By Mr Futter, Head of Design Technology

On Thursday 27th June, four teams from Year 10 reached the finals of the RSA Pupil Design Award.

The RSA Pupil Design Awards is a national design award programme for secondary school and sixth-form pupils aged 11-17. Participants are encouraged to use their creativity and imagination to tackle real challenges to enable people, places and the planet to flourish. This year UK pupils responded to three brief challenges applying design thinking to solve complex problems. From focusing on renewable energy, integrational community and wellbeing with hope and optimism, this years commended projects demonstrate the powerful skills and ability of creativity for social good.

A total of eight teams from numerous schools were shortlisted by the judges so an amazing achievement that half came from NHEHS. The students participated in workshops linked to sustainable design which was followed by talks from established designers. The day concluded with an awards ceremony to celebrate all the successful projects.

Well done to all our teams! Read more about their designs here.

Brief 1: All Being Well

Olivia, Rahel and Melissa

Hydra Seed: A drink container that naturally biodegrades/decomposes with integrated seeds related to the drink flavour. This innovative submission combined many different areas in relation to health and wellbeing and had a strong environmental dimension too, considering planetary as well as human health. It offered a clever way to tackle and extremely bold choice of problem! Our expert review panel though this was a very impressive proposal.

Zoe, Natasha and Freya

Calm Flow: Calm Flow is a product aimed at helping children with anxiety by giving them a much more playful alternative to the paper bag as a breathing technique to reduce anxiety. Children would breathe into the flow tube which then blows mini bubbles out allowing the child to control the bubbles rising and see that they are in control of their breath and in turn calm their anxiety. Our expert review panel thought this was a very creative and innovative idea founded on in-depth research and prototyping.

Brief 2: Powering People. How might we support communities to transition to renewable energy?

Sylvie, Sophia and Sofia

Super Sole: An insole product that harnesses ‘human power’ to generate electricity by replicating the turbine system used in wind farms on a smaller scale to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. It can be used by anyone, anywhere in the world, no matter the time of day, weather conditions, or geographical landscape to produce electricity. Our expert reviewers thought this was a well-developed product considering a wide range of potential sources of renewable energy and building on existing ideas to form a new product that encourages people to be more active as well as increases personal user awareness of how much energy it takes to power our personal energy requirements.

Olivia and Keisha

Green Window: A product to adapt windows to reduce condensation/damp and promote well-being by having more plants in homes. It is a money and energy saving solution that provides nature to people who otherwise wouldn’t get the exposure to nature and in turn improve their wellbeing. The expert review panel though the designers of Green Window had thoroughly researched the issue and demonstrated a creative approach to idea generation and product iteration to come to their final design, with the use of moisture from the winder for the benefit of the plants being a surprising value-added element in the proposal.