3 graduate projects that tackle real-world challenges

Below we highlight how three RCA graduates sought to tackle real-world challenges for their graduate project.

Lucy Jung graduated from MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering in 2019 and is now one of InnovationRCA's start-ups. 

Her project, Charco Neurotech (previously The Moment), is developing a wearable device which emits a low-voltage impulse on-demand, in order to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s and other neural transmission disorders. The vibrotactile stimulation device sits on a user’s sternum and helps decrease stiffness, slowness and improve the fluidity of their movements. 

Pilot testing has showed 100% of the users showed increased speed in their movements and has been shown to overcome hesitancy and immobilisation in Parkinson’s sufferers – enabling them to live richer lives. Trials are showing that The Moment’s technology might have similar benefits to sufferers of other neural transmission disorders.

Data has become the world's most valuable resource. Ibiye Camp graduated from MA Architecture in 2019, with her project, Data, the New Black Gold, which explores how data has materialised in the West African landscape and the spatial consequences of its production, consumption and storage. 

This project is set in two West African cities: Lagos, Nigeria and Freetown, Sierra Leone. The project highlights the biases and conflicts of data consumption and the tensions between government, private corporations and citizens. The aim of the project is to explore how data could be utilised to give restitution to citizens during this time of technological investments and developments from overseas. 

The representation of the project uses data leaks and technological glitches of data collection to emphasise the conflicts of digital infrastructure. The technological glitches are used to question the disconnect of technology to the reality of the landscape.

Flora Weil graduated from MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering in 2019. Her graduating project, Particle Parasites, presented a series of hacks for climate alteration technologies. Each device uses a resource collection method to subvert advances in atmospheric optimisation. The project questions techno-utilitarian fixes to global warming and tells stories emerging from a world in which the weather is made entirely artificial. It examines the trajectory from prediction of the climate to control of the climate, which is suffused with the relation between urgency and technology.

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