The V&A/RCA History of Design MA programme is more than a postgraduate course. It’s an inspiring and impactful community of leaders in sectors such as museums, cultural organisations and the creative industries. Collaboration and engagement are central to the programme’s ethos. Each year, our master’s students come together to organise a symposium and publication, sharing the best of their dissertation research and reminding us how design and objects shape our lives. In this post, 2026 graduate Sally Holditch talks about the co-creative process behind the student symposium and publication.
On 14th July of 2026, in celebration and recognition of their academic achievements, this year’s graduating V&A/RCA History of Design (HoD) students hosted the Pencils Only symposium and publication launch in the Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre at the V&A South Kensington. The HoD symposium and publication are organised and produced by the students themselves, making each year’s event completely unique to its cohort.
The variety in our cohort’s research topics posed the unique but welcome challenge of both highlighting our individual achievements and presenting them cohesively to the public. Our cohort accepted this challenge as an invitation to collaborate and create an event that was guided equally by our investment in each other and the objects we study. As a symposium co-organiser and the evening’s emcee, I have compiled the following (non-exhaustive) list reflecting on our approach. Crucially, the process began with a name.
What’s in a name?
Like many great ideas, the theme Pencils Only came into being among friends in The Royal College of Art (RCA)’s ArtBar. The concept emerged as a playful nod to the oft-seen reminder posted in the archives that HoD students frequent. As in most archives where old manuscripts are kept you are allowed to bring ‘pencils only’. Given our cohort’s investment in challenging and expanding the structures that have guided the study of objects, the pencil also revealed itself as a unifying symbol for our collective work, representing impermanent mark making and the inevitability of change. After fruitful ArtBar brainstorming, Pencils Only was proposed to our entire cohort and democratically selected from other proposals including, Ex-Libris (Latin for From the books of), and Impressions. While each of these themes had the potential to unite our research, we were hard pressed to find a better representative than a humble, yet powerful writing instrument, as RCA Head of Programme, Sarah Cheang, noted in her opening remarks at the symposium.
Designing our ‘look’
After choosing a theme, our cohort’s next major task was to design a visual identity to match. While not all students were able to contribute to this design process, those with graphic design experience found small ways to include the principles of collectivity within that identity. Designers Lauren Pencil and Sally Holditch ingeniously folded as many of our peers as possible into the symposium’s poster design by creating a composite graphic spelling Pencils Only, from letters in individual students’ handwriting. This element, while subtle, offered a visual representation of the pencil’s unifying influence among our cohort. While both the event and publication would feature over 20 distinct compositions and presentations, balancing individuality and group identity was a distinct priority that our visual identity helped us achieve.
History of Design in conversation
It was also crucial for our cohort that the Pencils Only symposium would not simply showcase individual student work but would embody the critical questions that we had been interrogating all year long. To do this, students established unique, discursive groups and pairings, using the perspective of their own research to investigate their peers’ thought processes. For example, Carolina Sánchez Rojas and Karima Grillo joined their respective decolonial perspectives to re-evaluate global contemporary museum practices and emphasise the value of community involvement, repair, and joy in these spaces. Narin Keitikul and Sally Holditch used their experiences conducting digital design histories to ask the audience to reconsider their definition of ‘artefact,’ especially as people increasingly live their lives digitally. Elizabeth (Xinyi) He and Cağla Kazanlı shed new light on the relationship between cultural exchange and the concept of modernity by creatively placing the design of late 19th century Ottoman clocks in dialogue with the travel diaries of V&A founding director Henry Cole. In true HoD fashion, these conversations explored the boundaries of the Pencils Only theme, asking what has been written, what has been erased, and what might be re-written with the right tools.
Reflecting on Pencils Only, I was reminded that the event’s success was supported by my colleagues’ ability to be inquisitive about each other and our ideas. The process of planning was strengthened by our willingness to question not only how our peers’ research might enrich the event, but how their perspective(s) and skills as individuals would carry us over the line. By recognising each other’s individuality as a crucial support for our collective work, the 2026 HoD cohort models the kind of leadership and camaraderie that will take them far as the newest members of the HoD alumni network.
