A custom executive education programme for Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts collaborating with RCA Ecological Citizenship Network+, ‘ Sustainable Design and Beyond: looking to Ecological Citizenship.’
At a glance
Since 2018, the RCA has delivered custom executive education for the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (SAFA). This year’s workshop focused on Design-Led Innovation to with the theme:
How can Ecological Citizenship encourage a better future?
New and creative ideas for designing a sustainable world.
Led by Dr. Rob Phillips and Emily Boxall( Ecological Citizenship Network+), the programme was a close collaboration with SAFA academics Zhang Yujie, Chen Yiqi, Jiang Cen, Shi Chong, Chen Wenjia, and Zhou Tianfu, guiding students to create design-led interventions for a more regenerative future.
At the end of the course, the participating 100 students gained experience building positive design-led responses and interventions aimed at empowering individuals, communities and organisations to contribute to more sustainable practices and the common good.
Key details
Gallery
More information
Course structure
The 5 day short course was hosted by Shanghai Academy of Fine Art (SAFA), with a cross-disciplinary unit including: designers, artists, digital artists, calligraphers, art historians. The course included a variety of:
- Keynote talks
- Practical exercises
- Creative workshops
- Concept development
- Storytelling and prototyping
- Evaluation and iterative development
As part of the programme, the students created their own research tools and worked dynamically to unpack intervention points for their deployment.
Ideas ranged from re-thinking how architecture impacts bird life, to viewing the world as a dragon fly to the ‘future mundane’ where communities support new modes of Ecological Citizenship.
Students created over 300 concepts to explore the world but also pro-actively shared their cultures and offered new perspectives on the world.
During the final presentations, student groups presented fully edited short films, visions of the future, live performances, songs, creative expressions and new digital interactions.
The work celebrated the cross-cultural collaboration, learning and exchange that can happen within the team at the RCA.
Course outcome
Participants came away from this course with:
- Creative confidence to work in a team on design-led innovation.
- Practical experience in applying the design methodology on a site-specific project.
- A reinvigorated sense of what can be achieved through a human-centred approach.
- The capabilities to question wider sustainable systems and interconnected challenges.
- Unparalleled opportunity to experience what it is like to study at the RCA, benefiting from the latest knowledge, resources and tools which they can apply to their studies in the future.
- RCA Certificate of achievement on completion.
About Custom Executive Education at the RCA
Through our portfolio of innovation masterclasses and workshops, the RCA provides senior-level professionals and business leaders with critical business skills. We deliver courses for businesses, organisations and universities on design thinking, service design, creative leadership, disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship, human-centred design, artificial Intelligence and healthcare design.
We can tailor the curriculum for a day, a week, or several weeks over the course of a year with interrelated projects. Courses can be delivered online, on-campus, hybrid or at partner organisations. Previous courses have been delivered in Dubai, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Germany and Mexico.
Find out more about RCA custom courses.
Please get in contact with us if you would like to discuss developing a custom programme:
- Hattie Allen, Executive Education Manager
