Rachel Armstrong

Rachel was recommended to me by Michael Pawlyn, a distinguished architect who worked with Nicholas Grimshaw on the Biomes at the Eden Project. In that particular case I was looking for a speaker who could make biomimicry and its related topics understandable and accessible to an intelligent but not necessarily well informed audience. Having worked with Rachel now on a couple of different projects, I can thoroughly recommend her as a speaker. She has everything a conference producer like myself needs: she is warm, articulate, emphatic, charming, painstaking, conscientious, much more good looking than anyone as clever as she is has a right to be, and most important of all presents, perhaps uniquely, a radical re-assessment of the mental processes that distinguish the arts and the sciences. She stands for what I call a new humane or humanist way of thinking that re-draws the relationship between the two essentially inimical disciplines, and proposes holistic rather than divisive ways of seeing. Her work in itself is fascinating to a wide range of audiences, not just the scientific or architectural. It can be characterised as blue sky thinking, but on the other hand it is based on hard scientific process. Her Senior TED Fellowship is itself just about the best recommendation possible. I was delighted to be able to give Rachel a platform at Eco Build, at which she presented in one of my own seminar streams and also the more public Arena programme. In fact she put a whole session together for me with three other speakers, going to considerable length to find a substitute at the last minute when one of them pulled out. I have written about her work for one of the professional design journals, and am enthusiastically working to create the next opportunity for her to present in one of my programmes. As you can see, I am great fan. She has important things to say, she says them delightfully, and more people should hear her.
Director of Seminars at Eco Build, Grand Designs Live, Clerkenwell Design Week,

“Thanks again for putting so much effort into this project. From my point of view this has been one of the most interesting projects I have ever worked on. Not just because of the tool you created is so super great, but mainly because you worked so hard and passionately on this project - so thanks for that”
Futures Specialist, Consumer Vision, NOKIA

Dr., Rachel Armstrong first came to my attention at the Picnic conference, a high profile event in Amsterdam featuring leading thinkers and practicioners in the fields of design, technology, science, media and entertainment. There she delivered two brilliant lectures in two different contexts: one was about the need for interdisciplinary scientists and designers. This was for a selected group of Dutch top students from over the whole country, The second speech was her main speech in the conference hall for the prime audience of the Picnic event. Here, in a very stimulating 20 minutes, with absolute clarity and dazzling command of her material, she took the audience through territories of knowledge and research practice where 'no-one has gone before' . This 20 minute brain frying trip left the audience not only with the sensation that they had made sudden leap of 15 years into the future, but also with new concepts, categories and sensations by which to coherently approach and productively turn over notions as varied as environmental degradation, urban planning, evolution, and industrial engineering. A combination of different aspects convinced me to try and engage Dr. Rachel Armstrong to exhibit, to speak and conduct a masterclass at the TransNatural event. One main aspect was her abilty to speak engagingly and clearly to people from different levels of professional experience without having to compromise in any way the complexity of her subject matter. The second one is of course her specific interests and ground breaking practice of developing autonomous technologies that are modelled on life like processes, and that are environmentally harmless though extremely powerful. My expectations were, needless to say, very high. I hoped for similarly exciting lectures, groundbreaking ideas and the general sensation of intellectual renewal that I had experienced during the first two lectures I saw her deliver. Dr. Rachel Armstrongs performance at TransNatural was without any reservation outstanding. She exceeded any reasonable expectations that a first time member of her audience could have had, but since I had a taste before, I knew what was coming. The reactions of the audience (among whom some of the most advanced design thinkers, a couple of established and highly critical visual artists, some established technicians from the most reputed research institutions of the Netherlands) closely resembled my own at my first encounter with her work. I am very much looking forward to new occasions that would justify me to ask Dr. Rachel Armstrong to again to come and speak, and share her amazing insights and research practice.
Programme Manager of Virtual Platform

I invited Rachel Armstrong to give a speech in the context of an international brokerage event about Clean Technologies, in the session about Energy-Efficient Buildings which I was chairing (see more about it under www.meet4cleantech.eu). As her field of research is relatively vast, and not directly focusing on the topic of the session, she took an active part in discussing in details the elements of her research that would be the most pertinent for the audience, in particular the industry (half of the participants were from the construction sector). She gave a brilliant talk, supported by multimedia and artistic graphics of an amazing quality, bridging architecture, design, chemistry and arts in a truly inspiring style. Both academic and industry participants were captivated by her presentation, which perfectly matched the expectations I had as well.
National Contact Point (NCP) ,Information and Communication Technologies, Euresearch Head Office