Sevra Davis, Manager of the RSA Student Design Awards, gave a presentation on the competition’s brief to the latest batch of Limkokwing University’s Global Campus programme students in London on 29 October.
The RSA Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) Student Design Awards competition brief, titled ‘Creative Conditions’, to “design and develop a vision and business case for an environment or situation that prompts and fosters creative thinking.”
Sevra Davis began with a brief history of the organisation, which was founded in a coffee shop in Covent Garden in 1754, and noted that “at the heart of the RSA’s contemporary mission and public debates about the future prospects for the human race is the question: ‘Can we go on like this?’ Will the ideas and values which transformed our world in the last two centuries be sufficient to find solutions to the challenges we now face or do we need new ways of thinking?”
Ms. Davis then played three excellent, original and entertaining videos which had been submitted as entries to previous competitions: ‘Re-Imagining Work’ by Dave Coplin, a well-realised, funny and very informative animation concerned with the changing nature of work practices; ‘The Power to Create’ by Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of the RSA); and ‘Anyone Can Change the World’ by Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize winner). The videos can be seen here and here.
Other winning entries for earlier competitions were also showcased, including Julie Berdou’s mobile workplace (winner of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Award for the Best Business Case).
Following these videos screening, Ms. Davis then described the project brief in detail, noting the benefits for participants and winners. Details on how to contact and submit to the RSA were also given, as well as online resources, in particular the RSA Student Design Awards Toolkit, which is available here.
One student from each team was invited to attend the RSA’s ‘Commercial Awareness’ workshop on 5th November 2014. The workshop was run by experts from RBS and NatWest Banks and concerned with the business aspects of the project, including how to design a business plan, SWOT analysis, etc.
Sevra Davis’s presentation was an excellent overview of the good work of the RSA, and extremely helpful in explaining the project brief to the attending students. Ms. Davis was very enthusiastic about the multi-disciplinary approach and multi-national origins of the students of Limkokwing University’s Global Campus programme. She opined that the Global Campus programme is a great platform for doing these projects, which was unique in her experience.