RCA
IN SESSION: What’s Next for Design? Global vs National
08 Jul 2025
Free RCA online talk with leading industry experts exploring the how design is evolving as a global business.
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08 Jul 2025
RCA2025: School of Design EXPO
02 Jul 2025
Custom House, Our House: A Community’s Fight to Be Heard
10 Jun 2025
Custom House, Our House, a National Lottery Heritage Fund-supported project led by the Royal College of Art and local partners, documents the community's response to decades of regeneration in East London.
IN SESSION: Ana-Meta-Materialisms - Contemporary art practice reinventing, rethinking and referencing itself
06 Jun 2025
Watch this contemporary art online talk with Dr Despina Zacharopoulou, alongside multidisciplinary artist Emma Fineman and visual artist and lecturer Dr. Giorgos Kontis.
The RCA in Wandsworth: Creative community projects across the borough
03 Jun 2025
As London celebrates Wandsworth’s designation as Borough of Culture 2025, the RCA is proud to be part of a summer of community-led creativity.
Featured
Typewriters, the office machines that preceded computers
By Kiron Kasbekar | 10 Apr 2025
You see office tables today equipped with desktop computers or laptops. But think of the 1970s, and what would you have been seeing?
Wishful thinking about cars
By Kiron Kasbekar | 05 Apr 2025
Donald Trump may be many things, but a good economist he is not. Accustomed to dictating terms to people he has worked with,
The history of safety glass
By Kiron Kasbekar | 26 Mar 2025
You probably already knew that the world’s VIPs move around in cars with bullet-proof glass windscreen and windows. But did you know that ‘bulletproof glass’ is not really bulletproof?
German silver: used in cutlery, music, electricals - but it’s not silver
By Kiron Kasbekar | 20 Mar 2025
This material, which was first developed in China, not Germany, and is an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc, has lost its sheen in home uses, but finds favor in electrical engineering.
Pioneers – the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss launched the aircraft industry
By Kiron Kasbekar | 17 Mar 2025
First Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their plane, the ‘Wright Flyer’, from near a small town called Kitty Hawk. Then Glenn Curtiss built planes with a very different system of controls, which has lasted until now.
What do aircraft have in common with bicycles and motorcycles?
By Kiron Kasbekar | 17 Mar 2025
From chains and sprockets to direct drives—If someone asked you what aircraft have in common with bicycles and motorcycles, how would you respond?
Radar’s ancestors: From sound mirrors to modern detection technology
By Kiron Kasbekar | 11 Mar 2025
Radar has become a well-settled technology today, especially in the field of navigation.
Nokia Bell Labs: innovations in communication, computing, technology
By Omar Almeida | 08 Mar 2025
Bell Laboratories, or Bell labs, which has now become Nokia Bell Labs, is one of the most renowned research and development organizations in the history of science and technology.
Company story – Quaker Oats
By Kiron Kasbekar | 08 Mar 2024
Quaker Oats is a company whose products I remember from my childhood days. Years before a foreign exchange crisis caused the Indian government to impose curbs on consumer product imports, we used to see a host of foreign brands in the Indian market. Including Quaker Oats, which I remember eating when I was a child, and which has been available for the past two decades or more.
