
Retail Futures - Rethinking the High Street
An intensive interior design course radically rethinking future retail environments.
Key details
Fees
- Early bird fee: £1080
- ends 18 April 2021
- Regular fee: £1200
- from 19 April 2021
Location
-
Online
6 sessions over 3 weeks
2, 5, 6, 12, 13 & 16 July 2021
11am-2pm BST each session

High-street interior design reflects and responds to cultural change and must evolve rapidly to meet current trends and desires. The challenges currently faced by the High Street open up an opportunity for radical rethinking and for the questioning of its place within the city, its historical constraints and preconceptions.
The intensive course has been carefully designed to stimulate both conceptual and practical thinking, helping you gain practical knowledge, provoking discussion and inspiration, and developing industry skills within a supportive and creative learning environment.
The course offers an academic insight and experimental design workshop bringing people around the world to explore:
- an overview and rethinking of High Street Retail practice
- raise questions and examine post-Covid context for retail practice, with focus on the threshold of street
- reassessing consumer behaviours and question brand engagement in response to current challenges such as Climate Change, post-Covid, social media and online practices.
About the course
Course Structure
Session 1
- Introduction and welcome
- Lectures from RCA Interior Futures academics
- Participant presentations (Pecha Kucha)
- Workshop Introduction and short project brief
Session 2-5
- Lectures from RCA Interior Futures academics
- Lectures from special guest speakers
- Workshop
Session 6
- Introduction to crit panel
- Finalisation of projects
- Final group review with guest reviews
- Sum-up and conversation with guest speakers
Disclaimer: The information given is accurate at the time of publication, however, the RCA reserves the right to amend the described course as circumstances dictate.
Personal and organisational benefits
Benefits to you and your organisation include:
- insights into global best practice in retail design
- experience in critical, creative and insightful thinking
- returning to your practice with a greater ability to innovate
- connecting to retail design trends in a post-Covid environment
What will you learn?
You will learn:
- how to research and question current retail practice that might lead to testing, rethinking and reworking the retail experience in an intensive design project
- creative and conceptual thinking relating to popular culture and the streetscape to translate ideas into practical spatial designs
- how to plan and think about customer experience and engagement
- how to engage your customers by using advanced retail design communication in spatial environments
How will you learn?
This intensive masterclass will blend lectures, workshops and seminars with one-to-one consultation sessions, and design reviews with academic and renowned retail designers.
You will participate in:
- action-based practical tasks
- collaborative, iterative teamwork
- extended lectures delivered by expert RCA staff and special guest speakers
- project workshops
- opportunities to network with visiting retail designers and peers on the programme.
Leading retail thinkers/designers joining the intensive to be confirmed soon.
Online delivery
The course is organised in synchronous sessions in a live virtual environment that combines various digital platforms and tools.
Zoom
Using the videoconferencing service Zoom, the RCA's esteemed academics and facilitators deliver a mix of:
- live lectures
- case studies
- guided assessments
- presentations
Participants interact with the faculty and peers in breakout rooms in real time.
Miro
Participants engage in cross-functional team work with the use of visual collaboration tools.
Through the online whiteboard platform Miro, participants get to:
- interact with various formats and templates
- plan and brainstorm ideas
- create processes and workshop activities in the digital workspace
Moodle
The College's learning platform Moodle is personalised according to the course's requirements to provide participants with a secure integrated system where they can access the course content.
The hub hosts a range of useful resources to enable the learning experience, including comprehensive timetables, pre-reading materials, course slides, curated videos, tutorials and session recordings.
Slack
Participants stay connected and communicate via the channel-based messaging platform Slack throughout the whole duration of the course.
In this space, the academics, facilitators and delegates get to network, plan the course activities, share documents and files during the live sessions or offline.
Course outcomes
Participants will:
- explore Future Retail and the context we now find ourselves living in
- examine the topic, culminating in individual provocations which will be debated by the group and visiting critics
- learn how to research and question current retail practice
- learn how to plan and think about customer experience
- learn how to engage customers by using advanced retail design communication in spatial environments
- develop industry skills within a supportive and creative learning environment
- network with visiting retail designers and peers
Who should attend?
This course is highly suited to design creatives across the disciplines interested in producing innovative and immersive retail design experiences that are informed by future trends.
These may include:
- interior designers, architects and other spatial designers
- policy makers and planning consultants.
- retail designers
- retail industry professionals
- window-display specialists
- stylists
- merchandise designers
- exhibition designers
- commercial design practitioners
- fashion industry professionals and fashion retail
- enthusiasts
- XD /user-experience designers
Admission criteria
Participants must:
- be either an interior design, architecture, branding or other spatial practice graduate
- and/or have 2-3 years professional experience working in retail design or a related design field
- and/or be a graduate of a design/creative discipline
- have advanced-level of English
Course team
Gallery
Contact us
Get in touch with Jo Chounta if you'd like to find out more about this or any of our other short courses.
[email protected]
