RSA Student Design Awards 2018-2019

RSA Student Design Awards 2018-2019 now is over!

The RSA Student Design Awards is opened for entries in its 95th year inviting all students and new graduates worldwide with a goal to empower a generation of savvy, employable designers who understand the potential of design to benefit society.

About Competition

Now in its 95th year, the RSA Student Design Awards, an global curriculum and annual student design competition, run by the RSA since 1924, has been recently announced for edition 2018/2019.

Each year this student design awards challenge emerging designers to tackle a range of design briefs focused on pressing social, environmental and economic issues.
The goal is to empower a generation of savvy, employable designers who understand the potential of design to benefit society. This is encouraged through a competition that challenges students and recent graduates to think differently about design, by tackling briefs focused on real-world problems.

This competition includes 10 different briefs that address important social, environmental and economic issues:

• The Circular Emergency – Design a product, service or system that uses circular design principles to make emergency medical care more effective.
• Grand station designs – Design a way to reinvigorate and/or repurpose an ageing commuter train station building, utilising its existing structures and resources.
• Citizens as shapers – Design a product, service or system to that improves the quantity and quality of citizens’ participation in public decision making.
• Beyond the kitchen table – Develop an inclusive kitchen product or spatial solution that enables people of diverse ages and needs to prepare and eat food, entertain, engage in hobbies or work and enjoy life together.
• Alone together – Accounting for how different groups in society are affected by loneliness, design a way to reduce its impact on one or more of the following: physical health, mental health, or access to services.
• Harvesting health – Design a product, system or service which uses sustainable food and farming to help improve people’s health or wellbeing.
• Hidden figures – Design a way to break down the physical, organisational or attitudinal barriers that people with hidden disabilities or impairments can face in society, to enable them to live their lives to the full.
• Take leave – Design a system, service or campaign to encourage or enable parents, employers or society more widely to embrace Shared Parental Leave.
• Living and dying well – Conceive and produce an animation to clarify and illuminate the audio content provided, which explores why talking about illness and planning for death is important for people affected by serious health conditions.
• Moving pictures - Conceive and produce an animation to accompany one of the two selected audio files that will clarify, energies and illuminate the content.

These are the challenges posed by this year’s RSA Student Design Awards briefs:

1) How might we design ways to transform emergency healthcare, address the loneliness crisis, reimagine train stations or kitchens, or enable citizens to shape the decisions that affect them?

2) How can we rethink sustainable food and farming, encourage greater equality in childcare, or break down the barriers people with hidden disabilities face in society?

3) And how might animation be used as a tool to highlight everyday sexism or engage people in talking about end of life care?

As you prepare your submission, please ensure that:

• You do NOT include your name, university/college or other identifying marks anywhere on your submission.
• None of your PDF submission files exceed 10Mb – this is the maximum size for each individual file / board when you submit online.

For ALL brief except ‘Living and Dying Well‘ and ‘Moving Pictures’, the submission requirements are:

• 1 x A3 PDF Hero Image, with project title and 1 sentence description

A singular ‘poster image’ that conveys the essence of your project, and includes your project title plus a 1 sentence description. For example: ‘Bare Technology: a product and service design solution to convert old computers (e-waste) into simpler, more straightforward, accessible computers for older people’. Your hero image should aim to bring your concept to life – make sure it is vibrant and engaging.

• 1 x A3 Written Summary
A single A3 PDF page that summarises your big idea using the following format:

- Problem (50 words max)
- What is the specific problem you identified within the brief topic?
- Who experiences this problem, and how does it impact them?
- Process (75 words max)
- How did you investigate this issue – what were your key insights?
- What journey did you go through to get to your final solution?
- Solution (50 words max)
- What is your proposed solution?
- How will it solve the problem?

• 4 x A3 PDF Boards Outlining Your Proposal

- 4 pages describing your proposal and demonstrating that you have met the 6 judging criteria. Each board should include a heading. It is important that you number each board in the top right hand corner, in the order you want them viewed by the judges.

• 5 x A3 PDF Pages of Supporting Material

- Up to 5 A3 PDFs of additional material illustrating your development process – this could include scanned pages of your sketchbook or computer modelling (if applicable).

• Optional YouTube / Vimeo + website links
- Please note that they cannot guarantee supporting films and websites will be viewed at the shortlisting stage. If you have created digital materials, they recommend referencing them (for example by including labelled film stills or website screen grabs) in your 4 main PDF boards.

The competition will open for submissions in January 2019 and responses can come from individuals and teams (there is no set number of people that can be part of a team, but generally, team entries comprise 2 or 3 persons), and any discipline or combination of disciplines – from product, communication and service proposals to spatial and environmental solutions. Some projects may be more suited to teamwork than others.

Each RSA brief is judged in person by a different panel of designers, industry experts and social innovators in two stages: anonymous shortlisting, followed by interviews with finalists.

All winners are invited to the Awards Ceremony at the RSA which includes a keynote talk by a high profile figure, the presentation of the awards and a drinks reception with networking.

Early Bird Rate for entrants submitting their work before or on 13 February 2019, the entry fee is charged at the reduced early bird rate of £25 per entry, instead Standard Rate after 13 February 2019 and until the final submission deadline on 13 March 2019, the entry fee is £35.

Eligibility

The RSA Student Design Awards is open to students and new graduates worldwide. Candidates may be undergraduate or postgraduate engaged on courses at a college or university, or those who graduated in or after March 2018.