Art school pioneers embrace AI as creative collaborator, RCA leaders say

LONDON — The Royal College of Art is grappling with what artificial intelligence means for human creativity, a question the institution has been exploring since its founding in 1837 as it continuously redefined creative education to embrace technological advances from the motor car to the moving image.

Dr. Danielle Barrios-O’Neill, associate dean across the RCA’s Schools of Communication and Design, said AI carries major implications for creators because creativity is the most important component of intelligence. “And perhaps the first impulse is to be frightened. We’ve all seen the headlines about what AI could mean for artists,” she said.

She compared the current anxiety to the arrival of photography. “If you were a painter when photography first arrived, there would have been a similar response: people who paint portraits thinking: ‘Oh God, what does this mean?’ But it ended up changing how we think about portraiture, and clarified the meaning of painting and photography as art forms.”

“Today, it’s very exciting to be educating and supporting students who are tackling similar questions about AI and trying to answer them through their work,” Barrios-O’Neill said.

AI touches every discipline at the RCA, from architecture and contemporary art to communication and product design. One field with a particular focus on AI is the Master of Design Futures, which uses design methods and strategies to address complex social and environmental challenges of the coming decades.

Product experience designer Julian Yutong Zhu graduated from the MDes in 2025. For his degree project, he created a conceptual model visualizing the future of higher education in 2050 — a scenario where every student would be guided by their own individual AI “partner.”

Yutong Zhu’s research examined both positives and negatives of AI, exploring whether it could produce more personalized learning experiences and greater equality of outcomes, and conversely whether overreliance on AI could harm critical thinking and creativity.

“I’m really interested in exploring how AI can support equitable, creative, flourishing futures,” Yutong Zhu said. “At the RCA, we’re encouraged to critique everything, and we have the space to be speculative. We can be pioneers, imagining these futures and sharing our visions. And we’re trained to express these ideas by visualizing and making things, rather than writing papers.”

Even students in more traditional artistic disciplines have opportunities for wide-ranging technological exploration. Emma Deegan, a student on the Sculpture MA program who works predominantly in metal and textiles, recently began incorporating robotics and microcontrollers into her work.

“I’ve worked with the robotics technicians at RCA to learn how to use Arduino boards and get the technical expertise to bring my ideas to life. I’ve also been able to swap ideas with the Design Products students on the floor above, who have a very different perspective from us sculptors, and I share a studio with someone who uses 3D printing and AI in their work,” Deegan said.

Deegan recently attended an RCA event called The Urgency of the Arts Assembly: Art and AI, which featured leading artists and academics challenging students to engage with major cultural debates, including the impact of new technology, and question their own artistic assumptions.

“The sessions we have had on the emergence of AI, and what it means for artists have made me think about it a lot in my own practice,” Deegan said. “I’ve been developing kinetic art that explores the way our own bodily processes are similar to the internal workings of machines.”

Deegan, who has concerns about the ethical and environmental impact of AI, said she appreciates the RCA’s approach to the broader conversation around AI, particularly the critical dialogue it encourages on both sides of the issue.

In the RCA’s School of Communication, AI has been embedded in degree programs for five years or more. As head of program for Information Experience Design from 2020 to 2025, Barrios-O’Neill encouraged her students to think about ways they could “collaborate and interchange with non-human intelligences.”

She said: “We position AI as an agent, collaborator or resource that can be very helpful in the creative process. It’s particularly good for speculative design: it can project a blueprint of the future, which we can then challenge, coming up with counterfactuals and alternatives.”

AI tools have proved their worth in prototyping, making it easier and quicker for students to pioneer new designs, Barrios-O’Neill said. Exploring AI’s possibilities has been a genuinely collaborative process.

“Everyone is on the same level – students and staff. People constantly bring new tools to the community, and we learn about them together, looking at them critically and testing them in workshops,” she said.

Making sure students are up to speed with technology and the debates surrounding it is one part of equipping them for a successful future. To thrive, graduates need resilience and adaptability, with core skills such as effective communication, critical thinking, creative problem-solving and team dynamics high on the curriculum.

Barrios-O’Neill said she no longer considers these “soft skills” because they are so vital. “We need to make sure students aren’t overwhelmed by complexity. We want to give them a systematic approach to problem-solving, so they’re not just looking for a silver bullet and expecting to be able to solve everything with a single piece of work.

“Whatever challenges they take on, they’ll need to navigate complex networks of factors and interactions,” she said.

Above all, the goal is ensuring students have “agency in a landscape of uncertainty” and become graduates who not only weather change but can take active control of the technologies shaping tomorrow’s creative landscape.

“At the RCA, we’re educating the people who will determine what objects and environments look like in the future,” Barrios-O’Neill said. “It will be their responsibility to channel AI, both as a resource and a collaborator, into creating the sort of world we actually want to live in.”

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