Interior Design

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College-wide units.

Term 1

You'll take an initial Primer unit, which will engage you in the exploration and synthesis of the principles and methods of critical ideas in interior space. It introduces you to ideas and the processes that will enable participants to synthesise thinking and research in the design of interior spaces. The work in this unit will be based on a focused exploration that affords you the possibilities to challenge your thinking through research, design, exploration in order to generate new meanings for buildings, objects, spaces and the elements within them.

You will also participate in Media Studies. The unit aims to increase your critical engagement with media and space. Through this unit you will be supported to increase your cross-disciplinary communication and you will be challenged to expand your media practice beyond architecture’s reliance on media as purely representation.

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in the College-wide unit AcrossRCA; see below for more details.

You'll also take an Elective unit.

Term 2

The Platforms unit engages you in the origination and development of your own project in relation to the thematic concerns of the programme platforms. Each platform in this unit is design to emphasise a particular way of thinking or aspect of the design of the interior.

Platform themes are the provocations or generators of ideas that you will utilise in the development of your own research and projects. It is anticipated that you will use the platforms interests to assist in the determination of your own practice interests and ultimately your professional identities.

In term 2 all School of Architecture students be offered a School-wide Elective unit.

Term 3

The purpose of the Independent Research Project (IRP) is to enable you to apply the intellectual, technical and professional skills that you have developed throughout the programme to a challenging self-set brief. The project you are undertaking is one that is normally informed and advanced from the work previously undertaken in the previous platform unit.

Still working within the thematic concerns of the platforms, you are expected to have agreed a research and project proposal, a brief, with your tutor that identifies the parameters of your project, including its aims, rationale, approaches and methodologies and possible resource implications.

Situated at the core of your RCA student experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College- wide AcrossRCA unit supports how you respond to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds by engaging you in a global creative network that draws on expertise within and beyond the institution. It provides an extraordinary opportunity for you to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts.

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations from internationally acclaimed speakers that will encourage you to think beyond the discourses of art, architecture, communication, and design, and extend into other territories such as economics, ethics, science, engineering, medicine or astrophysics.

In interdisciplinary teams you will be challenged to use your intellect and imagination to respond to urgent contemporary themes, providing you with an opportunity to develop innovative and disruptive thinking, critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world. This engagement with interdisciplinary perspectives and practices is designed both to complement your disciplinary studies and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.