Design Ventura 2020 Winning Product Grow Wild
The Design Ventura 2020 winners are Heckmondwike Grammar School with their product Grow Wild (formerly called Sow Beautiful), a flower seed canon used to disperse seeds to help tackle bee decline by creating a source of pollen for wild bees.
Heckmondwike Grammar School’s design sheets demonstrate how the team generated and developed their ideas. The sheets clearly show the team’s design and prototyping processes and how they planned to address the criteria set out in the design brief, as well as allowing our shortlisting judges to clearly understand the final product design.
The team competed against 15,000 students from 270 schools across the UK. With their entry, Heckmondwike Grammar School earned a place in the shortlist as one of the seven schools asked to submit a 3-minute pitch video to be reviewed by our pitching judges on 12 May. You can watch this video to find out more about what happens at pitching day.
Design Ventura 2020’s pitching day took place online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Heckmondwike team made a convincing case for Sow Beautiful producing an engaging pitch video and demonstrating clearly how the product fulfilled the design brief and judging criteria. After much deliberation, the judges decided they should be the winners of Design Ventura 2020.
The Heckmondwicke Grammar School team were awarded with the Design Ventura trophy at the Celebration Event. All top seven shortlisted products were exhibited at the Design Ventura exhibition at the Design Museum.
You can see the student team from Heckmondwike talking about Sow Beautiful on Leeds Local TV and read more about their process on PBS News Hour and the Guardian.
Following the Celebration Event, the student team from Heckmondwike worked with design agency Tom, Dick and Harry to develop their Design Ventura 2020 winning product. The first product development meeting with the designers took place at Castleton Mill in Leeds. You can read more about the students experience in their blog post here.
The students returned to the Design Museum in February to launch their product in the Design Museum Shop. The product is now on sale and retails at £6.50. All proceeds go to the student’s chosen charity Kirkwood Hospice. Buy it here.
The students wrote about their experience of developing their product for sale. You can read about this on our blog.
The student team visited Kirkwood Hospice, their chosen charity on 8 July 2022.
They presented the charity with a cheque from the total sales their product made in the Design Museum shop. Impressively, Grow Wild raised a total of £1,859.