Strategic Pillar One
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Creating and delivering the best art and design education, dialogue and research.
Our ambition
Our world-leading approach to critical thinking and creative making champions interdisciplinarity and collaboration – using art and design to reframe the possibilities of the humanities, technology, and ethics. We experiment, question and discover, putting research and practice at our heart, to equip students for new futures and opportunities and build on current knowledge.
To achieve this, we will:
- Create new ways of thinking about pedagogical excellence in art and design.
- Deliver an academic portfolio and School structure designed for a changing world.
- Drive a strategic and integrated approach to world-leading research.
- Practice continuous innovation, embracing emerging technologies.
Examples of how we will work towards this in the next five years:
- Drive pedagogical excellence by developing pedagogical reflection structures and programmes that ensure we stay at the forefront of good practice – culminating in a biennial RCA Global Art and Design Summit.
- Launch a new Research and Innovation Strategy for 2026–30, bringing interdisciplinary researchers together across the College to build on our strengths, and focus on where we can make the most difference.
- Create two new College-wide Research Institutes focused on sustainability and regenerative practice, and the impacts of future technologies and convergence science; and new cross-College Research Groups and Labs.
- Conduct a review of our Schools to ensure our structure represents the changing nature of our disciplines.
- Curate and update our portfolio of taught postgraduate programmes to ensure they keep us at the cutting edge of our disciplines, technologies and practices, informed by the research of our teaching faculty.
- Explore adaptations for environments affected by climate change, through teaching, research and collaboration with industry.
- Review Technical Services provision to ensure a student- focused, academically integrated offer that embraces the opportunities of new technologies.
This work will be enabled by:
- Investing in the historic Darwin building to put creative energy back at the heart of our traditional Kensington home, and ensure world-leading facilities.
- Enhancing our research culture, including improving academic and research career development.
- Researching, innovating with and defining the role of AI and emerging technologies, both as a creative tool and as a practical tool to improve staff and student experience.
- Ensuring sustainability and regenerative practices are embedded in our programmes, as well as in our cross-programme and cross-School units.
- Creating resources and structures to support academic professional development.
- Expanding the range of research funders supporting the College’s world-leading work, including scaling up business and philanthropic support.
- Building links between research, student learning and entrepreneurship to create more successful creative start-ups through an enhanced engagement programme.
