Collaborative research studentships provide opportunities for PhD students to gain first hand experience of work outside an academic environment. The support provided by both an academic and non-academic supervisor enhances the employment-related skills and training a research student gains during the course of their award. The studentships also encourage and establish links that can have benefits for both collaborating partners, providing access to resources and materials, knowledge and expertise that may not otherwise have been available and also provide social, cultural and economic benefits to wider society.

This studentship is a collaboration between Photography at the RCA (led by Professor Olivier Richon and Yve Lomax) and the Word and Image Deaprtment at the Victoria and Albert Museum, starting in October 2011. The studentship offers the opportunity to propose an investigation that centres on specific themes, interests, forms of classifications and documentation that arise from the Photography collection at the V&A Museum. The aim is to construct a specific corpus that will form the basis for description and interpretation, in order to unearth new relations between bodies of work, looking at overlooked meanings and representations. The research aims to engage with new forms of writing, that considers academic scholarship as well as more open subjective readings of an image and a text. It addresses the question of writing as a form that produces meaning and interpretation. The model, however, is not fiction or ‘creative writing’, but writing as a critical, creative and theoretical mode of investigation that articulates and constructs new meanings from photographic representations.

This studentship, starting in October 2011, is a collaboration between History of Design at the RCA (led by Dr Sarah Teasley) and the Science Museum (led by Dr Peter Morris). The history of X-ray crystallography's development and subsequent impact on our understanding of the physical world is well-researched within the history of science; less well known is the role played by these new images and concepts in physically forming spaces and objects of daily life in the period. Drawing particularly on the extensive X-ray crystallography related collections at the Science Museum and the Museum's collection of 1950s household objects as well as archives and oral histories, the project will investigate the relationship between scientific discovery, the popular dissemination of science and design in postwar British. The project will explore the impact of scientific discovery and its popular imaging on design practice and production, and raise awareness within the history of science of the importance of particular choices for data visualisation on the course of scientific understanding and discovery. The studentship will provide the opportunity to contribute to the planned Making Modern Science Gallery at the Science Museum.

In 2010 the Design Products department at the RCA and the Victoria and Albert Museum were awarded two PhD studentships under the title Emerging Design Practice and Curating: Paradigms and parameters. Two students, one project-based and one theory-based, began their studies during the 2010/11 academic year. Julia Lohmann is undertaking a PhD by Project investigating the museum as both a repository for knowledge and an upholder and disseminator of good design. She is exploring curatorial and educational approaches towards design that challenge the observer’s perception of values, ethics and material usage. Gillian Russell is undertaking a PhD by Thesis, which explores how museums enable and constrain the development and dissemination of relations between objects, people and concepts. 

In 2009 the History of Design department at the RCA and the Victoria and Albert museum were awarded a PhD studentship in the field of Japanese design during the period of the "bubble economy" (baburu keiki) and its aftermath. This boom-and-bust period (1986 to 1991) bears a striking resemblance to recent events in the global economy. The years prior to and during the bubble were an extraordinary moment in design; Japan's postwar emphasis on technological innovation gave way to an expansively creative moment, centred on design for individual consumption as part of an expanded emphasis on pleasure in daily life. Hui-Ying Kerr took up the studentship in October 2010. Her PhD by Thesis is exploring the notion of identity in Japanese material culture, and the ways in which Japan used its material culture to refashion itself post-war, both domestically and abroad.

In 2006, the RCA was awarded funding to appoint three PhD studentships, in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, in the fields of Modern Craft: History, Theory, Practice. The first three year studentship commenced in October 2006 with Steve Brown, based in the Department of Ceramics & Glass, explored new image-based technologies and their impact on the individual practitioner, both past and present. The second studentship was held by Catharine Rossi, based in the Department of History of Design, and explored the transition to modernity in the practice, dissemination and consumption of modern craft in postwar Italy between 1945 and 1960. Steve and Catharine both graduated in July 2011. The third studentship, based in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery, commmenced in October 2008 with Stephen Knott investigating amateur practice in modernity.