MA Interior Design

To provide prospective students with opportunities to find out about the RCA experience and programs we run many 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 MA Interior Design Programme engages you in exploring emergent ideas and issues concerning distinct aspects of the design of the interior. This incorporates research, practice, and making work that explores the diversity of human occupation in numerous environments, extending from the room to the city. The program encourages the view that the interior is an interface between its occupants and the built environment, and it supports the notion that the interior is an agent for social change.

The program values speculation, analysis, and rigor concerning the thinking and making of all aspects of the design of interior environments. It challenges you to formulate your own rigorous and critically independent responses to these fundamental concerns. This is often undertaken via the reworking of existing structures, the creation of temporal installations, and the formation of permanent interventions. All of these practices involve the construction and communication of particular spatial identities using space, objects, and materials.

Program structure

The program is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of program, School, and College-wide units.

Term 1

You'll take an initial Primer unit, which will engage you in the exploration and synthesis of the principles and methods of critical ideas in interior space. It introduces you to ideas and processes that will enable participants to synthesize thinking and research in the design of interior spaces. The work in this unit will be based on a focused exploration that affords you the possibility to challenge your thinking through research, design, and exploration to generate new meanings for buildings, objects, spaces, and the elements within them.

You will also participate in Media Studies. The unit aims to increase your critical engagement with media and space. Through this unit, you will be supported to increase your cross-disciplinary communication and you will be challenged to expand your media practice beyond architecture’s reliance on media as pure representation.

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

You'll also take an Elective unit.

Term 2

The Platforms unit engages you in the origination and development of your project concerning the thematic concerns of the program platforms. Each platform in this unit is designed to emphasize a particular way of thinking or aspect of the design of the interior.

Platform themes are the provocations or generators of ideas that you will utilize in the development of your research and projects. It is anticipated that you will use the platform's interests to assist in the determination of your practice interests and ultimately your professional identities.

In term 2 all School of Architecture students be offered a School-wide Elective unit.

Term 3

The purpose of the Independent Research Project (IRP) is to enable you to apply the intellectual, technical, and professional skills that you have developed throughout the program to a challenging self-set brief. The project you are undertaking is normally informed and advanced from the work previously undertaken in the previous platform unit.

Still working within the thematic concerns of the platforms, you are expected to have agreed on a research and project proposal, a brief, with your tutor that identifies the parameters of your project, including its aims, rationale, approaches and methodologies, and possible resource implications.

What you need to know before you apply

Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world. The selection process will consider creativity, imagination, and innovation as demonstrated in your portfolio and video, as well as your potential to benefit from the program and to achieve high MA standards overall.

You will usually have a good undergraduate degree or other appropriate experience. Professional experience, either before during, or after a first degree, may be a benefit. We welcome applications from candidates from other related backgrounds, such as architecture, furniture design, product design, and graphic design.

For full entry requirements, key dates and the application process visit the RCA website.

Fees for new students

Visit the RCA website for tuition fees and information on scholarships and funding opportunities.

Meet the RCA

We host a range of online and on-campus open days as well as recruitment events in cities around the world. These events can include 1-to-1 meetings 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.

Next on-campus open day: Saturday 27 January, 2024.