RSA announces Student Design Awards winners

A series of James Bond vehicles, a system that reinvents the laundry process and a promotion for the notional National Optimism Day are among the winning designs in this year’s Royal Society of Arts Student Design Awards.

About 2500 students from over 100 universities entered this year’s competition, which involved 42 design briefs in 28 project areas, from furniture and fashion to medical products and mobile communications.

University of Huddersfield student Tim Jackson won the home laundry section of the consumer products category. The brief was to create a solution for the management of home laundry for a busy family of four.

Jackson designed a system to minimise labour using separate wash baskets that are pre-set with programme instructions. Small round buttons attach the clothes to a retractable line within the wash basket to ensure an even wash action. The retractable line is also for drying purposes.

Robert Melville, who is also at Huddersifeld, raced off with an award for transportation design for his series of vehicles for James Bond. Each vehicle focuses on one aspect of his personality. ‘Illusion’ projects holograms around Bond to disguise the vehicle, ‘Secret’ is a stealth vehicle able to use almost any material as fuel, and ‘Kiss Bang Bang’ is designed to attract the opposite sex, but conceals a motorbike within its central console for a speedy exit.

Falmouth College of Art student Neil Tinson’s bold, instructional design illustrations for National Optimism Day brought him an award in the graphics category. Tinson created a rotating wheel that changes the graphical and text response to the various situations, alerting the user to a number of possible responses to a situation.

This year’s competition included three new categories: robot technology, mobile communications and gerontechnology, which required students to develop inclusive design concepts and technological interventions to increase the quality of life for older people.

The winning students will be presented with their awards on 22 May at the RSA in London and their work will be posted on the RSA Student Design Awards on-line exhibition, www.rsa-sda.net.

Previous winners of RSA Student Design Awards include fashion designers: Betty Jackson, Sarah Sturgeon and Martin Kidman, as well as iMac designer Jonathan Ive, Andy Clark, who designed the Heathrow Express train, and Hot Springs radiator designer and founder of Priestman Goode, Paul Priestman.

The 77-year-old scheme is the longest running student award scheme of its kind in the UK.

Full results will be published next week.

Start the discussionStart the discussion
  • Post a comment

Latest articles