'Small ideas can have a big impact': Prince of Wales and Sir Jony Ive launch green design competition

The Prince of Wales has teamed up with leading designer Sir Jony Ive to launch a new competition focused on encouraging the product designers of tomorrow to create "small designs that can make a big impact for the world's transition to a sustainable future".

Announced today, the 'Terra Carta Design Lab' is the result of a collaboration between the Prince, Ive - the former Apple chief designer who played a key role in the development of the original iPhone - and the Royal College of Art (RCA), and aims to encourage design students to embed sustainable thinking into their work, in order to help deliver innovative solutions to major global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

The initiative forms part of the Terra Carta, a green recovery roadmap for businesses launched by Prince Charles earlier this year and has won the backing of a host of major corporates including including Unilever, BP, and BlackRock. The 10-point roadmap is named in homage to the historic Magna Carta, the charter of basic rights agreed over 800 years ago.

And, as with the Terra Carta, the new design lab initiative is being supported by strategic partners of the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), including Octopus Energy, the Islamic Development Bank and Amazon.

"Small ideas can have a big impact if they are supported with the right design, science and engineering and that is the key idea behind today's Terra Carta Design Lab," the Prince said in a statement. "We only have 100 days until COP26, the big UN conference in Glasgow to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis, and we will all need to play our part, old and young, if we are to change how we look after the Earth, making it sustainable for nature, people and planet."

As part of the design lab, young and emerging architects, designers, scientists, engineers, historians, writers, and artists are being asked to supply designs for products or technologies which seek to address the climate and biodiversity crises, with the designs sought under three key themes: nature, people and planet.

Over 2,300 RCA students - with an average age of 27 and drawn from over 70 different countries - are now being invited to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams drawn from its architecture, communication, design, arts and humanities departments, according to the College. They will also be joined by recent RCA alumni in a bid to bring "real-world perspective and experience", it said. 

Then, in November, a jury including the Prince of Wales, Ive and the RCA's vice chancellor Dr Paul Thompson - as well as representatives of the Terra Carta Design Lab supporting partners - will decide on a final shortlist of up to 16 concepts to be unveiled during the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow. The winning designs will then be chosen in 2022, in addition to being given development support, the RCA said.

Ive, who is also chancellor of the Royal College of Art, described the initiative as a "visionary and imaginative way of helping address the world's increasingly urgent environmental problems".

"Often the biggest challenges demand the most ingenious, most creative thinking, which is why I'm so excited about the work that the RCA students will be able to contribute through this collaboration," he said. "I know that their creativity and inventiveness will develop truly powerful solutions. I'm delighted to be able to support this work both as a supporter of the Terra Carta, and in my role as chancellor of the Royal College of Art."