L. Bruce Archer

Leonard Bruce Archer CBE (22 November 1922 – 16 May 2005) was a British mechanical engineer and later Professor of Design Research at the Royal College of Art who championed research in design, and helped to establish design as an academic discipline.

Leonard Bruce Archer (known primarily as Bruce Archer or L. Bruce Archer) was born in 1922. His father was a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Scots Guards and his mother a dressmaker and a trained amateur artist. During his schooldays, at Henry Thornton Grammar School, he wanted to be a painter, but he was academically bright and not allowed to continue with art beyond fifteen. His school certificates were in entirely scientific subjects. The Second World War intervened before he could go to art school or university and he joined his father’s regiment. He saw service in Italy but left after three years (1941–44) on medical grounds. The war was still on and, after giving him an aptitude test, the Ministry of Labour said to him, as he recorded wryly:

You seem to be a bit of an artist at heart. You can become an engineering draughtsman.

Which he decided to do.

Bruce Archer was a chartered mechanical engineer who spent most of his working life in schools of art and design, including more than 25 years at the Royal College of Art. He promoted the use of systems-level analysis, evidence-based design, and evaluation through field testing within industrial design, and led a multi-disciplinary team which employed these methods in practice, including most notably their application to the design of what became the standard British hospital bed. He went on to become head of a postgraduate research and teaching department where he identified that scholarly inquiry in design was just as vital as it was in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, and argued that design warranted its own body of scholarship and knowledge no less than conventional academic disciplines. He proposed that modelling be recognised as the fundamental competence of design, just as numeracy underpins mathematics and literacy the humanities and he believed that – like both literacy and numeracy – it should be widely taught.

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