Engineering and Design news
Product Design students ‘do a Dyson’ on Sussex Plus
Posted on behalf of: Product Design; Careers and Employability Centre
Last updated: Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Product Design student Dorota Biniecka with the Sussex Plus display boards that she helped to design.
L-R: tutor Mark Jenkins and students Dorota Biniecka, Mary Dickison, Poppy Dorans and Mohsen Fatoorechi, with the Sussex Plus display boards they designed.
A team of Product Design students have used their design skills to create bespoke promotional boards for the Sussex Plus employability initiative.
Sussex Plus helps students to create an online ‘webfolio’ that demonstrates their skills and achievements and shows what they can offer employers.
Linda Buckham, Director of the Careers and Employability Centre, says: “We wanted to have a strong student perspective to promote the wide range of tools that students can use to support personal development, in addition to the Sussex Plus webfolio, blogs, learning diaries, action plans and achievement logs.
“The design solution the Product Design students have developed is creative and fun, enabling the Careers and Employability Centre team to use the exhibition resource in a variety of ways with all students.”
BSc Product Design students Dorota Biniecka, Mary Dickison and Poppy Dorans, plus Electrical Engineering doctoral student Mohsen Fatoorechi, worked with Product Designer and Tutorial Fellow Mark Jenkins to develop and design the display boards.
The students employed all the typical design processes for initiating possible solutions and concepts, researching and analysing the brief as well as sourcing and liaising with other professional specialists in electronics and graphical and product production.
They completed the project in less than six weeks and within budget. The promotional display, which was produced by a local design company, can now be seen in the Careers and Employability Centre at its base in the Library building.
Mark Jenkins, Tutorial Fellow for product design, has worked in industry and has experience of the related constraints of team dynamics, targets and deadlines.
He says: “If I could always work with a design team like this group of professionally minded students, potentially we could be giving James Dyson a run for his money!
“From the beginning there was a keen enthusiasm to understand the true needs of the design product, as well as gaining a good understanding of the Sussex Plus initiative, the interaction of students and also the Careers and Employability Centre staff using the displays.
“The students had a great time, enjoyed the challenge and added some tangible quality work to their personal professional portfolios.”