Rick Dickinson (c. 1957 – 24 April 2018) was a British

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 ...

er who developed pioneering

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

designs in the 1980s. Notable examples of his design work include the

ZX81 The ZX81 is a home computer that was produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Dundee, Scotland, by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and designed to be a low-cost ...

case and touch-sensitive keyboard and the

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as t ...

's rubber keyboard.

Early life

Dickinson graduated from

Newcastle Polytechnic , mottoeng = A lifetime of learning , established = 1877 - Rutherford College of Technology1969 - Newcastle Polytechnic1992 - gained university status , type = Public , budget = � ...

in 1979 with a First Class Bachelor of Arts honours degree in Design for Industry. The "Design for Industry" degree was the first of its kind, formerly a three-year "Industrial Design" degree. The new course, with two additional terms for industrial placements, extended the degree to four years and popularised the term "

sandwich course A sandwich degree, or sandwich course, is an academic degree or higher education course (also known as tertiary education) involving practical work experience in addition to academic study. The work experience is often referred as an industrial pla ...

Sinclair

Dickinson joined

Sir Clive Sinclair Sir Clive Marles Sinclair (30 July 1940 – 16 September 2021) was an English entrepreneur and inventor, best known for being a pioneer in the computing industry, and also as the founder of several companies that developed consumer electronic ...

Sinclair Research Ltd Sinclair Research Ltd is a British consumer electronics company founded by Clive Sinclair in Cambridge. It was originally incorporated in 1973 as Westminster Mail Order Ltd, renamed Sinclair Instrument Ltd, then Science of Cambridge Ltd, then ...

in December 1979, replacing John Pemberton who was leaving Sinclair to head up a new design centre for ITT in Harlow. Sinclair Research offices were at 6 Kings Parade,

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

. Dickinson was the in-house

er of Sinclair Research Ltd. He saw John Pemberton's design for the

ZX80 The Sinclair ZX80 is a home computer launched on 29 January 1980 by Science of Cambridge Ltd. (later to be better known as Sinclair Research). It is notable for being one of the first computers available in the United Kingdom for less than a h ...

case through to completion and designed a memory expansion. He went on to design the

, including its touch-sensitive keyboard, a "clear step forward" in home computer design. In the rubber keyboard for the

, he replaced the hundreds of components of a conventional keyboard with a design using "maybe four or five moving parts". Along with its colour display, engineered by

Richard Altwasser Richard Francis Altwasser is a British engineer and inventor, responsible for the hardware design of the ZX Spectrum. Biography Altwasser graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a degree in engineering in June 1978. He was hired by Si ...

, and commercialisation by

, the Spectrum popularised home computing, coding and gaming. Dickinson also designed the

TV80 The Sinclair TV80, also known as the Flat Screen Pocket TV or FTV1, was a pocket television released by Sinclair Research in September 1983. Unlike Sinclair's earlier attempts at a portable television, the TV80 used a flat CRT with a side-mount ...

casing and

Sinclair QL The Sinclair QL (for ''Quantum Leap'') is a personal computer launched by Sinclair Research in 1984, as an upper-end counterpart to the ZX Spectrum. The QL was aimed at the serious home user and professional and executive users markets from small ...

. The ZX81 won a British

Design Council The Design Council, formerly the Council of Industrial Design, is a United Kingdom charity incorporated by Royal Charter. Its stated mission is "to champion great design that improves lives and makes things better". It was instrumental in the prom ...

award in 1981. It won a Haus Industrieform award and is in a permanent collection in

Essen Essen (; Latin: ''Assindia'') is the central and, after Dortmund, second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of makes it the fourth-largest city of North Rhine-Westphalia after Cologne, Düsseldorf and D ...

. The Sinclair QL won an Italian design award at the Smau Industrial Design Award.

Post-Sinclair

In 1986, he founded Dickinson Associates, an industrial design consultancy based in Cambridge. That year he produced the industrial design for an early laptop computer, the

Cambridge Z88 The Cambridge Computer Z88 is a Zilog Z80-based portable computer released in 1987 by Cambridge Computer, the company formed for such purpose by Clive Sinclair. It was approximately A4 paper sized and lightweight at , running on four AA batterie ...

. In 1987 he was commissioned by

Alan Sugar Alan Michael Sugar, Baron Sugar (born 24 March 1947) is a British business magnate, media personality, author, politician and political adviser. In 1968, he started what would later become his largest business venture, consumer electronics com ...

to create the industrial design concept for

Amstrad Amstrad was a British electronics company, founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar at the age of 21. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in April 1980. During the late 1980s, Amstrad ...

's first portable computer. In 1989, Dickinson,

Christopher Curry Christopher Curry (born 28 January 1946 in Cambridge) is the co-founder of Acorn Computers, with Hermann Hauser and Andy Hopper. He became a millionaire as a result of Acorn's success. In his early career days, he worked at Pye, Royal Radar ...

(

Acorn Computers Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the United Kingdom, UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archi ...

), and Keith Dunning re-thought the MacArthur field microscope and Dickinson designed the Lensman microscope, a portable field microscope. In 1990–91 the Lensman microscope won the BBC design awards, The Prince Of Wales Award For Industrial Innovation And Production, and the Archimedes award for Engineering Excellence. Dickinson met Apple founder Steve Jobs numerous times as they shared ideas for the MacBook in 1994. He produced the industrial design concepts and models of the first "Broad Band phone" for

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

. Dickinson Associates created the industrial design, mechanical design, and production engineering design for the first

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such as ...

mobile phone "reference phone" design, for Rockwell. Dickinson Associates were also the designers of the

Gizmondo The Gizmondo is a handheld gaming console developed by Tiger Telematics. It was released in the UK, Sweden and the U.S. starting in March 2005. Its first-party games were developed in studios in Helsingborg, Sweden, and Manchester, England. Giz ...

handheld console (originally the Gametrac). In 2014, he published concept designs for modern Sinclair microcomputers. The following year, Dickinson published a series of images of the

ZX Spectrum Next ZX Spectrum Next is an 8-bit home computer, initially released in 2017, which is compatible with software and hardware for the 1982 ZX Spectrum. It also has enhanced capabilities. It is intended to appeal to retrocomputing enthusiasts and to " ...

re-imagining the original Spectrum design. In 2016, he designed a wireless patch for a medical system to allow expectant mothers to monitor fetal heart rates. He also worked on the design of the

ZX Spectrum Vega+ The ZX Spectrum Vega+ is a handheld game console based on the ZX Spectrum and designed by Rick Dickinson as a follow-up to the ZX Spectrum Vega handheld TV game which was released in 2015. Only a small number of Vega+ machines were released, bef ...

handheld games console. The first ZX Spectrum Next was delivered in February 2020.

Personal life and death

Dickinson had two daughters, Grace and Daisy, with his first wife Kim. He is survived by them and by his second wife Elizabeth ("Lizzy"). Dickinson died on 24 April 2018 while in Texas receiving further treatment for cancer first diagnosed in 2015.

References

External links