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Striking RCA Design Installation Takes Pride of Place at Clerkenwell Design Week

Monday 27. May 2013 - A striking design installation for Jaguar Land Rover created by Royal College of Art students takes pride of place at Clerkenwell Design Week this week.

Second year students Claire Miller (Textiles) and Ewan Gallimore (Vehicle Design) together have crafted an impressive five and a half metre-long structure made from glass reinforced plastic and various coatings, finished with copper and patinas.
As part of a collaboration with the College, Jaguar’s Advanced Design team in Whitley, Coventry, gave the pair unique access to the technologies and facilities used in many of Jaguar’s concept cars and production designs.
Jaguar Land Rover, Clerkenwell Design Week’s headline sponsor, chose Claire and Ewan’s piece as the winner from nine ‘exceptional’ proposals presented by RCA Vehicle Design and Textiles students to the car brand as part of a competitive brief.
Under the brief, cross-programme student teams considered proportion, surfacing, line interaction and aesthetics, drawing on Jaguar’s rich design archive. The outcome was joint exterior and interior form studies that expressed students’ visions of what Jaguar Land Rover’s future design language might be.
Working with Jaguar Advanced Studio in this way helped introduce students to the processes involved in realising concepts within a global design studio.
‘One of the key things we learned was about juggling time constraints and working to a strict manufacturing schedule,’ said Claire and Ewan – who both receive prize money and support for their imminent graduate show.
The RCA has a long-standing history of collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover. Jaguar’s leading designers Ian Callum and Julian Thomson are both alumni of the Vehicle Design programme.
You can see Claire and Ewan’s piece, alongside renderings of the nine RCA proposals in the main Farmiloe Building exhibition area at Clerkenwell Design Week, from 21-23 May.
Also exhibiting at Clerkenwell Design Week are RCA Design Products alumni Tom Foulsham, Markus Kayser and Philippe Malouin (now also a tutor) – the winners of the 2012 W Hotels Designers of the Future Award.