MDes Design Futures Royal College of Art

Take your career and practice to the next level

Transform the world and your career through the potential of Design

The RCA is proud to launch a new Design Futures MDes programme for the start of the 2023/24 academic year.

In an era of turbulence for people, planet and nature, how we navigate our future is more critical than ever.

The Design Futures programme is designed to enable you to work across all the disciplines and beyond, to build future-shaping knowledge and skills, address the challenges we face, envision and then navigate towards a preferred future through design-led interventions. It will allow you to ask the ‘big questions’ about disruptive innovation, ethics for design, design resilience, shared values, future forecasting and design for safety.

Design Futures is focused on professional development and action, identified and implemented through research methods and strategies.

The programme is aimed both at postgraduate students and career changers, and offers a balance between core knowledge, elective and collaborative work and a self-defined research project – enabling you to choose your own areas of interest, while developing the skills to implement your ideas. It will take a ‘burst-mode’ approach to teaching and learning.

Within the overall credits of electives on offer, you'll have the opportunity to further define your learning journey by choosing electives in areas such as Design Safety, Design Resilience, Design Ethics or Design Innovation.

What you'll study

The teaching will be delivered by a combination of core and elective areas of study, which will include an extended independent research project, and may also include work-based learning such as placements or action research projects.

The Royal College of Art has been ranked the number 1 university for art & design internationally for the 9th consecutive year, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023 – the largest world-wide survey of academic and industry opinion.