Owen, BDes Product Design

Can you tell us a bit about your final year project?

I've been working on this project called Joey To Go-ey. It’s for kids, you make a little kangaroo pouch where you can keep your belongings, and then you make your own toy that goes inside it. You can go a little adventures with it and kind of take it with you to bring some sort of comfort to kids. I came up with the idea when I was volunteering at a Youth Theatre – there was one kid who wouldn’t talk to anybody, but had a little toy that when he brought it out, it would help him to interact with people. So I thought maybe there’d be a way of doing that to help other kids that find it difficult to interact, especially post-lockdown, maybe it's slightly difficult getting back into normal activities, so this is a way of trying to give them a bit of comfort and make it a little bit easier for them.

How have you worked with your coursemates to develop your ideas?

We work in smaller groups of 10, and it’s great to see other people’s projects develop. Often you can take elements of what’s worked for them and find ways to make it work for you. You can also use each other's networks, so people might say my friend works here and they do this, and that could work for your project. I sit beside Ross, and we work together a lot. We’ll sit and discuss something together and then you can go back and work on it. Even if you're at a point where you're stuck with a creative idea of your project, you might have something for someone else and then vice versa. It’s the perspective, sometimes they might know something you can’t see because you’re too close to it.

BDes Product Design student Owen

How do you feel now, looking back on the last 4 years, compared to where you were when you started?

I had no design experience going into this – I initially wanted to study drama. I had never done any CAD (computer-assisted design), any kind of sketch work, drawings. And so a lot of the stuff that I've developed purely through this course. It's been really good to see how quickly you can kind of learn those skills, and I’ve just had to trust that I can do it if I push hard enough.

Can you remember a lightbulb moment for you?

I think from the first couple of projects that we did because it's so general, I was almost like still guessing myself, seeing if this was something I liked. I quite enjoyed working alongside children, from the volunteer stuff I’ve done, so that fed into it. So doing that kind of child centered design, I was like, I can kind of see how this actually works in the real world. I kind of started to turn the lightbulb on there, but I'm still figuring it out - I've got no clue what I'm doing half the time still. I think that's almost the best way to be more creative, if you have a bit of freedom to learn and fail.

How are you feeling about presenting your work at the degree show?

I’m really excited to show people. I feel like as well as industry, it’ll be great just to see how people respond to it – maybe see how it would work for a nephew, or their own kids, see how they can maybe interact with it. So I think it might make it a bit more real, seeing actual potential users of my project.

Degree Show