Major success for NCAD students in prestigious UK design competition
Four Industrial Design students from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) have received major recognition at the RSA Student Design Awards.
Thursday, 9th June 2016
The annual RSA Student Design Awards is the longest running global student competition and challenges emerging designers at university level to tackle social, environmental and economic issues through design thinking and skills. The competition challenges students and recent graduates worldwide to think differently about design, through tackling briefs focused on real-world problems.
Alan MacFarlane and Mirna Maye collected the RBS award for the Best Business Case in the ‘Creative Conditions’ category for their creation ‘Watercooler’, a community-based service designed to get people in Dublin into a creative mind-set and think more clearly. Through playful furniture, installations, workshops and ‘daily topics’, Watercooler helps to de-focus your mind from the mundane every day, and spark the creative flow that exists within us all.
In the ‘Africapack’ category, sponsored by GSK, Megan Sands and Sarah Twaddell won the overall internship award for their project ‘Positive Future’. This is a packaging design, awareness campaign and mobile network support system for patients taking Triumeq anti-retroviral medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa. Their project followed the brief of improving the way medicines are protected, dispensed and distributed.
Commenting on the student’s achievements, Sam Russell, Head of Industrial Design at NCAD, said: “We are delighted to see NCAD’s Industrial Design students achieving wins in two categories of this significant international competition. The RSA awards set a benchmark in outstanding student design work and will offer an invaluable launch pad for these four graduates. Both projects demonstrate our student’s ability to operate across product, service and user experience design.”
The successful projects will be on display to the public at the upcoming NCAD Graduate Showcase which runs from Saturday, 18th June to Sunday, 26th June, across the NCAD campus in Dublin 8.
Each category brief in the RSA Student Design Awards has a dedicated prize, including paid work placements and case awards to support career development. Winning entrants also receive a year of complementary RSA Fellowship, which provides students with access to the RSA’s Catalyst Fund, Skills Bank, and crowd-funding page on Kickstarter to further develop their products.
Commenting on the 2016 winners, Sevra Davis, Director of the RSA Student Design Awards said, “The awards encourage entrepreneurship, creative thinking, business acumen and real-life application. Since 2003, we have focused our efforts on inclusive design and setting briefs for social impact. It’s encouraging that each year, we are receiving more and more entries and partnering up with more universities and sponsors around the world. We’re also starting to see collaborations between students of different disciplines, like design and biology. This is testament to the variety of the Awards programme as well as new, inclusive ways that students are working together and thinking about solving societal issues.”
The 2016 awards received 906 entries to 12 different briefs, with 19 countries represented. Each entry is judged according to six criteria: social and environmental benefit, execution, research, design thinking, commercial awareness and magic.
Further information about the RSA Student Design Awards is available at http://sda.thersa.org.
ENDS
Contact: David O’Donnell, DHR Communications, Tel: 01-4200580 / 086-1081139
Notes to Editors:
About NCAD
The National College of Art and Design occupies a unique position in art and design education in Ireland. It offers the largest range of Art and Design degrees in the State at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and is the only Irish university institution specialising in Art and Design. NCAD has over 1,100 full-time students and a further 450 students who take award and non-award bearing part-time classes. Further information is available at www.ncad.ie
Follow NCAD on Twitter: @NCAD_Dublin, Instagram @ncad_dublin, or Facebook www.facebook.com/NCAD.Dublin. #studyatNCAD
About the RSA
The mission of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) is to enrich society through ideas and action. The RSA believes that all human beings have creative capacities that, when understood and supported, can be mobilised to deliver a 21st century enlightenment. The RSA works to bring about the conditions for this change through a diverse, worldwide network of 27,000 Fellow and also by working with institutions and in communities to bring change.
