The Royal College of Art (RCA) today announced Design for Betterment as the theme for the 2025/26 edition of their Grand Challenge.
The RCA Grand Challenge is the biggest single-institution postgraduate design project in the world. Each year, students from across the School of Design form interdisciplinary teams to devise collaborative, innovative solutions to global challenges. Since its inception in 2016, the programme has brought together postgraduate designers from disciplines such as Design Products, Fashion, Innovation Design Engineering, Intelligent Mobility, Service Design, and Textiles, to work alongside leading industry and institutional partners including Logitech, UNESCO, Design for Good, RNLI, and CERN.
This edition will involve 500 design students collaborating with a range of industry partners including Tesco and Holland & Barrett to tackle real world problems. The partners will support the project by developing creative briefs for the student teams as well as participating on the jury to select the winners.
The programme also features talks from a range of collaborators, including the Sustainable Markets Initiative, RSA, Design Council, UKRI, Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial School of Sustainability and Design for Good.
For 2025/26 the theme is Design for Betterment – exploring ways to enhance and improve ecological and equitable societies to create more positive outcomes and greater flourishing for all. This concerns socio-economic and ecological improvements such as advancing solutions for climate restoration, improving health outcomes, and reducing social & economic inequalities.
125 student teams will choose a subtheme as their area of focus, either Sustainability or Equity, to identify a key challenge to address. They will engage with local communities, experts and other key stakeholders to understand the risks and challenges they face and apply a range of collaborative-design strategies to ground and develop a creatively driven and innovative solution.
Once the student groups submit their designs, 10 projects per subtheme will be shortlisted. In March, the shortlist will be judged by a jury of external experts who will choose 6 winners (3 per subtheme). The creative innovations will demonstrate the effectiveness of a community-centred approach to design.
Professor Kerry Curtis, Interim Dean of the School of Design and Dean of the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, said: ‘Now in its ninth year, the Grand Challenge brings together students to co-create across disciplines to position design as a catalyst for social and cultural advancement. In close collaboration with valued industry networks, this year’s theme, Design for Betterment, encourages students to shape experiences and design objects, systems, and interactions that enrich everyday life and contribute to a more thoughtful and equitable future.’
