Announcing RCA2026: School of Design EXPO

From 16 - 19 July, the School of Design EXPO highlights the groundbreaking work of graduating postgraduate students from the RCA’s School of Design and Intelligent Mobility Design Centre. Hosted across the RCA’s Battersea and Kensington campuses, the exhibition celebrates works from a diverse range of programmes. Battersea will showcase MA Design Products, MDes Design Futures, MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering, MA Intelligent Mobility, MA Service Design, and MA Textiles, while Kensington will host MA Fashion.

Examples of student work include:

Varun Bisht (MDes Design Futures) combines user experience, systems thinking, and human-centred design to address complex social and environmental challenges. He introduces a Regenerative Footwear Framework and speculative prototype that redefines ownership boundaries, enabling brands to retain product custody and smoothly transition into circular systems.

Oliver Stiff (MA Design Products) explores the intersection of fashion and furniture, drawing on garment construction, tailoring, and bodily silhouette in his designs. His project explores the transformation of luxury offcut fabrics and deadstock textiles, materials that might otherwise be discarded or destroyed to preserve a brand’s exclusivity, into high-end furniture pieces creating a dialogue between fashion, craftsmanship, and sustainable design.

Rikke Geelen (MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering) draws on her international experiences to tackle challenges in climate change and social equity, using design as a catalyst for impactful and lasting transformation. ‘Good Taste’ is a community hub system that connects dinner party hosts with seasonal, local ingredients, using an AI agent to generate plant-forward menus that inspire their guests to become hosts themselves.

Yingao Li (MA Intelligent Mobility) is an exterior-focused transportation designer who explores how automotive DNA, material experimentation and visual storytelling can be translated into contemporary form language. ‘Fragile.0’ is a Hyundai concept vehicle that redefines luxury through the lens of transience and fragility, using physical design methods like tearing and crushing metallic paper to shape its exterior form language.

Saumya Patel and Tanaya Chitale (MA Service Design) are designers with shared interests in systemic design, social design, and wellbeing.'When Rest Isn't Recovery’ uses research, co-design, and physical artefacts to expose the disconnect between regulatory rest and actual bodily recovery for short-haul cabin crew, presenting a design-led argument for systemic changes to aviation welfare.

Olivia Ekelund (MA Textiles) is a textile artist who combines painting, screen printing, and embroidery to create richly detailed compositions that weave together historical references and contemporary culture, balancing humour and elegance. Olivia presents a series of tapestries that blend art history and autobiographical elements to reimagine women’s histories and question what labour and happiness look like in contemporary society.

Cornesha Harris (MA Fashion) explores fashion as a material language of multilocal identity. Influenced by Taiye Selasi’s ideas surrounding rituals, relationships, and restrictions, she investigates how inherited objects, everyday gestures, and embodied repetition shape experiences of belonging, turning the garment into a living archive carrying traces of migration, intimacy, and continuity.

Free and open to the public, the official schedule for RCA2026 can be accessed here.