Q4 2012 - Q3 2013

Welcome to the third edition of the Brunel Design

newsletter, in which we are celebrating the

achievements of our students and alumni. Graduates

of 2013 have harvested a number of awards and prizes,

one of which, the Red Dot Award, was recently

collected by a group of postgraduate students in

Singapore. We have recently celebrated 140 years of

Design Innovation at Brunel with the ‘Designing

our Future’ exhibition. And we are also celebrating a

bumper year for student placements, as our links with

industry increase with every year, and this year sees

us consolidating our student placements at lighting

companies with a lighting design undergraduate

module in collaboration with the Lighting Education

Trust.

Sharon Baurley, Head of Design

Recent Brunel graduate, Emily Riggs, has won the 2013 Core77 Award in the Social Impact Student category, with her design Kulinda.

“Kulinda is designed to prevent transmission of HIV through breastfeeding in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a simple, clear, binary indicator which works in conjunction with a process called Flash Heating to show when HIV has been deactivated in breast milk. This enables HIV positive mothers with limited resources in sub-Saharan Africa to accurately treat their breast milk before feeding to their babies, providing them with food and nutrients in a safe, economical way”. (Emily Riggs)

Undergraduate

Today, over 1.5 billion people have no reliable access to mains electricity. These people rely predominantly on kerosene for light. However kerosene is not only extremely hazardous, but the fumes are carcinogenic and kill an estimated 1.5 million women and children in Africa every year. There is a real need for a safer, sustainable and affordable alternative.

Four years ago, Brunel alumnus Jim Reeves and his colleague Martin Riddiford of Therefore Design, inspired by the potential of gravity, created a radical new form of lighting.

With huge financial support via a crowd funding campaign they have been able to develop GravityLight and in October 2013 gifted the first 1000 trial units to Africa and India.

GravityLight is powered by a weighted bag that, when lifted by hand, drops slowly to the ground providing up to 25 minutes of LED lighting. This process is free and can be repeated time and time again, thus releasing villagers from the dangers and cost of kerosene.

The insights from the trial will enable further development and in the future villagers in developing countries will be able to purchase a GravityLight for less than $5. (Jo Barnard)

To follow the story and find out more visit www.deciwatt.org

Gravity Light: $5 lamp for developing countries

2013 Core77 Award for Social Impact: Emily Riggs

Kulinda, designed by Emily Riggs, winner of the 2013 Core77 Awards

The Innovation Hothouse competition is an event to showcase the very best final year student design projects in the United Kingdom and provide an opportunity for those involved to present their work to a panel of business angels who will offer advice and potentially funding to develop the project into a commercially viable product. The ultimate aim of the Innovation Hothouse is that participants are encouraged by their involvement to start-up and create flourishing businesses.

I was the winner of the Innovation Hothouse JC Gammon award for Innovation. I received a trophy along with £5,000 to put towards the development of my adjustable Velok sprint shoe for junior athletes.

I graduated from Brunel University in 2013 with a first class honours degree in Industrial Design and Technology. I am currently working at Lamb Industries Design Consultancy in Bath. Following this, in January 2014, I will begin a six-month internship at Nike within the footwear design department at Nike’s European Headquarters in Holland. (James Eaton, 2013 graduate)

The Innovation Hothouse

This September an exhibition was created to explore key moments of design innovation at Brunel University past and present, from the traditional craftsmanship of the Royal Indian Engineering College and Shoreditch Technical Institute, to the innovative, state-of-the-art products and designs showcased by Made in Brunel.

The exhibition, in the Beldam Gallery, Eastern Gateway, was visited by over 1600 people over a five week period. Brunel students have always delivered quality of excellence appropriate to their time. The exhibition showed how the nature of our work has changed in over 140 years; the innovation and the excellence of our work has evolved from individual hand-crafted work to globally-appropriate, mass produced, design concepts for the 21st century.

The centrepiece of this exhibition was a Timeline, created by Sophie Richards. This illustrated the University’s design history

from 1870 to the present day. Objects from the University Archives, showed the traditional craftwork made almost 100 years ago, the work of Brunel Design’s first graduates in 1989 and the early 1990s and the extraordinary work done by graduates of 2013.

In adopting Brunel’s name, the University has always sought to emulate his qualities of ingenuity, rigour, creativity and enterprise combined with practicality and thoroughness – our design students continually match these qualities. (Paul Turnock)

Designing Our Future

Gravity Light

James Eaton’s Velok Shoe, winner of the JC Gammon Award

Product Development

What is Made in Brunel in 2014?Jo Barnard & Rob Bye, MIB student Directors write:

Made in Brunel is a student run platform for showcasing creativity and innovation across the School of Engineering and Design. A series of industry evenings, networking events and workshops develop a strong network of links between students and professionals creating a gateway for graduates into the workplace.

Each year we not only work on in-depth projects in design, engineering and digital media, we also create the stage upon which we present them. With backing from the managerial team, final year and masters students work as a collective, leading Made in Brunel in a new direction each year; leaving their mark on a brand that has influenced them from before they even began University. The culmination of these efforts is the annual exhibition in central London. Accompanied by the Made in Brunel Book, it showcases the impressive collection of Brunel University’s most inspiring thinkers.

Last year’s class of 2013 did not disappoint. At the Bargehouse in June, students impressed industry members, alumni and invited guests with their in-depth understanding of their subject and originality of their projects.

Now that the ‘Out of the Blue’ graduates are employed across the UK and abroad, it is time for the 2014 graduates to take the next step. This year we aim to highlight just why Brunel graduates differ from any others around the world. Not only highlighting our achievements and communicating our skills and abilities, but also expressing our aspirations and aims for the future. We are all Made in Brunel, but for us this is only the beginning.

Made in Brunel, Creative Session, October 2013

www.madeinbrunel.com | @madeinbrunelBargehouse, OXO Tower - 12-15 June 2014

Brunel Design Timeline, by Sophie Richards

Two of the key challenges the food manufacturing industry faces include the ability to identify market segments that have different sensory needs, and the ability to respond quickly to these

segments. At the same time we are in an age of participation, where consumers no longer need to be on the periphery of development, but can play an active role.

The Open Food research project is about building a new ICT platform that will enable the food industry to crowdsource sensory and experiential perceptions and attributes of food products and to translate those into customer requirements for new products, integral packaging and manufacture.

Open Food is Brunel and Nottingham University’s £2.4 Million project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Future ICT enabled manufacturing – crossdisciplinary research clusters initiative. Over the next five years research teams from Brunel and Nottingham will be working with industry partners, including Camden BRI, Design Bridge, AutoDesk, Giraffe Innovation, EnginSoft and others, on this exciting project in the food, packaging and related manufacturing and supply chain sectors. Focused on principles of open innovation, the project team will prototype cloud-based software platforms to dynamically involve customers in the creation of new products that enable ‘conversations’ between consumers, brands and manufacturers. (Paris Selinas)

Lighting placement at Osram

Q4 2012- Q3 2013

BRUNEL DESIGN | NEWS | Q4 2012 - Q3 2013Guest Editors: Jo Barnard & Rob Bye, Made In Brunel Directors (‘NEWS’ font by Enya Williams)

Design: Miss Sze Yin Kwok, Miss Charlotte Hickey & Mr Stephen GreenAdditional contributions: Dr Sharon Baurley, Mr Stephen Green, Mr Paul Turnock & Mr Clive Gee

Red Dot Award: SKYNEX

Postgraduate

Placement news: placement students earning £1million in 2013/14

Over the past few months, the Bee Lab project (@beelab_open) has put on a series of hackdays bringing together technologists, product designers and engineers to work with beekeepers to co-create customisable, monitoring devices that can be inserted into hives to sense different signals for the beekeeper to read – including frame or feeder weight, whole hive weight, temperature and humidity. The idea is that the more bees communicate to their beekeeper, the more the beekeeper can understand and respond to them without opening the hive. The aim is gathering data from devices and publicly sharing information to help others understand the health of their local environment, informing sustainable and bee-friendly approaches.

The project informed the wider discussion of Open Design enabling lay users to monitor global environmental issues. A discussion at the Design Council debated “Open Design and its ramifications” with a mixed audience of designers and wildlife experts. Tom Hulme (Design Director Ideo.com), Daniel Charny (fixperts.org), Jess Price (sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk), Dr Hillary Geoghegan (hilarygeoghegan.wordpress.com) and Robert Phillips (Brunel, rdphillips.co.uk) presented relevant material and sharing their experiences. (Rob Phillips)

Follow the story on Twitter @beelab_open

Brunel Design joins the DESIS Network

Brunel Design has just become a member of DESIS - Design for Social Innovation for Sustainability - an international network of design schools and universities actively involved in promoting and supporting sustainable change through social innovation (www.desis-network.org).

The main ideas behind the network is that social innovation could be a powerful driver towards sustainability and that design schools could help in supporting and accelerating the process. In particular the main aim is to use design thinking and design knowledge to trigger, enable and scale-up social innovation.

As part of the network, Brunel Design will: promote teaching and research activities in the area of social innovation; partner with regional and international DESIS labs to share knowledge/case studies/design approaches and tools; develop research programmes and projects; support local communities to make existing social innovation initiatives more effective and efficient.(Fabrizio Ceschin)

“During my third year of studying Product Design and Engineering BSc at Brunel University I was given the opportunity to join Osram Projects and Solutions in Manchester for a placement year. After being successful in the application process I joined the Technical and Lighting Scheme Design department in September 2012. My time with the company has been the best experience of my education at Brunel so far. I have developed detailed skills in Lighting Scheme Design as well as an increase in knowledge and understanding of luminaire product design and lighting control systems. I was tasked with providing technical lighting solutions to an array of applications and I soon learnt to produce designs for Retail,

Industrial, Exterior, Interior, Sports and Office lighting as well as Mirrortec Secondary Reflector System schemes. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Osram and would really recommend the experience to any student showing an interest in the Lighting Industry. I have fond memories of the team within the Manchester Office and cannot thank them enough for the effort put into my training and the support they gave me. I am now using the skills I have developed in industry within my Major Project in my final year of study and am hoping to soon return to the Lighting Industry to pursue a future career”. (Charlie Benson)

A team of postgraduate design students from Brunel University has been awarded the ‘Best of the Best’ prize in the Institutional Category of the Red Dot Design Award for their design project, SKYNEX. The SKYNEX project produces a new vision for air travel – providing the air traveller in 2030 with a seamless travel experience from door to destination.

The integrated travel system is designed to be facilitated through a personal smart device with the SKYNEX service application. The system covers several user touch points in this technology to help the traveller purchase their ticket, check-in, navigate the airport, choose and customise their in-flight seat, track their flight,

arrange shuttle and luggage pick-up, keep tabs on their luggage, shop with discounts, disembark and travel safely to their destination.

The project, which evolved from the Design Futures module, sought to combine current and developing technologies and trends to create a hassle free experience for future air travellers. The designers’ solution was based on the mechanism of London’s Oyster system, where a journey can be a seamless experience across various transport modes. (Allen Tsai)

There are 125 Design students on work placements in 2013/14 which is the largest number ever placed and is an increase of (11%) compared to the number placed last year (104).These students are collectively earning over £1million in placement salaries.

Nearly 90 companies are currently employing Brunel placement students including regular placement providers such as Avon Protection, Burberry, Chanel, Disney, Hasbro, Philips, Rolls Royce, SMR Automotive and Tesco. Design consultancies taking students include

Design by Touch, Futurama, Therefore, Fuse, PDD, Precipice, Identity Consulting, Integrity Design Management and Team Consulting. We have also placed students in a number of new companies for the first time this year including British Airways, Formula One Management, Lego, L’Oreal, Pavegen and Glen Dimplex Design. Students have been placed in the following industrial sectors: Lighting (17%); Consultancies (18%); Product (19%); Industrial/Engineering (19%); Graphics/Branding (11%); Digital/Interactive (7%) and overseas exchanges USA/ Italy (9%).

There has been a large increase (more than double) in the number of students placed abroad- 29 students in 2013/14 compared to

13 in the previous year. This represents 27% of those placed. Students were placed across many countries including: China-6 (Pico Exhibition Services; TecAtech; Tessellate Lighting), Denmark-2 (Bang & Olufsen; Lego), Hong Kong-2 (Abdoolally Ebrahim Group), Germany-4 (Peppermint; Fream); Netherlands-2 (Philips, Studio Stallinga) together with exchange students going to San Francisco State University-7 and Milan Polytechnic-2.

We continue to develop and maintain relationships with employers to increase the number and quality of placement opportunities. Where a good relationship exists there are very often ‘repeat’ placements, as employers know that they will receive good quality students whom they view as potential future graduate recruits.

Whilst the majority our students start 12-month placements any time over the summer, from May to September, we have students available for shorter periods of 3- and 6- months at most times of the year. Our dedicated placement team of Tony Waite and Gurdeep Plahe in the Placement & Careers Centre (PCC) are responsible for providing a placement service to Design students. (Tony Waite) Contact via: design-placements@brunel.ac.uk

Andrew Allan at Philips Lighting

Adam Geal at Rolls Royce

Receiving the award in Singapore. The team included: Allen Tsai, Sandra Mileikyte, Jennifer Gomez, MyungJin Song, Jinwoong Seo, Tien Fang Yu

Working on Bee Lab electronics

Open Food Launch

SKYNEX concept

Dr Fabrizio Ceschin and Prof David Harrison have been awarded a €135k EU grant as part of a €697k research project entitled “LeNSES, the Learning Network on Sustainable Energy Systems”.

LeNSES is a 3-year project (October 2013 – October 2016) involving three design schools in Europe and four in Africa (Politecnico di Milano, Brunel University, Delft University of Technology, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, University of Nairobi, University of Botswana and Makerere University).

The project focuses on distributed and renewable energy systems in rural and urban African contexts. In particular LeNSES is an agent of human resources and curriculum development aimed at promoting a new generation of designers capable to effectively contributing to the transition towards distributed and renewable energy systems. The final output will be an open learning e-package, a modular package of teaching materials and tools that design educators, designers and practitioners will be able to download/modify/remix/reuse (in an open source and copyleft ethos). (Fabrizio Ceschin)

€ 135k funding for LeNSes

The Bee Lab Project: Open, but is that good for you? Launch at Old Vinyl Factory

Open Food