The Royal College of Art

The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a British public research institution, which operates internationally from its base in London, UK, and is recognised as one of the world’s premier arts and design universities. The RCA will partner with the Ocean Decade as a Decade Implementing Partner (DIP) to create a world class fit-for-purpose co-design and stakeholder engagement platform, specifically focusing on tackling Decade Challenges 2, 4 and 10.

As a DIP, RCA will support and improve connecting scientific data (and knowledge) to community actions by generating inclusive innovative design solutions with stakeholders including scientists, government, policy makers, NGO’s, institutions, global north and global south communities. RCA will combine design methods with cross-disciplinary collaboration to make a positive impact on ocean ecosystems and biodiversity, on the ocean economy and on society’s relationship with the ocean.

RCA’s role as a DIP will therefore involve uncovering future needs and creating new ocean design partnerships across governance, science, industry, cultures and society.
RCA aims to collaborate, observe, monitor, facilitate, educate, train, network and deploy the best co-design practices and a key part of this role will be the development of exemplars and case studies for future dissemination.

The main capabilities and expertise RCA will apply and contribute toward this purpose are:

1. Core design research from the NEMO (New Economic Model for the Oceans) project, which is a strategic activity in the RCA School of Design’s Design Resilience initiative, focussing on the ocean.
   2. Expertise in design and co-design, citizen science, innovation and stakeholder skills across the school of design.
   3. A global design, research and innovation network of partners.
   4. A series of postgraduate grand challenges that deliver significant creative capital.
   5. Diverse expertise in engineering solutions, innovation technology, service design and expertise in teaching, executing research programmes, and creating world-leading research centres.

RCA’s ambition through its engagement in the Ocean Decade as a DIP, is to create measurable, tangible impact to the ocean ecosystem by bridging quantitative and qualitative approaches to ocean development, through to sustainable behaviour and economic improvement for the designed future ocean we want.