The RSA Blog

Civic goods and civic good

Blog

30 Jan 2009

In her New Statesman preview of the coming Tate Modern exhibition Rodchenko and Popova, Rachel Aspen recounts how the October Revolution brought art into everyday life in complete and programmatic way which is bracing for a designer to imagine today: “Their work was no longer to be confined to the elite realm of galleries and studios. The entire fabric of everyday existence – from mass transportation and housing projects to teacups and book jackets – was to be redesigned to serve a new vision of Russian life”.

Reporting back on the Teachers' TV debate

Blog

27 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

I said I would report back on the Teachers’ TV debate last night. The gig was worth it even if only to see the magnificent Capital City Academy building and facilities in Willesden. Call me a liberal old softie, but I find it inspiring to see wonderful facilities like this serving a diverse working class community.

Subjects or competencies - a false dichotomy?

Blog

26 Jan 2009

Matthew Taylor

I’m slightly nervous ahead of a date to appear on Teachers’ TV this evening to talk about the curriculum and, in particular, discrete subjects versus cross curricular teaching. Two of the other panellists – Professor Alan Smithers and Mick Waters of the QCA are national experts on the curriculum, while a third, Phil O’Hear, is an Academy head teacher and a man of outspoken, if not always consistent, opinions. Fortunately the presence of Saira Khan, a runner up from the Apprentice, means I’m not the only enthusiastic amateur.

Social networks, signalling theory and deception

Blog

23 Jan 2009

Something I have come across recently is signalling theory. Part of the theory (as I understand it) is that humans communicate almost entirely through conventional signals where there is no inherent cost if communication is dishonest or not (compare a ‘natural’ signal such as one antelope communicating to its cohorts that there is a pack of hunting lions nearby – the costs to the ‘honesty’ or otherwise of this signal are immediate and extremely high). Signalling theory says that the costs of deception must be high enough to keep signals within the expected range of honesty of signallers and receivers.

The catalogue that changed the whole earth

Blog

19 Jan 2009

Public art and public space

Blog

19 Jan 2009

... if you were listening to Radio 4 this morning you would have heard a very brief snatch of RSA Arts & Ecology's Michaela Crimmin respectfully disagreeing with the plan to use the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Squarefor a memorial to World War Two hero Sir Keith Park. The RSA were instrumental in turning the Fourth Plinth into a unique public contemporary art space.

Was Florence Nightingale a designer?

Blog

16 Jan 2009

October 22 2008: Mark Bostridge, latest biographer of Florence Nightingale, has reminded us that her genius was not her bedside manner but her metaphysical grasp of data. A highly perceptive ability to infer clinical knowledge from statistics – to transform patterns of numbers into a story – makes me wonder why Daniel Pink did not name her as a classic right-brain thinker in his excellent book A Whole New Mind (why right-brainers will rule the future. OK, she may not have drawn any pictures, but defining design in terms of image and object is so 20th century. Meanwhile in a nice piece of information design medical geography in the UK has revealed in pictures the UK’s major causes of death.Glaswegians drink themselves under the ground, Liverpudlians get cervical cancer and Londoners take their own lives when the metropolitan pressure gets too much.

Unity of Habitation

Blog

16 Jan 2009

October 13 2008: It feels like a new dawn to see the Stirling Prize for Architecture awarded to a housing project, Accordia in Cambridge. Well, let’s be accurate: it’s not exactly hard core social housing, more like a pleasant renewal of the leafy garden suburb ideal with some affordable housing integrated. But it absolutely does not pull iconic stunts and appears to keep its guiding principles modest but firm: a restricted range of materials, nice warm ones we know and love – brick, oak. It privileges access and a kind of porosity, front confounds with back. It amazingly has a lived-in feel for something so new.

Pole to pole: making art in the Antarctic and the Arctic

Blog

15 Jan 2009

The artist Neville Gabie is currently in the Anarctic with the British Antarctic Survey as artist-in-residence at the Halley Reseach station on the Brunt ice shelf. He'll be there for four months and each week he's recording a video blog of his life there, One Minute Week.