The Foundation welcomes the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) as a Partner

2011

• Dame Ellen speaks at the RSA as part of an event entitled 'Re-imagining Business: The transition to the circular economy'.

2016

• The RSA hosts the Foundation's 2016 Disruptive Innovation Festival Live Launch event.

2017

• Rowan Conway, Director of Design and Innovation at the RSA, speaks at the Foundation’s annual Summit.

• Simon Widmer, Design Network and Creative Lead at the Foundation, speaks at the RSA's Student Design Awards briefing on circular design tools and methodologies that students can use.

• The Circular Design Case is launched in collaboration with the Foundation and IDEO’s Circular Design Guide - an immersive learning experience and design challenge where applicants can think in systems as well as reflect upon interventions to make a system more circular. The RSA’s Josie Warden was on the judging panel and the winner was announced during the Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival.

• The Foundation takes part in the RSA’s Student Design Awards with Philips, creating a brief called ‘The Circular Emergency’. The brief asked students to design a product or system that uses circular design principles to make emergency medical care more effective.

• The RSA’s Chief Executive Matthew Taylor speaks at the Foundation's annual Summit.

• The RSA’s Josie Warden speaks at the Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival on 'Abundant Materials and Universal Manufacturing'. The RSA’s Rebecca Ford also joined us for a session on ‘The Circular Emergency’ design brief for the Student Design Awards.

• The Foundation's Make Fashion Circular initiative is awarded £1 million by the players of People’s Postcode Lottery to support circular fashion and design projects run in partnership with the RSA. The aim of the partnership is to engage the student community through design challenges, events, workshops, and communications. This milestone saw the start of our Make Fashion Circular collaboration with the RSA.

• The Foundation's Make Fashion Circular initiative contributes two circular design briefs to the RSA’s Student Design Awards. 1) A Make Fashion Circular brief, where students were tasked with addressing the waste and pollution problems that the fashion industry creates. 2) A Moving Pictures brief, where students were asked to create an animation to accompany the audio clip 'Fashioning a Circular Future' - narrated by model Lily Cole.

• The RSA and Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular initiative collaborate on 3 design workshops to explore a circular economy for fashion. The workshops were targeted at those interested in tackling the two Make Fashion Circular briefs at the Student Design Awards.

• The RSA’s Josie Warden speaks at the Foundation’s Disruptive Innovation Festival on ‘The Future of Fashion: A Narrative for the Industry'.

• The RSA creates the Regenerative Future’s Programme to demonstrate how a regenerative future could look, act and feel and incorporating the RSA’s circular economy ambitions.

• The Rethink Fashion Learning Journey is launched, a collaboration between the RSA and Make Fashion Circular that brings together a group of 12 inspiring creatives on a 4-month learning journey to explore the transition to a circular future for fashion.

• The RSA's Director of Design and Innovation, Joanna Choukeir joins the Foundation’s Circular Design Leaders network.

• Our latest collaboration with the RSA, is the Partnership for Change event - a community networking experience that celebrates our formal partnership and convenes our global communities around the topics of circular design.

Find out more and register to attend.