdesign/2009/medical/GD09-495/index.html

Services

Systems Engineering Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their Enterprise life cycle, life cycles. At its core, systems engineering uti ...

Insight & Strategy
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Mechanical Engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines and mechanism (engineering), mechanisms that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and engineering mathematics, mathematics principl ...

Industrial Design Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical Product (business), products that are to be manufactured by mass production. It is the creative act of determining and defining a product's form and features, which takes place in adva ...

Digital UX/UI

Human Factors
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Electronics Electronics is a scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate electrons and other Electric charge, electrically charged particles. It is a subfield ...

Software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

Prototyping A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to ...

References

{{Reflist, 30em Design companies of the United Kingdom Product design Companies based in Warwick Design companies established in 1960 1960 establishments in England British companies established in 1960 Consulting firms of the United Kingdom Consulting firms established in 1960