Category: School of Arts & Media

2nd Year Product Design Student Owen Wright was selected by judges from the Design Museum to take part in the exclusive Design Factory Symposium 2014.

The challenging brief was to:

Design something that communicates, provoked reflection on, or tells a story about a cultural identity and how can visual design culture be both global and modern whilst also having a strong cultural identity and ‘dialogic’, or conversational, two-way, relationship to society?

 In answer to the brief, after months of research and development, Owen created the concept of Night Owls – a sustainable and energy efficient form of street lighting.

Owen’s concept was selected as one of the forty winners from the 1000’s of entries received.

The following is Owen’s own account of the Design Factory Symposium which took place on 19^th May this year at the Design Museum, London.

“I got to the design museum for 10 o’clock and we were taken to a workshop room on the first floor of the design museum that overlooked the river Thames. After brief refreshments we were introduced to the day by the Deputy Head of Learning, Catherine Ritman-Smith. After this introduction we were given a talk by Designer of the Year 2014 architectural nominee, Alison Brook. Alison explained the way in which she designed and how she and her team came to create innovative designs through research and development. After this talk we were split into groups of about 5 students to develop and create a concept for a welcoming entry to a home using a mixture of design disciplines. The groups included students studying graphics, product and fashion which allowed us to understand how to work in a multi-disciplinary group.

After this exercise we had lunch and an opportunity to walk around the Design of the year exhibit with an employee of the Design Museum so we could ask questions. The final exercise of the afternoon had us helping MA fashion design students, to evaluate and critique their work. In the exercise we had the opportunity to express our thoughts about their work and what we thought could be different or what we thought was good. At the end of the day we had the opportunity to express our thoughts about the day and how it influenced our thoughts on the design process.

Overall the whole experience of the competition brief, from designing my concept, to being chosen as a winner, visiting London and spending a day at the Design Museum, was one I will never forget.”