BeyondRCA

The mixture of people from all over the world makes the Royal College of Art such a special place. However, there are limited opportunities for students to get to know each other and collaborate. Firstly,  the physical border that is created by three campuses located in different areas of London makes seamless interaction hard, as people have to commute up to 30 minutes to meet each other. Secondly, all students have different schedules, projects and deadlines which makes it hard to meet students from other courses. Lastly, isolation is a common behavior among programs. People study and work with the door closed, which creates silos within the community. 

Sunshine Collective is a team of eight people coming from different programs of the RCA. Within a one week project on Collective Intelligence, they focused on the question: How might we enable RCA students to collaborate more and learn from each other? 

The final concept is called BeyondRCA, which is a digital platform for students to connect with each other based on shared interests and similar project areas. The aim is to build a strong network and foster interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. BeyondRCA includes not only students but also alumni, prospective students, the student union as well as teachers and admin teams. The platform will connect data of people’s schedules, areas of interest and project topics on a virtual map of the college, and motivates people to explore different projects and getting to know others in a playful way. To ensure data privacy, the users can also decide how much data they want to share and whether they want to be visited or not. 

BeyondRCA goes beyond departments to create a strong community with the aim of creating more thought-provoking concepts and impactful marketable solutions.

See the slides of the project here.