Our students are particularly good at
combining things that others wouldn’t
have thought of combining. They operate
across multiple art and design disciplines,
working within them, enhancing them
and producing new knowledge. It’s
synthetic thinking, applied in addition to
analytic thinking, and it produces new
ways of utilising ideas and solutions that
result in outcomes that would not arise
from mono-disciplinary methods and
approaches, or from STEM alone.
Our students develop the confidence
to tackle global problems through
experimental learning: a learning-by-doing
model, rather than learning
from teachers. It’s a method that
embeds confidence, founding deep
disciplinary knowledge in trial, error and
experimentation. When they reach a
solution, our students know not only that
what they are doing works, but why.
Co-creation, working in groups and teams,
brings the ability to articulate ideas.
This happens most readily when you
accept a brain surgeon to study sculpture,
or an ophthalmologist to study vehicle
design, or a Sanskrit scholar to study
product design. These are real examples of
recent RCA alumni, the last being Roland
Lamb, RCA Design Products alumnus
and inventor of ROLI, the keyboard that’s
revolutionised music production and
features in an Oscar-winning movie.
Supporting this ethos is InnovationRCA, the College's centre for enterprise and entrepreneurship, which helps students and graduates transform compelling ideas into successful businesses.
Innovation is also at the heart of our pioneering Research, whether by individual staff, specialised, multidisciplinary Research Centres or Knowledge Exchange.
