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RSA Student Design Awards

‘The Good Life’ award

The RSA Student Design Awards challenges emerging designers to tackle pressing social, environmental and economic issues through design thinking.

The objective of this annually run global competition for students and recent graduates is to empower a generation of savvy, employable designers who understand the potential of design to benefit society.

We do this by running a competition that challenges students and recent graduates to think differently about design, through tackling project briefs focused on real-world problems. We work closely with industry partners to develop the briefs, we help colleges and universities embed them in their curricula, and we support participants through workshops and mentoring. Winners are rewarded with cash prizes, paid industry placements and complementary RSA Fellowship to kick-start their careers.

 

‘The Good Life’ 2015/16 Student Design Awards brief

The competition invites participants from a wide range of design disciplines at university level to develop responses to different project briefs.

‘The Good Life’ brief challenges students to think about how the experience of living with a long-term, lifestyle-related disease could be improved through taking a greater role in managing care at an individual level, in the home, in the workplace and in a range of social institutions.

As part of their strong human-centred research, students are asked to consider how socioeconomic factors and barriers to patient activism as well as psychological factors affect people's attitudes to driving their own care.