David Constantine

Brief description of achievement:

David Constantine co-founded Motivation, a charity that works to improve the quality of life of people with mobility impairment. One of the ways they do this is by designing and making affordable wheelchairs for people in developing countries in 1990. David himself is wheelchair dependent, following a diving accident in 1982. Motivation now produces wheelchairs from local materials in 17 countries and to date 25,000 wheelchair users world-wide have benefited from his endeavours.

Detailed description:

Motivation was set up in 1990 by David Constantine, Simon Gue and Richard Frost. David and Simon were both Royal College of Art students and they entered and won a design competition set by Lord Snowdon. This set David and Simon on a course that ultimately led him to them founding Motivation, and addressing the need for affordable wheelchairs in developing countries.

Using their prize money, and with help from Sir Jocelyn Stevens, then Rector of the College, David, Richard and Simon travelled to Bangladesh with their design in 1989 and, finding great interest, returned to set up Motivation's first workshop the following year.

David has worked tirelessly to develop what began as a student project into a sustainable charity that gives disabled people in the developing world access to a wheelchair that is suited to their disability, need and environment.

Motivation's principles are that the chairs should be made from local materials and be suitable to the local environment, that local workshops should be self-sustaining once the designers have left and - wherever possible - wheelchair users should be employed in the workshops.

Today, more than 25,000 people in 17 countries have benefited from the use of a Motivation wheelchair. Many more have been helped into employment by Motivation's vocational training schemes and hundreds of children with cerebral palsy have been given access to education via Motivation's special seating unit.

"David Constantine has founded and developed the Motivation group - one of the most important initiatives in design for disabled people to have happened over the last twenty years. David has led Motivation, shaped its policy and its creativity and tirelessly promoted its work and its principles all over the world. I have known David well since his postgraduate student days, and have seen him develop as a leader and motivator, as well as a creative talent."

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector, Royal College of Art

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