Join us for the RSA Design Workshop series

The Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative are inviting students to a hands-on workshop to explore a circular economy for fashion. As part of the RSA Student Design Awards which challenge students to tackle real-world problems through design thinking, Make Fashion Circular and the RSA have contributed two briefs to help students explore ways to reimagine how we can apply circular economy principles to the fashion industry.

Earlier this year, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative was awarded £1million from the players of People’s Postcode Lottery Dream Fund, to radically change the way clothes are designed, made, used, and reused. The funding is supporting a project between Make Fashion Circular and the RSA to drive a two-year effort to engage with the student community and empower the next generation of designers. The Student Design Awards by the RSA see students and recent graduates tackle pressing social, environmental, and economic issues through design thinking.

Make Fashion Circular and the RSA have posed two design briefs; ‘Make Fashion Circular’ which challenges students to innovate the way we produce, use, and access everyday clothing items – designing out waste from the start, and ‘Moving Pictures’ which challenges students to produce an animation to accompany an audio file ‘Fashioning a circular future’, voiced by Lily Cole.

Students from across the world are invited to participate in the Design Awards, with the final awards ceremony taking place in June 2020. Winners are rewarded with cash prizes, paid industry placements, complementary RSA Fellowships, and a number of other benefits to kickstart their careers.

If you are thinking about contributing to the 2019/20 Student Design Awards, join us for one of three workshops to gain an understanding of circular economy thinking. Learn to use tools and techniques for applying circular economy to designing for the fashion system, and meet and learn from other designers.