MA Visual Communication

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What will I learn?

You will become well-practised in interpreting ideas, events, complex data, knowledge and experiences, translating these into artefacts, narratives or connections that might manifest across or between the physical, digital or virtual. Through language, storytelling, tools & materiality you will learn to elicit new knowledge and in turn, create new insights. Your role as a communicator of such experiences is to form a bridge; to create forms of communication that can connect people and connect ideas. Referring to these exchanges as ‘conversations’ expands the possibilities for social accountability and creative consciousness.

As a student in the programme, you are given the creative agency to explore the ideas that drive your practice. Recent work has been as diverse as the body in digital space, the gentrification of communities, immigration rights, intangible cultural heritage, feminist and LGBTQ+ histories, media archaeology, the living archive, material labour, the privatisation of public space, protest, racial justice, visions of utopia and more.

Our open and inclusive vision of the practice of communication produces work that is every bit as divergent in form as in content, embracing multidisciplinary approaches including sound, type-design, performance, publishing, moving image, workshops, fieldwork, documentary, radio, virtual reality, comics, ceramics, happenings, drawing, walking and writing.

We invite you to join a conversation based on our shared belief in humankind and the power of art and design to empower and transform.

Programme structure

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

In term 1, you will study the Encounters unit. Together we will develop ‘conversations’ within a critical framework that aims to question existing ideas and models of knowledge production. By staging encounters with other disciplines, communities, and sites, we will examine and expand on lived experience, motivation and practice. We will formulate inquiries that unsettle the familiar and ask — What if?

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA, the College-wide unit.

Term 2

Following on from Encounters, you will begin testing the series of critical questions you’ve emerged within the unit Affinities. You will identify which discussions you want to participate in and practice listening and connecting with others on a non-individualistic level. You will start a dialogue with the people, objects and ideas you want to engage with and be expected to connect to them with care and purpose. You will consider new modes and methods relevant to your research, and focus on making, exchanging and experimenting with this knowledge by working collectively.

You'll also take the School-wide unit Making Worlds with Others. This unit Will allow you to work alongside students within and across the School. Working from the perspective of your individual practices and disciplines, you will develop a project that engages with others and/or creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings, with the intention to create critically engaged situations and/or outcomes resulting in convivial knowledge exchange. Through collaborative learning and making the unit will support you in understanding knowledge exchange and public engagement and how you are to situate your own practice in these territories. The unit will also ask you to question how socially engaged practice can contribute to cultural understanding, co-researching and co-creating methods for knowing with, and not knowing about.

Term 3

Independent Research Project. Here we ask you to focus on locating and establishing yourself and your work in the external contexts in which you seek to engage and connect your practice to emerging critical discourses. You will enact the critical frameworks, methods and tools you have developed through the programme.

The Royal College of Art has been ranked the number 1 university for art & design internationally for the 9th consecutive year, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2023 – the largest world-wide survey of academic and industry opinion.