Designing for the Future competition launches again at Collyer’s Sixth Form College

Following last year’s successful collaboration, we are delighted to be launching our second student design competition with the College of Richard Collyer in Horsham, West Sussex. 

The UK is going through an enormous demographic transition.  The first ‘baby boomers’ born after the Second World War are now drawing their pensions and the number of people over pension age is overtaking the number of children.  However, research released from charity Age UK revealed that the majority of people over 50 feel that businesses in the UK ignore them, instead focusing the majority of their attentions on the ‘youth’ market.  

The aim of the “Designing for the Future” competition is to encourage young designers to think about the challenges of getting older and produce designs which are usefuland attractive to everyone.  

Kate Sharp, Faculty Leader, Art & Communications at Collyer’s, commented: “We are delighted to be able to run this innovative competition again and to give the students the opportunity to think about real-life design challenges. We have imbedded the competition into the AS level courses and have been commended by the exam boards for using this “live” brief”.

 The competition is open to Collyer’s students on the GCE Advanced Subsidiary Product Design course and will be judged by Denise Stephens (co-founder of online design community Enabled by Design), Craig Barrow (former winner of the “Designing for the Future” Competition at University of Brighton, final year 3D Design student), and Philippa Aldrich (founder of The Future Perfect Company).

Tutors Kate Sharp and Hari Atkins (Subject Leader – Product Design, Materials) will act as advisors to the judging panel. The results will be announced in December 2011.

Image: Boiling mug designed by James Delve ; “Designing for the Future” competition, Collyer’s 2010