Royal College of Art at London Design Festival

The Royal College of Art will present a series of multidisciplinary events and displays for the 22nd edition of the London Design Festival, positioning London as the design capital of the world and running from 14–22 September 2024.

The Royal College of Art’s highlight events and displays include an exhibition of the RCA’s finalists in the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Terra Carta Design Lab, an exhibition from RCA’s new research and innovation projects including AiDLab, Ecological Citizen(s) and the Textiles Circularity Centre, and an exhibition from RCA’s MA Design Products students in partnership with Brompton Design District.

Located at RCA’s Battersea Campus, the public will have the opportunity to discover the Royal College of Art’s 10 finalists for this year’s edition of the Sustainable Markets Initiative's Terra Carta Design Lab.

The exhibition will be open from:

12–5pm, Friday 20 September
12–6pm, Saturday 21 September

Following on from the global success of the 2022 edition, the Royal College of Art partnered for a second time with the Terra Carta Design Lab to invite designers and innovators from the world’s leading universities, to find solutions to the current climate and biodiversity crisis and produce breakthrough solutions for Nature, People and Planet. This year's shortlisted projects display high-impact solutions in strikingly innovative forms such as, a soluble-on-demand polymer composite, recyclable RFID tags and a new, novel textile made from truly regenerative fibres.

Over the course of London Design Festival, an exhibition at 200 Battersea Road will display projects from RCA’s AiDLab, the first research platform to focus on artificial intelligence in design, alongside Ecological Citizen(s), a four year Network+ aiming to catalyse Ecological Citizenship for positive climate action, and the Textiles Circularity Centre, a programme working towards enabling a circular textiles economy through interdisciplinary research.

The RCA has also partnered with Brompton Design District to present Curious Habits - Design as Learning, a series of works from RCA’s MA Design Products students asking the question, is there design without learning? The exhibition explores themes of insight, learning and change, and the creative relationship between the designer and the object.