From the Great Exhibition to the Fourth Plinth, and now with its Design for Life mission, the RSA has changed the world. As the Society celebrates its 270th anniversary, we look back on notable achievements and forward to what the future might hold.

Should a significant anniversary be used as an opportunity to celebrate the past or look to the future? Well, for the RSA, which in its different guises has been in existence now for 270 years, it is a chance to do both.

There is much to look back on with pride over those 270 years, be it helping to plant millions of trees, holding the first dedicated exhibitions of contemporary art, initiating the Great Exhibition, developing the first national public examinations, launching the Blue Plaque scheme, introducing the Student Design Awards (currently celebrating their 100th year), creating the designation of Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) or starting the Fourth Plinth campaign.

These are lasting achievements and the world would be greatly diminished without them – as RSA resident historian Anton Howes points out in his RSA Journal feature; A world without the RSA. But such diverse successes have only been possible because of the unique structure and approach taken by the RSA to establish itself.

In the Three centuries of the RSA lecture in 2023 to discuss his book on the RSA (Arts and Minds), Howes said: “I think the RSA really is unique. There is literally no other organisation like it in world history.” He suggested that the best way to describe the RSA was as a “subscription-funded improvement agency”, with improvement related to “anything and everything”.

Enlightenment inspiration

The organisation was founded on 22 March 1754, when 11 ‘noblemen, clergy, gentlemen and merchants’ gathered in Rawthmell’s coffee house in London’s Covent Garden to create the Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in Great Britain (the ‘Royal’ prefix was not adopted until 1908). They were led by William Shipley, a drawing master who wanted to create a subscription-based membership society, with the funds used to promote ‘good works’.

Inspired by the Enlightenment, the group met regularly to discuss societal and environmental issues that wider public institutions were not addressing and to investigate ways to bring people and ideas together to tackle them. Those who joined the Society became members (the term ‘Fellow’ was not used until 1914) and their fees funded one of the earliest forms of challenge prizes, known as ’premiums’.

Through its awards and initiatives, the RSA has subsequently enabled and championed hundreds of innovations that have shaped society including: the scandiscope (chimney brush), the firefighters’ ladder, solutions to prevent bank-note forgeries, and the creation of zero-waste pharmaceuticals.

Of course, the RSA is of and for its Fellows/members. The Society is a collective currently of more than 31,000 changemakers – an eclectic group of thinkers, makers, doers, activists and artists. Some of these are famous names, but many more are the unsung heroes who believe in the RSA’s mission and values, and have changed and are changing the world for the better.

Famous Fellows

That collective spirit has attracted some truly remarkable historical figures to the Fellowship/membership of the RSA. Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Maria Grey, William Wilberforce, Benjamin Franklin, Dame Caroline Haslett, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison and Mary Moser were all members of the Society at some point. Look out for an article on 50 famous Fellows in the special 270th anniversary issue of the Journal.

More modern famous Fellows come from many routes, including RDIs such as illustrator Lauren Child, fashion designer Zandra Rhodes and filmmaker and animator Nick Park. The RDI title is the highest accolade for designers in the UK (with a maximum of 200 at any one time) and they automatically become Fellows of the RSA.

A similar process applies to winners of the RSA’s Albert and Bicentenary Medals, who are granted honorary life Fellowship. The Albert Medal – first awarded in 1864 – honours outstanding, regenerative and impactful innovation, with recent winners including environmentalist Christiana Figueres and Dame Sarah Gilbert, co-developer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

Meanwhile, the Bicentenary Medal – instituted in 1954, the RSA’s 200th birthday, to recognise outstanding contributions to the advancement of design in industry and society – has recently been awarded to peace and environmental activist Satish Kumar and biologist Professor Janine Benyus.

An RSA for the 21st century

The RSA’s focus has historically been on people, place and planet, and that is particularly true today. Introduced in 2022, the Society’s Design for Life mission is to enable people, places and the planet to flourish in harmony. This is matched with a vision that seeks a world where everyone can fulfil their potential and contribute to more resilient, rebalanced and regenerative futures.

According to Joanna Choukeir, the RSA’s director of design and innovation, Design for Life “challenged our community to move from extractive approaches that depleted, deforested and degraded, and beyond sustainability approaches that reduce, reuse and recycle, towards regenerative approaches to rethink, restore and replenish”. The world must move from “doing less harm to doing more good”, she suggests.

To achieve this, the RSA has launched a number of interventions that are already bearing fruit. These include:

• Creative corridors – working with partners to increase the impact of the creative industries in the north of England;
• Social connections – leveraging insights from Facebook data to better understand how social connections affect the opportunities that people have in their lives;
• Capabilities for life – exploring the capabilities required to ensure business aims and practices contribute towards a regenerative economy;
• Design for Life Awards – transforming the Student Design Awards, Pupil Design Awards and Catalyst Awards into one unified and enhanced offer;
• Playful green planet – seeking to transform how primary schools and early-years settings foster a connection to nature and community through creativity; and
• UK Urban Futures Commission – unlocking the potential of UK cities to drive economic, social and environmental improvements.

Later this year – with more than 50 countries going to the polls – the RSA will publish its Day One Manifesto. More than 300 Fellows from across the globe have contributed ideas for public policies that could help to put into practice the Design for Life mission. These are some of the world’s leading thinkers and they are addressing our most pressing issues. An announcement is expected soon, but initial feedback suggests the standout theme is the climate crisis, and this will be the core of policy suggestions that follow.

Taking courage

Responding to the climate crisis – and the many other crises facing the world – will require courage. Appropriately, this is the RSA’s theme for 2024 and has been the subject of recent high-profile lectures in the Great Room. Notable examples include the Archbishop of Canterbury, who discussed how courage can help us to overcome any problem, and Christiana Figueres, in her Albert Medal Address, who highlighted courage in responding to climate change.

Courage was also the focus of the 2024 Fellows Festival, which took place at a number of locations around the UK and beyond. Speakers, including Young Vic artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah, National Theatre executive director Kate Varah and author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, offered their thoughts on how courage can make the world a better place.

Introducing the London event of the Fellows Festival, RSA CEO Andy Haldane suggested that the society and its Fellows were helping to build a “new Enlightenment”.

“The world, on some dimensions, has never seemed more divisive, darker or despairing. It is just for that reason that the RSA was created 270 years ago, and that is why it is even more important that we press ahead today – that from darkness we bring a new Enlightenment, that from divisiveness we bring even stronger collaboration, and, from despair, we bring an even greater degree of optimism,” he said.

The RSA of 2024 is very different to the Society of 1754, but it shares the original ideals and desire, and a vision for social and societal change. Crucially, it also now has a range of connected and powerful programmes that are bringing those ideals to fruition. As Haldane said in closing the Fellows Festival in London: ‘We are on the cusp of something very special at the RSA.”