The RSA has been leading innovation and design since our inception.

When William Shipley founded the Society of Arts in 1754, his original plan was for members to pool their subscription funds and spend them on initiatives for the public good. In our first century, this fund primarily encouraged inventions, discoveries, and design skills, through a series of advertised premiums – either honorary medals or cash prizes.

This premium scheme was used to encourage the landed aristocracy to plant an estimated 60 million trees, to get young people to practise their artistic and design skills, to fund inventions that would not otherwise have been profitable, and to find plants or minerals that could be the basis of new industries. We thus had hundreds of schemes to remedy social ills, including trying to abolish the use of children in cleaning chimneys by finding a technological replacement and trying to solve the problems of banknote forgery. Accepting unsolicited inventions, too, encouraged the lifeboat and a wide array of consumer and worker safety improvements. Many of the prize-winning models of inventions, artistic works, or samples of materials or designs would have been on display in what is now the Benjamin Franklin Room.

We continued offering various prizes throughout our history, and a version of the original premium system lives on today in the form of RSA Spark (formerly the Student Design Awards), which not only reward young people for design excellence but encourage them to apply design to solving society’s problems.

To this day, the RSA awards the title ‘Royal Designer for Industry’ (RDI) annually to designers of all disciplines who have achieved ‘sustained design excellence, work of aesthetic value and significant benefit to society’.

The RSA's design legacy and the RDIs

The RDI was established in 1937 and is the highest accolade for designers in the UK. Only 200 designers can hold the title. Non-UK designers may become honorary Royal Designers.

Royal Designers are responsible for designing the world around us, enriching our cultural heritage, driving innovation, inspiring creativity in others and improving our quality of life. The jet engine, Routemaster bus, iPhone, and Harry Potter film sets, among thousands of other things, have been created by them.

Past and current RDIs include:

• Dame Vivienne Westwood
• Lucienne Day
• Paul Smith
• Issey Miyake
• Terence Conran
• Ambrose Heal
• Zandra Rhodes
• Quentin Blake
• Mary Quant
• Norman Foster

• Charlie Paton
• Jonny Ive
• John Galliano
• Brian Eno
• James Dyson
• Ron Arad
• Tim Berners-Lee
• Jo Da Silva
• Anab Jain
• Demis Hassabis