The Interview – Royal College Of Art’s Kerry Curtis

What do Thomas Heatherwick, Sir Ridley Scott, Morag Myerscough, Jay Osgerby, Ben Kelly, Erdem Moralıoğlu, Ross Lovegrove, Sir James Dyson, Tomoko Azumi, Bianca Saunders and Pentagram partner Marina Willer have in common? They’re all alumni of the Royal College of Art.

A postgraduate-only institution, London’s RCA has been ranked number one for art and design in the world for 11 consecutive years (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015-2025).

Professor Kerry Curtis puts the RCA’s outsized impact down to its emphasis on research, innovation and critical thinking. The College attracts creative risk-takers, she says. “If you’re really motivated to make a difference, if you’ve got ideas, and you’re inspired and curious about the world, that’s the kind of student we’re looking for.”

She describes how students and staff share a desire to do exceptional creative work and to think about the future in terms of artistic outcomes, design, products and experiences, digital and immersive technologies.

Because this isn’t innovation for innovation’s sake, but rather the focus is on design as a force for good. “The academics and leadership here believe that a university has a civic role to create benefits for local and global communities,” Curtis adds. “We also recognise that design is undergoing a period of change, with priorities shifting to a more values-led approach. At the RCA, this is demonstrated in how our teaching looks to support, empower and connect.”

This shines through the student work at the final shows, open days, exhibitions and events held in the UK, around the world and online each year. “Postgraduates come to us because they want to be part of that.”

For the students, this urge to make a difference comes from “the weight and pressure, particularly on young people, to improve the world,” she says. “They’re really savvy about what they want and where they want to take their ideas, and they come with curiosity and a huge desire to make a really positive impact. We’re obviously leading with those same values, so it’s a complete meeting in the middle.”

Curtis points out that although the students and faculty are still inspired to create desirable, well-designed objects, information and interactions, “we find the starting point has changed. The primary research is less self-referential and aesthetics driven, and much more about opening up a dialogue with communities and industries to discover what could be designed or expressed that is of use and is beneficial to others.”

Design as a force for good

The upshot is a raft of output with “design as a force for good” at its heart. One such success story is the POoR Collective (Power Out of Restriction), co-founded by Shawn Adams, who completed an MA in Architecture in 2020. It’s a socially minded design practice aiming to develop communities by elevating young people from underrepresented backgrounds. Explicitly, they work to get youth voices heard in the built environment. In 2023, POoR Collective won the Emerging Design Medal at the London Design Festival, and last year they were involved in the transformation of Clapham Junction’s Falcon Road Bridge from a dark, unwelcoming railway underpass into a vibrant, inclusive, community-owned landmark.

At the start of every academic year, Curtis witnesses each student being taken on a journey of confidence-building. “They have an idea, and they’re supported to push and interrogate it, to investigate it and go deeper, but then to start putting a variety of different lenses and perspectives onto that piece of work. We give our students agency to explore a range of perspectives and recognise cultural identities within their projects.”

The refining of students’ research skills and critical thinking contribute to that confidence. “Our academics and researchers are practitioners in their own right,” Curtis says. “They support and work alongside the students, and encourage them from their own learning, without being too instructional or directive. It’s more about enabling the students and giving them the tools to discover how to develop their own practices.”

And critical thinking goes hand-in-hand with deep research and testing. That could be going out and testing ideas in live spaces, or more desktop and library-based research. Ideas are also tested in terms of materials or techniques, and the way they use the workshops. “So critical thinking is really pushed not just through a text-based approach, but also much more through exploring, experimenting with materials, and the making and designing processes.”

Through this confidence building students are also taught how to best articulate their work, and their intentions for that work. “That’s one of the most important things they learn at the RCA, we’re always getting them to present in different ways. The aim is to help them articulate in a way that will get them the job, that will get them their seed funding, or that first step into their career.”

Throughout, the tutor is there to “hold the group”. Whether that’s a tutor group or a whole programme, the tutor’s role is to make sure the teaching space is open, so that the practice of learning is very dialogic. “You learn through the conversation, you learn through the enactment of testing and articulating your ideas with rigour, and it’s a space where challenge and criticality is important but you’re doing it in this safe environment,” Curtis explains.

The RCA Grand Challenge

Meaningful innovation is fostered through initiatives like the RCA Grand Challenge. Each year, students from programmes across the School of Design are put into interdisciplinary teams to come up with collaborative, innovative solutions to global challenges. “We believe it’s the biggest single institutional postgraduate design project in the world,” she says. These teams can also draw on input from industry and institutional partners, collaborating with organisations as diverse as Tesco, Holland & Barrett, Arup, the RNLI, local government and Logitech.

While the Grand Challenge’s focus is on big social, economic and ecological challenges – the theme this year is Design for Betterment – the approach is “to think about the accumulative impact of little gestures”, she adds. That could be around advancing solutions for climate restoration, improving health outcomes for all, environmental enhancements, or it could be around reducing social and economic inequalities.

For example, in last year’s Grand Challenge, the teams were each assigned a London borough, allowing them to home in on a particular problem and come up with a site-specific solution reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the teams. One team looked to improve the conditions in Wandsworth Prison’s cells with innovative spatial design; another looked to tackle the air pollution found in Hounslow, the London borough bordering Heathrow Airport.

From the Grand Challenge to their many other projects, the College’s key ambition is to give the students as much agency as possible. “That will help them understand how they can develop their creative practice in a really rigorous way from their interest points, and enjoy that period of learning and developing while they’re here,” Curtis explains.

A global network

Put together, the skills of research, innovation and critical thinking combined with confidence and agency make them very sought after. “An RCA graduate is highly valued,” Curtis says, “that’s very obvious by the number of industry partners who want to work with us. We get lots of approaches from businesses who want to draw on our student talent.”

It’s also evident from the generations of alumni who have gone on to make an impact at design agencies and in the business world beyond, at firms including Habitat, IDEO, Pentagram, Barber Osgerby, Dunne & Raby, Dew Gibbons, PA Consultants, PDD Group, Superflux, The Alloy, Regular Practice, Tomato and Vitra.

And it’s evident from those who have been successful in their own right, those who have formed thriving start-ups, and those who are benefiting from the College’s own incubator programme, InnovationRCA. These past cohorts are one of the RCA’s superpowers. With more than 30,000 alumni, the College claims to have one of the world’s biggest art and design postgraduate networks. “This is a diverse, inclusive and international network of artists, designers, creators and innovators who are recognised as leaders shaping our culture and world,” Curtis says.

“And what’s special to the RCA is that as an alumnus, the network stays with you forever. We hold a lot of alumni events and wherever you go, there are people connecting with each other across different generations and different disciplines. Recent alumni have the opportunity to meet someone who’s already 10 or 20 years further into their career, who can offer advice and support, who can offer that encouragement about what the next steps are. This multidisciplinary network has a wealth of knowledge, and they welcome newcomers with open arms.”

Entrepreneurship and commercialisation

Career support is also embedded within the College. InnovationRCA, its centre for entrepreneurship and commercialisation, has an extraordinary track record of transforming students’ ideas into successful high-impact businesses. Since its inception in 2004, it has funded almost 90 design-led start-ups and spinouts – more than 50% of them women-led since 2021. These have gone on to raise more than £150m from other investors.

This dynamism means that despite its relatively small student numbers, the RCA is consistently ranked among the UK’s top 10 universities for the number of spinouts created and the number of equity deals secured by its spinouts. Around 40% of InnovationRCA’s portfolio comprises impact-for-profit companies, and 60% are patent based. Many of them are following the College’s ethos, and are responding to sustainable development goals. Two such businesses are Carbon Cell, a plastic-free foam; and Pyri, a bio-inspired, biodegradable early wildfire detection system designed for remote communities.

Unsurprisingly, the College also stands out beyond expectation in competitions – another way of raising students’ profiles and making them even more attractive to employers. In this year’s global hackathon The HTC Viverse Spark Challenge, RCA students were up against 40 other institutes. They came top in one category and secured two more podium positions. “Those kinds of successes happen all the time,” Curtis says.

As she walks around the College, Curtis gets the sense that it’s vibrating with energy. “The way students of different disciplines interact with each other, the conversations between staff and students in corridors, in the incredible workshops and in the really beautiful library… I get very excited about all that.”

So while it’s no mean feat to be accepted by the RCA, once there, the opportunities to thrive are there for the taking.

The next application deadline is 17 March, with final applications needing to be in by 3 June 2026. Find out how to secure your place at the RCA for 2026 here.

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