Student Design Awards
We invite young designers from across the globe to answer design briefs that focus on the most pressing social and environmental challenges.
Reimagining regenerative education and enterprise
The Design for Life Awards build on the RSA’s 269-year legacy of inspiring innovation through challenge prizes and grant-making. They will bring together and transform for the better our Student Design Awards, Pupil Design Awards and Catalyst Awards under a shared, unified offer.
We invite young designers from across the globe to answer design briefs that focus on the most pressing social and environmental challenges.
A free, national design competition where pupils aged 11-17 are encouraged to use their creativity and imagination to tackle real challenges facing people and the planet.
Grants and support for social innovations from our Fellowship
The Design for Life Awards will offer radical and inclusive learning experiences for children, learners and entrepreneurs to help them build the future-proof capabilities and ideas needed to create a regenerative world.
Our awards legacy has, over time, shaped education and the economy towards vital social design, innovation and creativity skills. As we plan to celebrate the centenary of the Student Design Awards in 2024, we are looking ahead to what the world will need from us in the next 100 years. The urgency to shape regenerative futures, combined with our learning to date, have inspired us to evolve our offer.
We are responding to:
Join the Design for Life Awards space on our Circle community to share your feedback on our work, connect with like-minded Fellows about the work and ask questions, raise discussion points and share ideas relating to awards.
During our 2022-23 awards cycle, we have begun experimenting with changes as part of our current awards offers, to inform our future offer.
The current phase of this work, up to September 2023, focuses on:
During our Student Design Awards centenary year in the 2023-24 cycle, we will test what our offer will look like through a set of experiments and prototypes. Our ambition is to launch this new offer in 2024-25.
The scale of our ambition and potential impact over the next five years is bold, and we see this as only the beginning of the journey for our next 100 years of award-making at the RSA.
In the first five years, we are looking to:
Press release
Today, Schumacher College and its founder Satish Kumar have been presented with the 2023 RSA Bicentenary Medal in recognition of their outstanding contribution to education and the environment.
Report
Aidan Daly
This evaluation illustrates how the Pupil Design Awards contributes to the pupils' creative self-efficacy, awareness of real-world issues and pupil and teachers' design capability, as well as the critical factors supporting teachers to complete projects and how we can make the awards more inclusive.
Blog
Sophie Hague
Sophie Hague, a 2022 Student Design Award winner, explains how design helped to identify the learning techniques that worked for her.