James Gilchrist - It All Starts With an Ember
• – • The Welcome Building
About the speaker
CreativeMornings is the world’s largest face-to-face creative community - a free, monthly morning gathering happening in 227 cities worldwide, built around a short talk, informal connection, fresh perspective, and free breakfast!
This Months theme is EMBER
James Gilchrist has spent his career putting the user front and centre, first, last and always.
As Design Manager at Dyson in the New Product Innovation team, James works from blank sheets of paper to turn ideas into best-selling products that solve problems others ignore.
Alongside accidentally becoming a world expert in curling hair with air, he has spent years studying, implementing and evolving how to build a culture that promotes innovation, and gives it the space it needs to breathe.
When not trying to invent products or processes, you can find James inventing new drills as head coach of the Bristol University American Football team and making copious amounts of pasteis de natas.
Local partners
The Welcome Building
The Welcome Building is a central Bristol workspace and events venue designed to bring people together. With light-filled spaces and a strong focus on community, it hosts talks, meet-ups and collaborations that support creativity, connection and shared ideas.
We’re grateful to The Welcome Building for providing the venue and supporting breakfast for this CreativeMornings event.
Restore is a Bristol-based social enterprise using coffee as a way to create opportunity. Through their cafés and community spaces across the city, they support people facing barriers to employment by offering training, confidence-building, and paid work.
Partnering with Restore means we’re not just serving excellent coffee - we’re supporting a local organisation rooted in care, inclusion, and second chances. We’re really proud to have them as our coffee partner for CreativeMornings Bristol.
Additional details
Ideas and embers have more in common than you think. Both have a fragile beginning, easily extinguished by neglect or excess, but with the right balance of patience and care, they can ignite into something far more powerful.
Most ideas don’t fail because they’re bad. They fail because the conditions around them don’t allow them to flourish.
So how do you protect an idea in its earliest stages?
What cultures and behaviours turn innovation into a true tenet of your work, not just another ticket in the backlog?
James will share stories from over a decade of product design at Dyson and beyond, exploring how and why we must give ideas the space to breathe, and the structure and culture they need to truly take hold.
Location
Hosted at
The Welcome Building
Number One, Welcome Building, Bristol
Bristol, Bristol United Kingdom BS2 0PS
When
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