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Wycombe Abbey Pupil Celebrates Winning Inaugural Black and Blum Design Competition

14 May 2021 - Academic

Black+Blum competition winners at Wycombe Abbey

 

Pupils in the Fourth Form recently took part in the inaugural Black+Blum design competition which challenges children across the country to design a new on-the-go food and drink product for teens. Congratulations go to Dana (LIV) who won first prize and Charlotte (UIV) who was one of the runners-up.

For her winning entry, Dana designed an innovative lunchbox and cup. Click here to see her idea. About her product, Dana said, “Over 15% of the worlds’ population has a type of physical disability. I saw that a lot of the products here were not as accessible as they could be, and I wanted to change this by creating a line for teenagers that could help people. This project is only supposed to be aimed at teenagers, but I think that eventually this idea could be implemented into more ranges for adults too. Just because someone has a disability, doesn’t mean that they can’t buy from an eco-friendly company like this with good products. Likewise, I believe that the already existing products didn’t seem fun or exciting enough for some teenagers.”

Competition founders Dan Black (Co-founder and lead designer at Black+Blum) and Tim Weston (Head of Design and Technology, Oakham School) said “We established the competition to help children develop their creativity, analysis, evaluation and presentation skills whilst remote learning,” Launched in October, the Black+Blum Student Design Competition provided a ‘real life’ design challenge that could easily be done at home, either as an individual project, or one set by schools as remote classwork. The challenge enabled pupils to identify strengths in existing products, consider what makes a nutritional lunch, identify user requirements and develop ideas through sketches, 3D models and CAD.

As winner, Dana received an ipad, whilst runner-up Charlotte received a range of products from Black+Blum.

Given the success of the competition, Dan and Tim are currently making plans for next year’s challenge. We look forward to seeing what our next group of pupils will produce.