New Designers

I spent far longer at New Designers today. I was up early and headed for a coffee then up to Islington for the show. I ended up there for hours. There was loads of great stuff to see, some good talks and a few organisations that I can hopefully investigate some further opportunities for my course with,



The overall standard of work was really high and it was really difficult to separate out individual work however two pieces rely stood out. the first was by Bethany who studied at Napier university and for her final project wanted to do something to try and address the problem of children in africa rescued from lives as child soldiers, or displaced by war. In her research she discovered that tragically, but unsurprisingly, they were left unable to react like ordinary children, their senso of play and imagination was lacking. As a result her final project was an affordable play system for taking round refugee camps to encourage play and imagination from the kids. As part of her project she was able to re-visit the Democratic Republic of Congo where she had first come up with the idea to test her prototype and the results looked excellent. I really hope she can find a partner or funding to take the prototype to production as it’s such a great idea and an incredibly worthy project too. I grabbed a photo but unfortunately it didn’t come out to well.



The other project which really interested me was Emma’s, pictured here. She was studying at Central St Martins, and the brief they were set was to create some sort of experiential design to help build a sense of empathy between the many job seekers in London and the people who would be interviewing them. The problem they had to address was the difficulty for job seekers to know what employers were looking for and the difficulty for employers to gauge whether they had found the right person based on first impressions. I won’t try to describe the brief further as Emma did an excellent job of explaining it to a couple of us, and my mangled attempts would do her a massive dis-service. Her final solution though was a seemingly simple game which involved enhancing communication and understanding between interviewer and interviewee and, although different from Bethany’s above the feedback from users was excellent.

There were also a multitude of great graphic design and animation projects on display. Over all it was a really inspiring day.

Once I was done there I grabbed some food then headed back to the hotel to freshen up before heading up to Dalston to meet an old friend Chris, who’s band had a gig up there. It was great to get a catch up and their set was excellent.