Jony Ive and Prince Charles announce new design lab
ZELP is a recent project developed by students at the RCA – a device worn by cattle to reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere (image: RCA).
Jony Ive and Prince Charles have announced the launch of a new design project intended to create “small designs that can make a big impact for the world’s transition to a sustainable future”.
Created in collaboration with the Royal College of Art (RCA), the Terra Carta Design Lab will invite architects, designers, scientists, engineers, historians, writers, and artists to examine climate collapse and devise “solutions which align with the aims of the Terra Carta; drawing inspiration from, and giving back to, Nature”.
The Terra Carta is a sustainable finance charter launched by Prince Charles in January 2021. At the time of the charter’s launch, Charles wrote: “As we strive to imagine the next 800 years of human progress, the fundamental rights and value of nature must represent a step-change in our ‘future of industry’ and ‘future of economy’ approach.”
Ive and Charles have now launched the Design Lab to emphasise the role that design, art, science and engineering can play in addressing climate collapse. The link to the RCA is unsurprising given that Ive is the school’s chancellor and Charles its “Royal visitor”.
The lab will host a competition to find a design proposal that meets with its aims, inviting more than 2,300 RCA students to work in multidisciplinary teams drawn from the college’s four schools. These teams will be joined by recent alumni of the RCA (from 2011-2021).
These teams will be invited to submit proposals, with a final shortlist of 16 concepts made in November 2021 to coincide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26. A winning design will be selected in 2022 and subsequently supported in its development.
Ive said: “I’m incredibly proud to be part of the Terra Carta Design Lab founded by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. It's a visionary and imaginative way of helping address the world's increasingly urgent environmental problems. Often the biggest challenges demand the most ingenious, most creative thinking, which is why I’m so excited about the work that the RCA students will be able to contribute through this collaboration. I know that their creativity and inventiveness will develop truly powerful solutions.”
Prince Charles said: “Small ideas can have a big impact if they are supported with the right design, science and engineering and that is the key idea behind today’s Terra Carta Design Lab. We only have 100 days until COP26, the big UN conference in Glasgow to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis, and we will all need to play our part, old and young, if we are to change how we look after the Earth, making it sustainable for Nature, People and Planet.”
Story source: The Royal College of Art