Hello World
My name is Gregor Timlin. I grew up in Ireland in the 1980s. My father was Catholic and my mother Protestant, which was unusual at the time given the background noise of bombings up north. That violence never touched my life directly, apart from sporadic bomb threats at my Protestant primary school, when we’d file out to the playground in single lines for roll call, just in case.
My parents were involved in peace in their own quiet way. We’d go to Catholic mass one weekend and a Protestant service the next. The effect on me was to feel slightly outside the culture I grew up in. I wasn’t part of either tribe, and I could see the absurdity of violence over what seemed, to a child’s eyes, nothing particularly different. As an adult, I understand the complexity, but the wiring remained: the ability to step outside culture and observe it, to resist the pull of the group. It has been a constant feature of my life. That’s the first gift life has given me.
1. Don’t groupthink.
I was the youngest of four brothers, born into a team of rivals and friends. When they weren’t lining up to steal the best bite from my dinner plate, they were sticking up for me in the playground. It was a good family, and I was very lucky. One of the advantages of coming last was inheriting a vast box of Lego, the remains of many birthdays and Christmases, all left to me but with no instructions. I was obsessed and could spend hours making.
While other kids in school were learning to read and write, I was physically present but mentally elsewhere, visualising, iterating in my mind, imagining and reimagining my next project with the pieces I had. Later, I realised that all knowledge and technology could be broken down and rebuilt in a similar way. That gave me the next gift.
2. See things as components and systems.
In education I was drawn to both the practical and the analytical. At school it was physics, geography, maths, construction studies, and technical drawing. Later, at DIT I studied Furniture, and at the RCA, Product Design. Being at the Royal College of Art in 2007 was like stepping into Hogwarts or Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Financial cuts hadn’t yet hit, and the designers I looked up to were not just alumni but teachers.
Each year forty students were selected from across the world, and just a few steps from our desks we had access to every metal, wood, and rapid prototyping facility imaginable. You learned not only from your own projects but by watching how others worked and how great ideas took shape. Design, as Nigel Coates wrote, is a distinct way of thinking. Unlike theory, unresolved ideas cannot hide behind abstraction. They either work or they do not. Turning ideas into tangible form, confronting what fails, and pushing for excellence builds momentum and creates results.
3. Making is thinking. Trust the design process.
Being at the RCA opened my horizons. I realised that with enough effort a person could learn to design almost anything. But that raised a question: what should those skills be used for? The world already had enough chairs in it.
The answer came by chance when I joined the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, where I spent three years researching how environments and services could help people with dementia and age-related disabilities live more independently. It was demanding work but deeply rewarding. At the time, few in my design community understood why anyone would choose that path. Most wanted to work for the Apples or Vitras of the world.
That experience taught me to look beyond myself and to co-design with others. The field was so untouched that opportunities for improvement were everywhere. Later, when I read Zero to One, Peter Thiel’s idea of exploring areas no one else has thought to look in resonated strongly. To see those spaces, you first have to move beyond your own conditioning.
4. Answer somebody else’s needs. Inclusion leads to innovation.
My work in dementia led to a book, several papers, and eventually a talk at the Dementia Congress in 2010, where I was approached by Novartis. That moment drew me into the world of digital health and startups, where I have spent most of my career. Websites, apps, wearables, the Internet of Things, hardware, and medical devices all became part of my practice. Bringing complex ideas to market required balancing user needs, value propositions, technology, and real-world context, while learning through both successes and failures.
Over time I began to see how many moving parts within a business must align for a product to succeed. Companies, like products, move through a design process and need the same care and attention if they are to thrive. Whether applied to business models, internal structures, capabilities, operations, or marketing, design is a universal language that brings people together to create meaningful results.
5. Design the business, not just the product.
In 2023 I left my role as VP of Product Design at CLM to take a break from digital health, to read, study, work with different kinds of clients, and spend more time with my son in his formative years. It turned out to be an interesting moment to pause. The world seemed uncertain: wars, layoffs, economic strain, and AI reshaping industries. Yet in my own quiet corner it became a rare time for reflection. Free from short-term deliverables, I could see that much of the world around us has changed surprisingly little since the innovations of the 1960s and 70s. The systems, buildings, politics, and even our psychology often feel like old ideas restated in new forms.
In an age flooded with information and cynicism, it is easy to lose faith in progress. But as Herbert Simon wrote, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Design is the belief that change is possible, and progress depends on that belief. In a world that too often fixates on what is broken, deliberate optimism is a necessary and creative act.
6. Progress requires deliberate optimism.
All of these experiences have shaped how I see my work going forward and the energy I bring to projects and the people I work with. Design is not confined to a set of tools or disciplines; it is a way of thinking, of being in the world, and of finding paths to new possibilities and futures.
When we look around at the inadequacies of the environments, systems, technologies, and businesses that surround us, we should not feel disheartened but energised by the opportunities for improvement. There is no shortage of work to be done, and I, for one, want to get busy doing it. Anything else is stagnation, and we all know where that leads. Nowhere.