Key details
Date
- 11 November 2021
Author
- RCA
Read time
- 1 minute
Current participants in the Terra Carta Design Lab attended a unique event at COP26 this month hosted by our Vice-Chancellor, Dr Paul Thompson who was joined by HRH The Prince of Wales and our Chancellor, Sir Jony Ive.
Participants in the Terra Carta Design Lab had the unique opportunity to showcase their projects for solutions to the climate crisis in front of a COP26 audience including HRH and Sir Jony Ive, as well representatives of Terra Carta Design Lab sponsors from across industry and signatories of our partners in the project, the Sustainable Markets Initiative.
The participants present represented a broad cross-section of the projects currently participating in the Terra Carta Design Lab which brings together emerging architects, designers, artists, engineers, historians and writers from amongst our students and recent alumni with the opportunity to win seed funding for their ideas from the Sustainable Markets Initiative and InnovationRCA, as well as mentorship from InnovationRCA and Sir Jony Ive.
Dr Paul Thompson spoke of the unique history the RCA has as a centre of innovation in Art & Design with our current students and recent alumni taking up their place in this strong tradition. He said: ‘The Terra Carta Design Lab is a call to action to save the planet through the creative insights and power of design. The interventions our students and alumni are making at the RCA represent credible ways of tackling the climate crisis.’
“The interventions RCA students and alumni are making represent credible ways of tackling the climate crisis.”
Vice-Chancellor of the Royal College of Art
The projects showcased at the event included included Intimate Ecologies by Linn Phyllis; Fixed-Sail Artificial Jellyfish for Extracting Microplastics by Henry Parkin & Eve Townsend; Zero Carbon Cotton Club by Scarlett Yang & Xiaoyu Wu; Soft Living Architecture: Living Agal Biofilm by Victoria Geaney & Claire Miller; Weird Ecologies by Rosa Whiteley & Nico Alexandroff.
Alongside showcasing our participants, the event programme included Professor Ashley Hall and Dr Laura Ferrarello from our School of Design, and Dr Adrian Lahoud and Beth Hughes from our School of Architecture, who spoke to the audience about the ways design and architecture can address the state of the planet – and the strides made by students at the RCA to effect these changes.