Neil Poulton

Neil Poulton graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design (Technology) from Edinburgh Napier University in 1985 and was awarded the SIAD (Chartered Society of Designers) medal for the best British product design student of the year.
In 1988, he completed his Master’s degree in Design at the Domus Academy in Milan, under the supervision of the Italian architect Andrea Branzi and the designer Alberto Meda. Poulton’s mentors included the Italian architect Ettore Sottsass, the German industrial designer Richard Sapper, Isao Hosoe and Anna Castelli Ferrieri.
Neil Poulton made a name for himself in 1989 as the creator of ‘ageing pens’, also known as ‘mutant pens’. These pens were made from a durable, ‘living’ plastic that ‘ages as the layers of colour wear away with use’. The ageing pens were exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Axis Gallery in Tokyo.
Poulton worked for a short period with the French designer Philippe Starck in Paris from 1991 to 1992.
Poulton has been a guest lecturer, visiting professor and assessor of final-year projects at schools around the world, including Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, the Domus Academy in Milan, the University of Western Australia in Perth, in Australia, at EESAB in Rennes, at ENSCI (Les Ateliers) in Paris, and at the École de design Nantes Atlantique in France.
He has won numerous international design awards, including seven French ‘Étoile de l’Observateur du Design’ awards, twelve German ‘Red Dot Design’ awards, five ‘iF’ International Forum Design awards, three French ‘Janus de l’Industrie’ awards, two ‘Compasso d’Oro Recommendation’ awards, and the Red Dot Design ‘Best of the Best’ awards in 1994 and 2007.
His first major solo exhibition, ‘Design by Neil Poulton’, took place in 2013 at the Glyptotheque Museum in Zagreb, Croatia – his ‘Scopas’ lamp was inducted into the first permanent collection of the V&A Dundee in Scotland, in 2018.
Poulton has also served as a judge for international design competitions, including the iF Design Award, the APCI Design Observer, the Hong Kong Design Award (HKDA) in 2018 and the Muse Design Awards in 2020.
Poulton was inducted into the ‘Napier University Alumni Hall of Fame’ in Edinburgh in 2019. Poulton was also featured in ‘Who’s Who in France’ in 2020.