OPEN CALL:Royal College of Art seeks Head of Programme (Information Experience Design)

The Royal College of Art is the UK’s only entirely postgraduate institution of art and design, dedicated to teaching, research and knowledge exchange with industry. In 2020, the RCA was named the world’s leading art and design institute for the sixth consecutive year by the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

Located across three sites in central London (Battersea, Kensington, and White City) and with planned and increasing online and blended opportunities, the RCA has around 2,400 students from more than 75 countries, with ambitious plans to launch new programmes, underpinned by its world-class research. The College’s global dimension is enhanced through extensive links with business and industry and its partnerships with leading art and design, cultural, and educational institutions, and has more than 500 permanent academic, technical and administrative staff, with more than 1,000 visiting lecturers and professors, including internationally renowned artists, designers, theorists and practitioners. These staff, together with innovative forms of teaching and learning, and dedicated technical facilities and research centres, all contribute to create an exceptional creative and intellectual environment and a remarkable record of graduate employment.

One of four Schools at the RCA, the School of Communication situates human and non-human communication within the frames of culture, community, consciousness, creativity and criticality. In a world of false news, rising inequalities, global challenges, social and epistemological injustices, it is imperative that we change the terms and narratives of communication. The School seeks to rise to global and local challenges; informing and enhancing forward-thinking, affirmative and transformational communication processes, approaches and strategies. Whether operating in a social, artistic, commercial, political or academic environment, our goal is to question, collaborate and construct anew, while exploring fresh solutions, thoughts and pathways to help contribute to the building of a more fair and inclusive future. The School’s ethos embraces agility, interdisciplinarity and change whilst maintaining our research focus and specialisms through and across programme offers in Animation, Digital Direction, Information Experience Design and Visual Communication. Our civic and industrial links are reinforced by the School’s location at White City, London and our work with communities and organisations worldwide.

Within the School of Communication, the Information Experience Design (IED) programme encourages students to design experiences to communicate information, creating installations and interventions that engage senses and concepts through a plurality of modes and media. The programme approaches social and technological systems critically, and works across and between art and design, grounding the development of creative practices in theories and research methods drawn from arts, science and philosophy. Creative practitioners today can no longer afford to be constrained by traditional specialisms and outdated definitions of art, design, science and technology. IED takes a post-digital and post-disciplinary approach, working across these areas, undertaking advanced research and practice on the intellect, the senses and the imagination, using a wide range of media, materials and methods. IED looks beyond the object, product and screen to content, context and concept; and beyond binary concepts such as human, artificial and natural, aiming for individual and societal transformation. IED students have diverse backgrounds in areas including design, science, fine art, technology and the humanities, but share common critical interests in research, materials and making. Our current pathways in Sound Design, Moving Image Design, and Experimental Design are interrelated, focused around different ways of approaching the programme’s core aim of transforming information into ethical, meaningful and inclusive communication experiences.

The RCA is seeking to appoint a Head of Information Experience Design to provide hands-on academic leadership and take overall responsibility for academic quality and direction, research, teaching and learning, and management of all the resources of the Programme and its staff team. We particularly welcome candidates with an interdisciplinary expertise. The successful candidate will be critically informed and ambitious for the work of the College in developing the Information Experience Design programme and graduates internationally and will also understand the changing nature of higher education in an international and UK context. They will be a proven leader with an internationally recognised track record of research in a related field. The candidate will be an inspirational teacher and have energy and enthusiasm for the student experience, and be able to work well across teams. They will also have the enthusiasm to seek out interdisciplinary opportunities both within the RCA and externally, and to steward, cultivate and engage with established and new donor communities for fundraising purposes.

For further information please visit: jobs.rca.ac.uk