Winner of KU Product Design Contest Announced
What can the next generation teach us about innovation? Perhaps a lot. Over the past three months, students at the University of Kansas have been digging in at their chance to become part of tomorrow’s cutting-edge product design.
Eleven students studying design participated in an Innovation Competition to design a product for a real business. What kind of product? A tool that pulls weeds.
R2FACT and Garden Weasel, a division of Faultless Starch/Bon Ami Company, collaborated with the University of Kansas School of Architecture, Design and Planning to challenge students to apply what they have learned in the classroom to the marketplace. The objective of the 14-week product design competition was to refine and improve the 25-year-old Garden Weasel WeedPopper Pro and make it outperform all competitors on the market in every way – function, use, weight, cost and styling.
As more and more companies increasingly stress the importance that new hires have the ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings, KU college students embraced the challenge to solve an everyday problem through a hands-on project.
The goal of the competition was to challenge the KU industrial design students to create and innovate by allowing them to rethink better product design and function and to get a look at a real-world challenge they might face someday as product designers.
Contest Winners:
- 1st Place (received $800): John Hall, junior, Salina
- Runner-Up (received $400): Scott Wayland, senior, Lawrence
Garden Weasel presents check to K.U. Industrial Design Student, John Hall
Contest judges included Web Thompson, V.P. of Sales-Garden Weasel, Steve Pope, CEO-R2FACT and Huw Thomas, visiting industrial design professor from England who taught the course.
About the competition: As their thesis, the 14-week contest included four stages – research, concept development, design refinement/mockup and CAD model rendering — with a final presentation of the product.
The winner and runner up concepts may be utilized and further designed to be manufactured and added to the Garden Weasel Tool line in 2013.
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