DCA Design International is one of the world's leading

product design Product design as a verb is to create a new product to be sold by a business to its customers. A very broad coefficient and effective generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products. Thus, it is a major aspect of n ...

and development consultancies and is 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. It is south of Coventry, and south-east of Birmingham. It is adjoined with Leamington Spa and Whi ...

, England. The company was founded in 1960 and now employs more than 130 people. DCA specialise in many areas of

and

new product development In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product (business), product to market, renewing an existing product or introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is prod ...

including: Design for sustainability, Industrial Design, Engineering Design, Electronics Design, Software Design, Medical Design, Scientific Design, Commercial Design and Industrial Design. DCA have been ranked as the UK's Number 1 Product Design Consultancy between 2005 and 2017 according to Design Week in their Top 100 Surveys.“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).

History

Founded in 1960 by David Carter RDI

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established 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 Industrial design is a process of design applied to physical 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 advance of the manufactur ...

mechanical engineers Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, and ...

electronics engineers The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification a ...

software engineers Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, interaction designers,

design research Design research was originally constituted as primarily research into the process of design, developing from work in design methods, but the concept has been expanded to include research embedded within the process of design, including work concer ...

ers, strategists, (amongst other disciplines). DCA is considered to be one of the UK's most established product design and development consultancies.

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 of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...

and

London Underground The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or by its nickname the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent ceremonial counties of England, counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and He ...

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

Channel Tunnel The Channel Tunnel (french: Tunnel sous la Manche), also known as the Chunnel, is a railway tunnel that connects Folkestone (Kent, England, UK) with Coquelles ( Hauts-de-France, France) beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover. ...

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. Originally, the corporation was established in 1973 and merged with Synthélabo in 1999 to form Sanofi-Synthélabo. In 2004, Sanofi-Syn ...

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 a German international design prize awarded by Red Dot GmbH & Co. KG. There are prize categories for product design, brands and communication design, and design concept. Since 1955, designers and producers can apply ...

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 common usage and in philosophy, ideas are the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being ...

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 In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions. Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil and is of interest in the study of ethics, morality, ph ...

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 util ...

Insight & Strategy
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Mechanical Engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, and ...

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 advan ...

Digital UX/UI

Human Factors
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Electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

Software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

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