The Design School Lecture Series: Roland Bird

Join The Design School at ASU for our free lecture series featuring lead designers and design thinkers from around the world.

About Roland Bird

Roland Bird is an award-winning industrial designer and co-founder of GRO Design. At GRO he divides his time between project leading, art direction and hands on design.

After gaining a first-class honors degree in Design for Industry from Newcastle Polytechnic in 1991, he moved to the Netherlands to work for the Philips Corporation as a designer in their television department. While there he developed products produced in Italy, France, Spain, Belgium and Singapore and learned a great deal about design for mass production along the way.

In 1993 Bird was mentored by Alessandro Mendini and worked at his Milan studio with a small group of Philips designers during Philips’ Television at the Crossroads project.

In 1995 he was one of five core team members of Philips groundbreaking and award-winning Vision of the Future project. The large-scale project was based on extensive technology and socio-cultural research and accurately predicted many of the products and services we enjoy today.

In 1996 he became a founding member of Philips first Strategic Design group working on forward focused initiatives and strategic collaborations for all of Philips many divisions including; communications and computing, display technologies, entertainment and gaming, medical equipment, domestic appliances, lighting, personal care, clothing and many others.

In 1999 Bird, Roger Swales and Graham Hinde left Philips to start GRO design to have greater freedom to work with other companies and in other categories. During the last 20 years GRO has been fortunate to work with some of the world’s best-known brands and some of industry’s smartest people.