Stephen Bayley

Stephen Bayley Hon FRIBA, Chairman of The Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, is the person for whom the term “design guru” was coined. This he accepted with self-deprecating irony. He was plucked by Terence Conran from the tedium of provincial academe to create The Boilerhouse Project in the V&A, an exhibition space devoted to design which became London’s most successful gallery of the eighties. Then, the two of them created London’s influential Design Museum. He was – briefly and hilariously – Creative Director of The Millennium Dome before a spectacular falling-out with the Government which he wrote about in his book Labour Camp (1998).

Over the past forty years his writing has changed the popular perception of “design”. His many books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars (1986), Taste (1991), Design: intelligence made visible (2007), Cars (2008), Ugly: the aesthetics of everything (2012) and Value – what money can’t buy (2021). He has been art critic of The Listener, architecture critic of The Observer and design critic of The Spectator, as well as a columnist on The Independent and The Times. He is a Honorary Visiting Professor at Liverpool University School of Architecture.

Paul Finch

Paul Finch OBE HonFRIBA is programme director of the World Architecture Festival, deputy chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust and the Design Council and former editor of the Architectural Review and Architects’ Journal. He chaired the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment 2009-2011, having been a commissioner and deputy chairman 1999-2005, and also chaired Cabe’s Olympic Design Review panel from 2006-2012. He was deputy chairman of the Design Council from 2011 to 2014. He was awarded an OBE for services to architecture in 2002.

Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, where he has worked since 1988. This attractively vague job title has allowed him to form a behavioural science practice within the agency dedicated to uncovering the hidden business and social possibilities which emerge when you apply creative minds to the latest thinking in psychology and behavioural science. He is the author of three books: The Wiki Man, the best-selling Alchemy – The surprising Power of Ideas which don’t make Sense, published in the UK and US in 2019, and, co-written with his former colleague Pete Dyson, the newly released Transport For Humans on the behavioural science of transport.

Theo Fennell

Theo Fennell is the founder, owner and Creative Director at Theo Fennell Ltd, the company he founded in 1982, specialising in handmade and bespoke jewellery and silverware. His studios and workshop are still above the flagship store in London’s Fulham Road, and his company is one of the last in the United Kingdom to make all of their silverware by hand.

Theo is committed to developing young talent and actively promotes the future of the British silversmithing and jewellery industries by collaborating with a number of colleges and schools, including Central St Martins and The Royal College of Art.

Kassia St Clair

Kassia St Clair is an author and cultural historian. The Secret Lives of Colour was published by John Murray in 2016. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Waterstones Book of the Month and a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller. The Golden Thread was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award. It was also a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Sunday Times Book of the Year and was one of Peter Frankopan’s History Today Books of 2018. She has contributed to NPR’s Marketplace, Radio 4’s Saturday Live, Woman’s Hour, 5 Live and CNN. She gives talks at international venues including the Dallas Art Museum, Hay Festival and the V&A. In 2018 she collaborated with Color Factory to create an exhibit at their New York site. She has written for the Economist, Telegraph, Wired, Architectural Digest, the TLS and The New Statesman; her Elle Decoration colour column has been running since 2013.

Clive Aslet

Clive Aslet is a writer, commentator, historian, novelist, editor and lecturer. The latest of his twenty or so books on architecture and history is The Story of the Country House, published by Yale in 2021. He spent a decade as architectural editor of Country Life, before becoming its editor in 1993, and more recently he has been instrumental in establishing the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at Downing College, Cambridge, which opened in 2021.