London art school RCA empowers creative professionals to shape the world through exploration

Polina Ami Kosele, who has a background in film and animation and a focus on the rapid growth of immersive media, enrolled at the Royal College of Art (RCA) aiming to “shape the bigger picture” by transitioning into creative direction.

Shortly before graduating in 2024, she began working as a designer at Frameless, London’s largest permanent immersive art experience, and within a year became a junior art director at the company.

Kosele describes the role as a dream job, one she credits not only to the advanced technical skills acquired through the RCA’s Digital Direction MA but also to how the program shaped her work ethic, built her confidence in collaborative settings, and gave her the resilience needed for a demanding creative role in a commercial environment.

“I became much more intentional, in a reflective way – asking the tougher questions and really interrogating why, who, or what something is for,” Kosele said.

“Being given the freedom to explore ideas but having to take ownership of your choices made me more comfortable with being uncertain, or facing challenges and needing to troubleshoot. I realised that these things can help you evolve, and result in even better ideas.”

At Frameless, which partners with the RCA to showcase graduate digital artworks, Kosele primarily creates immersive experiences for private client events. “I think the MA programme prepared me for that professional step of thriving under creative pressure and offering solutions that evoke emotion,” she said.

The RCA’s impact extends beyond early-career professionals. Sofie Layton, who had a successful 30-year artistic career before joining the Master of Research (MRes) program, found an intellectually rich and rigorous environment that proved pivotal to her work’s evolution.

During the MRes and a subsequent PhD, Layton began using anatomical scans to explore grief and loss from miscarriage, pregnancy, stillbirth, and child loss. This required careful consideration of how to address historically taboo topics while protecting potentially traumatising patient data and narratives.

“Intellectually, I was prompted to really think through things in a very different way,” Layton said. “And I think it’s an extraordinary gift to have the opportunity to be challenged in a way that doesn’t shut down thinking, but opens it up.”

She added that the time to explore ideas deeply was invaluable. “As an artist you’re maybe given funding to work on a particular project, but you don’t necessarily have the time to really develop that work.”

Professor Zey Suka-Bill, the RCA’s Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education & Student Success, said this is the essence of creative education at the institution.

“It creates space for exploration, for ideas that take time to mature, and for forms of knowledge that emerge through practice rather than through predefined answers,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t care about rigour or accountability – we do. But we also recognise that some of the most valuable impacts of creative education are longitudinal. They unfold across careers, across sectors, and across lives.”

When meeting alumni, Professor Suka-Bill sees the lasting effect: “They’ve learned how to ask better questions, they’ve developed the confidence to say: ‘I don’t know yet, but here’s how I’ll find out.’ Those are exactly the capabilities of creative education that are needed to shape the world.”

Barcelona-based architect Pol Mensa Biosca connected with this approach. He joined the RCA’s one-year Design Practice MArch program attracted by the freedom to choose both research topics and final outcomes. “It felt like some universities were more uptight in terms of what the expected outcome is,” he said.

While the sustainable design course grounded students in practical skills like carbon measurement and policy design, Mensa Biosca found that experimenting with methods such as speculative design and critical fabulation changed his perspective.

“I come from a very technical background,” he said. “Here in Spain, architecture is not an arts degree. So I would always do everything from the bottom up. But on this part of the programme you were asked to imagine a future that would, in some sense, feel better – and then, from that position, track back to how you would achieve that.”

Now, rather than starting a project by assessing constraints, he first examines the assumptions behind those constraints to uncover overlooked solutions.

Back in Spain, Mensa Biosca is integrating design-led research into his architecture practice and credits his year at the RCA with enabling freer, more optimistic thinking. “I feel less constrained,” he said.

For Layton, the impact is clear: after completing her Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD last year, she secured a postdoctoral research associate position at the Visual and Material Lab, part of the Wellcome Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University. She continues researching how artists collaborate with patient groups, clinical staff, and academics to generate new insights into health conditions.

Layton said this would not have been possible without the RCA’s resources, including access to supervisors, technicians, peers, visiting speakers, novel materials, and innovative technologies.

“You’re exposed to so many different ways of thinking,” Layton said. “It was an incredibly rich space in which to develop new work. For me, it was a stepping stone into accessing the academic landscape in quite a different way. And as an artist, I am hopefully helping to push the boundaries within that landscape.”

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