Intelligent Mobility

The programme will deploy a range of teaching/learning strategies to build skills at a number of levels during the MA as follows:

• Personally directed study will be encouraged during the programme and will be a focus for the IRP as part of the strategic/ideological goals of the programme. Such study will be guided by tutors through regular personal and group tutorials as below.
• Personal tutorials will be used to explore and challenge students' attitudes and knowledge about their work in context between individual students and their tutor.
• Group tutorials will be used to debate issues across student cohorts and tutors and to examine ideas at depth.
• Group seminars will be used to provide a range of contextual and ideological knowledge to students on the programme.
• Group workshops and skills training will be used to build key skills in a range of areas during the programme. Typical examples include: specialist CAD training, research skills workshops, bespoke short skills projects.
• Individual interim project presentation and reviews (non-examined) will be used to assess and debate students work during projects - leading to verbal and written feedback being given.
• Final examinations will be used to critically appraise work and provide feedback by an examination board on work submitted for a unit.

Term 1

• People and places: This unit provides a framework to understand how and where future mobility fits into a changing global landscape and how people and place connect through mobility. The unit aims to sensitise you to the scope and limits of different mobility typologies within the mobility mix and highlights the need for design to meet broader infrastructural and social requirements.
• Humanising technology: This unit aims to explore how recent transformational mobility technologies such as autonomy and electrification can be interpreted to provide new and desirable human interactions in mobility. You are expected to gain a profound and critical understanding of emerging technologies and their place in future mobility design.
• You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

• Automotive transitions: This unit focuses on the future of the automotive typology and asks you to reimagine how technology and social trends will influence future automotive design. The unit provides a deep context into the key elements of future automotive design with an emphasis on advanced manufacturing, contemporary socio-cultural issues and questions related to future business models.
• Grand Challenge: In term 2 all School of Design students will participate in the Grand Challenge, School-wide unit. The aim of this unit is to connect and challenge all students in the School through the introduction of a ‘wicked’ design problem that requires a cross disciplinary approach to problem solving which may involve external international partners. This unit and lecture series has been hugely successful in connecting and disrupting disciplines, people, philosophies and approaches to design thinking whilst providing our student body with very unique networking opportunities.
• You'll also take the Core Skills unit (15 credits), which supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Terms 1 and 2

Across terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA.

Term 3

Independent Research Project: This is the final Master’s project and asks students to identify, develop and address a defined research question which is both socially relevant and technically challenging. The work must be documented at all stages for public dissemination. This will take the form of a physical and/or digital (virtual) exhibition of a selection of the students work during their 3 terms. You are responsible for the intellectual and technical evolution of this project and for leading the research and development of ideas and insights through different stages of the design process. This includes working out who the stakeholders are, how to research and the development of thinking through different media; notably from 2D to 3D and to an appropriate level of resolution. The scope of the IRP will be agreed with you, and the support of your tutor and will include the following:

• a clearly articulated research question or problem.
• a defined rationale for the scope of the project including a perspective from the identified global opportunity and the students’ personal skills and motivations.
• a plan/methodology for the development of the work.
• a fully resolved vision of the work in appropriate media and a clear evidence path which has all the necessary elements of research to underpin the logic reasoning and creative decisions to narrate the IRP student journey.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.