MA Intelligent Mobility Royal College of Art

To provide prospective students with opportunities to find out about the RCA experience and programmes we run a number of on-campus and online open days as well as events in various countries around the world. You can find out about upcoming events or watch replays of past open days on the RCA website.

The Intelligent Mobility MA programme builds on the rich history of vehicle design at the RCA, and places this within the context of a number of emerging social, cultural and technical changes. These include the shift to autonomous systems, renewable power, demographic changes and the increasing synthesis between man and machine. The programme defines and describes a paradigm shift which brings together existing fields with a design-led approach that addresses both physical and virtual aspects of the mobility space as an integrated whole.

We aim to equip students to deliver critical solutions to holistic mobility needs and issues. The core approach is translating techno-cultural challenges via intense creativity and research – building mature design and innovation propositions to meet new mobility opportunities. You'll work closely with mobility design practitioners, thought leaders and leading brands to ensure you have a thorough understanding of the industrial practice and the opportunity to engage and influence critical questions relating to business, production and new models of ownership and use.

The aim of this commercial, the connected approach is to create practice leaders within the ‘third age’ of automotive and mobility design and the broad spectrum of mobility services and artefacts – forming a new generation of designers who have both the skill set and mindset to operate as strategic leaders with a broad range of abilities and insight about their own ‘point-of-impact’ on an increasingly diverse industry.

AcrossRCA

Situated at the core of your RCA student experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College-wide AcrossRCA unit supports how you respond to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds by engaging you in a global creative network that draws on expertise within and beyond the institution. It provides an extraordinary opportunity for you to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts.

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations from internationally acclaimed speakers that will encourage you to think beyond the discourses of art, architecture, communication, and design, and extend into other territories such as economics, ethics, science, engineering, medicine or astrophysics.

In interdisciplinary teams you will be challenged to use your intellect and imagination to respond to urgent contemporary themes, providing you with an opportunity to develop innovative and disruptive thinking, critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world. This engagement with interdisciplinary perspectives and practices is designed both to complement your disciplinary studies and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Meet the RCA

We host a range on online and on-campus open days as well as recruitment event in cities around the world. These events can include 1-to-1 meets and portfolio advice, informal chats, presentations and sessions with staff, students and alumni.

Check the Check the RCA event webpage for details of upcoming events.

Programme structure

Term 1

The Humanising Technology 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.

People and Places 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.

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA, the College-wide unit. See below for more details.

Term 2

Automotive Transitions Fundamentals 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 also allows you to select a specific area of focus and adopt an approach which explores techniques and questions unique to your chosen sub-sector.

You'll then take either a School-wide elective or Automotive Transitions Advanced Practice. School of Design electives provide a very applied focus to the topics, through the execution of project activities you undertake by working in interdisciplinary teams which are drawn from across the School's programmes. Automotive Transitions Advanced Practice provides a deeper context to the key elements of future automotive design with an emphasis on advanced manufacturing, socio-cultural issues and questions related to future business models.

You'll also participate in the Grand Challenge, a 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 involving an external international scientific or industry partner (or both). This unit and lecture series have 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.

Term 3

The Individual Research Project asks you 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. 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 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.