I am exceptionally pleased to announce that today the RSA announced that I had won an RSA Student Design Award for the Beyond Borders Brief, for my project The Culture Tower.
BEYOND BORDERS – sponsored by Marketing Trust with additional support from The Chartered Institute of Marketing
BRIEF: Create a campaign, service, product or environment designed to promote inter-cultural understanding
- Winner of the Marketing Trust Cash Award of £2000
Antonia Lowe, University of Northampton
Culture Connects – Culture Tower: a fun and educational board game for school-age children that aims to confront the issues of cultural misunderstanding that lead to social conflict.
Today the RSA revealed the winning solutions developed in response to this year’s RSA Student Design Awards (SDA). Run annually by the RSA since 1924, the SDA is the world’s longest running student design competition, challenging emerging designers across the globe to tackle real-world issues facing society, the environment and business.
The Awards are open to university students and new graduates from all disciplines, who can work individually or collaborate in teams to apply their design thinking and skills in new ways. The winning entries this year show students using design in the context of social and economic innovation, sustainability and international development, and see the RSA’s online Showcase for images of winning and commended work.
The 2016/17 competition comprised 12 different briefs developed in partnership with a diverse range of industry and government sponsors, with topics including designing ways to foster inter-cultural understanding (‘Beyond Borders’), increase mental agility in older age (‘Agile Ageing’) and rethink Fast Moving Consumer Goods for a circular economy (‘Circular Futures’).
Antonia Lowe won the Marketing Trust Award for her project ‘Culture Tower’, developed in response to the Beyond Borders brief sponsored by the Marketing Trust and CIM. Culture Tower is a classroom game that aims to confront the issues of cultural misunderstanding that lead to social conflict.
Thousands of students around the world tackled these briefs, and engaged with the RSA through our programme of briefing sessions, skills workshops, and online resources to support students as they wrestled with these issues. Over 800 students from 21 countries went on to submit their work into the competition. Their proposals were judged by leading designers and industry experts in a rigorous 2-stage process: anonymous offline shortlisting, followed by face to face interviews with finalists.
It’s this combination of judging rigour, in depth engagement with students and explicit focus on design for social impact, along with the unique mix of benefits for winners, which sets the RSA Student Design Awards apart from other student competitions. This year over £45,000 of cash prizes and paid industry placements have been awarded to the winning entrants, who also receive a range of other benefits including complementary RSA Fellowship.
This year’s winners will be celebrated at an awards ceremony at RSA House in London on 21 June. The event will include a keynote address by past winner David Constantine MBE, founder of Motivation, a charity that sets up self-sustaining projects to improve the quality of life of people with mobility disabilities in developing countries. David is one of many SDA alumni that have gone on to have a massive impact in business and society, from Apple Design Chief Sir Jonathan Ive and Chief Executive of the Design Business Association Deborah Dawton, to founder/CEO of renewable energy company Pavegen Laurence Kemball-Cook.
For the full article written by the RSA’s Rebecca Ford, please follow the link below:
