About

Founded in 1960, we are one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary product design and development consultancies, operating globally from our campus of studios, laboratories and workshops in Warwick, UK.

Since the early sixties we have helped a wide variety of companies design and develop market-leading products that users still value every day. Today we focus on building long term relationships with large corporations in four market sectors: ‘Medical and Scientific’, ‘Commercial and Industrial’, ‘Consumer’ and ‘Transport’.

We help our clients achieve success through great product design. Over sixty years of our operation, we have a significant and consistent track record of achieving market-leading and successful products for and with our clients across the sectors in which we operate.

Our focus is to achieve commercially successful product design, that improves the lives of people. From just simply making things easier and more efficient and effective, to improving the quality of life and our sustainable interaction with the world and its resources, so making a growing, positive impact on the world.

DCA is a collection of over 140 extraordinary individuals. Intelligent, creative and thorough, our people make the difference to our clients’ projects.

Each person is an expert in their own field but has the curiosity, understanding and flexibility to reach across traditional inter-disciplinary boundaries. Our organisational structures and team culture encourage this synergistic blending and integration of specialist skills. Our clients benefit not only from each individual’s depth of knowledge and experience but also from a team whose combined strength exceeds the sum of its individual members’ expertise.

Our innovations and creative work have resulted in over 5900 patent applications and more than 3600 granted patents worldwide for our clients since 2000.

Successful innovation starts by asking the right questions in the right ways, to develop the best problem statements. To solve these problems we bring together our creative, highly qualified and experienced staff to create bespoke multidiscipline teams. These teams are trained in a wide range of structured creativity processes and techniques that can be used to help them generate and deliver successful solutions.

In addition to the many awards DCA has won for the quality, commercial effectiveness, and in more recent years, the sustainability of its design work, DCA has also been honoured with many company level awards and listings, such as being ranked as one of the UK’s top private companies in the Sunday Times ‘International Track 100’, winning the Plimsol ‘Outstanding Company Award’, multi-year ranking as the UK’s number one product design consultancy in the ‘Top 100 Consultancy Survey’ by Design Week, and twice winner of the ‘Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade’, one of the most coveted business awards and one of the highest accolades a business can achieve.

Left to right, Rob Bassil (Technical Director), Martin Dunne (Lord Lieutenant Warwickshire), Rob Woolston (MD) and Nick Mival (Creative Director)

In 1960 David Carter CBE RDI founded David Carter Associates (DCA) as “a multidisciplinary consultancy involved in designing products for mass production.“

For over six decades since then we have consistently helped our clients from all regions and market sectors to deliver breakthrough products and experiences from the Stanley Knife to the Euro Shuttle train. David retired in 1992, but his multidisciplinary philosophy remains a cornerstone of our approach.

DCA support a number of local, national and international charities on a regularised basis, as well as reaching out into the local community by visiting schools to support career awareness activities and by sponsoring and taking part in local events.