Award organisers beaten at their own game

A lecturer at Brighton university appears to have been the victim of his own brief for a national student design competition.

The brief set by Professor George Hardie, one of three for the Donside Student Awards, was to ‘tell a lie convincingly’. After creating dummy Donside headed paper from a competition poster, one student subsequently wrote to all participating universities claiming the awards had regrettably been cancelled.

A bemused awards spokesman says he was alerted to the prank when Blackpool and Newcastle universities both called to find out about the phoney cancellation.

‘The letter looks pretty official, but it appears she took it a little bit too far,’ he says.