RCA: Collective Intelligence Bootcamps
The Royal College of Art (RCA) has been named the world’s leading art and design university for the last 5 years consecutively. AcrossRCA is an annual programme of cross-disciplinary, collaborative projects and workshops that is specifically designed to enable students to gain perspectives on their practice from outside their own disciplines, make connections and find future collaborators. The programme helps foster innovation and creates a lasting impression for many students, shaping their time at the College and their careers beyond. Based on the collective intelligence playbook that we co-developed with Nesta and the United Nations Development Programme, we were invited to run several collective intelligence bootcamps - both in person and virtual - on the topic over the past two years.
The Brief
What we did
The Collective Intelligence bootcamps attracted many applications. Each year around 35 students were selected from different disciplines such as Architecture, Digital Direction, Global Innovation Design, Information Experience Design, Innovation Design Engineering, Intelligent Mobility, Photography, Service Design and Visual Communication and organised into teams to deliver the best learning experience possible. Student teams developed projects around loneliness, food waste, illegal trafficking and domestic violence.
Harnessing collective intelligence is complex and requires special skills and expert knowledge. We introduced the students to the Collective Intelligence Design Playbook and worked closely with the team using a variety of facilitation methods - including open space and world cafe - through each of the necessary steps of designing their projects. The quality of the final presentations, and the learning along the way, were both assessed to be very high and so we are now in the process of developing and rolling out the bootcamp methodology to other institutions and embedding it within a variety of learning communities.
“Overall I think this is the best course I have attended ever since been here in RCA.”
