Ruby Steel
- Co-Founder & Creative Director
- United Kingdom
- Member since 2021
After graduating from Kingston University, I gained a Master’s degree in Innovation Design Engineering at the RCA and Imperial College of London. Throughout my career of 15 years, I have been awarded two Helen Hamlyn Design Awards for Creativity and Inclusive Design, and have received honourable mentions from Core77 Design and RSA. I additionally starred on the BBC Two series The Big Life Fix, a show that involves a team of inventors and designers creating life-changing solutions for people in need. To me, design is empathy. This belief has led me to found my own inclusive design company, Studio Exception, a collective that champions diversity in people to create better products and services for all. Our mission is to disrupt traditional design methods and embed a new inclusive design standard into all organisations, ensuring disability inclusion becomes paramount to every business. We are achieving this through our unique 10 step process, ‘The Exception Method’, where we identify, empathise, and design for one excluded person; someone who’s fallen outside of consideration for mainstream products, but who stands to benefit emotionally if given access. By breaking away from the traditional focal point of designing for the average, we look to those excluded to solve their need and transform those learnings into universal benefits. We are a year old but have already worked with powerful global brands including Spotify, Sky and Jaguar Land Rover. Unlike a normal consultancy our approach is to work together with internal teams to inspire and teach our method to instill the values of inclusive innovation from within.
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