Celebration Event: Design Ventura 2023-24

On Thursday 25 April 2024, welcomed the top ten shortlisted schools who submitted this year to the Design Museum for a day of celebration. We also unveiled the Design Ventura 2023-24 display on the mezzanine – make sure you come and visit while it’s up.

Elysia Thorpe, Programme Manager for Design Ventura, kicked us off by inviting our industry insights speakers – Laura Lebeau, industrial designer at Map Project Office, and Neil Onions, founding director of Beyond the Box – to join her onstage and offer our student teams some guidance and encouragement drawn from their own experiences in the design industry. Students and teachers had the opportunity to ask Laura and Neil questions, before everyone took a break for some soft drinks, tea, and cake!

Next up, student teams were mixed together to take part in Sustainable Design workshops run by our expert Design Museum workshop facilitators, Anna Fearon and Cathy Meese. Sustainable Design workshops are available to book as part of our year-round schools offering and draw on a handling collection unique to the Design Museum, including materials displayed in our bestselling Waste Age: What can design do? exhibition.

Everyone took a break for lunch and explored the exhibitions, catching SKATEBOARD in its last weeks before closing as well as Enzo Mari, which opened the month before. After this came a Design Ventura favourite, speed networking. Students met professionals from all across the design and creative industries and varying career paths – find out more about them below.

Speed networking mentors

In the evening, the Design Museum opened its doors to the shortlisted school teams’ family and friends as well as Deutsche Bank employees, more design industry experts, the museum’s Learning team past and present, and other special VIP guests to celebrate the success of another year of Design Ventura.

The Awards

The Design Museum’s Director of Audiences, Josephine Chanter, welcomed all the schools and guests to the museum, followed by CEO and Director Tim Marlow and Christoph Woermann, Chief Marketing Officer of Corporate Bank Marketing at Deutsche Bank.

We were then joined by our judges from the Design Ventura Pitching Day in March, who took it in turn to announce the Design Ventura awards. This included Christoph as well as the Design Museum’s Senior Buying Manager Preena Patel; designer and entrepreneur Sebastian Conran; and of course our brief-setter for the year, textile and print designer Kangan Arora.

Outstanding Finalists
St Joseph’s Catholic High School with Emergency Cache
Dover Grammar School for Girls with OUTFITY
Comberton Village College with the Creative Colour Box

Commendation for packaging and visuals
Ferndown Upper School with Bouncy Buddies

Commendation for ingenuity of design
Manor CE Academy with S-C-R-A-P

Commendation for best presentation

Heathcote School with the Study Buddy

Commendation for most market-ready product
Christ the King Voluntary Catholic Academy with Road to Go

Third Place
Haggerston School with their Braille Calendar

Second Place
Upper Shirley High School with Dish of the Day

First Place
Piggott School with Colour Countdown – you’ll be seeing more of this one as we move into development and production ready for retail in the Design Museum Shop this winter!

Following the award ceremony, we unveiled our mezzanine display of all student-made prototypes from the top ten teams this year, alongside last year’s winning product Stack It! by The Piggott School (a different team of students, don’t worry!) as sold in the Design Museum Shop right now. The exhibition will run from until late June 2024 – find out more about visiting here.

A massive thank you to all judges and guests for attending for this very special event celebrating the achievements of the Design Ventura 2023-24 finalists, and as always thank you and well done to the students and to the teachers who continue to make Design Ventura special year after year.

All photos © Richard Heald Photography / the Design Museum

2022-23 Winning Product, STACK IT!

The Design Ventura 2022-23 winners the Piggott School with their product STACK IT!, a 3D puzzle game which challenges users to create 3D designs.

The Piggott 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 over 15,000 students from 287 schools across the UK. With their entry, the Piggott School earned a place in the top 10 shortlisted schools. As one of the shortlisted schools, they were invited to pitch their design idea to a panel of judges on 22 March. After much deliberation, the judges decided they should be the winners of Design Ventura 2021-22. You can watch this video to find out more about what happens at pitching day.

The winning team were awarded with the Design Ventura trophy at the Celebration Event. All top ten shortlisted products are exhibited at the Design Ventura exhibition at the Design Museum.

Following the Celebration Event, the student team worked with design agency Map Project Office to develop their Design Ventura 2022-24 winning product. The first product development meeting with the designers took place at the designers studio in London.

The product was launched at the Design Museum Shop on 23 January 2024. On the launch day, the team put their sales skills to the test, selling their product at the Deutsche Bank Office. Impressively, they sold 37 packs in less than an hour.

The students then head to the Design Museum to see their product on sale in the shop! They continued their successful selling streak, selling 3 more products to Director of the Design Museum, Tim Marlow.

All photos ©James Polley Photography/Design Museum

International and Independent Category Winners 2022-23

This week the Design Ventura team celebrated the top three shortlisted schools in the International and Independent Category. Each school submitted a 3 minute video pitch, which was reviewed by this year’s judging panel to choose a winner.

The top three schools were then invited to a prize day at the Design Museum on Tuesday 6 July. The students had an award ceremony, a sustainable design workshop followed by access to the Design Museum exhibitions, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense and The Offbeat Sari.

Josephine Chanter, Director of Audiences at the Design Museum announced this year’s awards to the top 3 shortlisted teams. We are happy to announce the prizes awarded were:

Third Place: St. Lawrence College
Aqua Utensil
A kitchen utensil designed with five interchangeable ends which fit onto a bamboo handle!

Second Place: The King’s School
Reely
Reely is a space-saving product that will provide a neat, mess-free place for your cables and wires.

First Place: Halcyon London International School
Monster Mouth
The Monster Mouth is a product designed to encourages children to feed the “monster” their clothing items or rubbish to help tidy spaces!

Well done teams!

All photos ©Richard Heald Photography/Design Museum

Celebration Event: Design Ventura 2022-23

On Thursday 27 April 2023 the Design Ventura team welcomed the top ten shortlisted schools to the Design Museum for a day of celebration.

The event was kicked off by Stella Fong, Head of Learning at the Design Museum. To begin the celebrations, schools were invited to join an insightful talk from Heba Tabidi, DJ and founder of SpaceBlack and Harrison Marshall, Co-Founder of design and build practice CAUKIN Studio.

After tea and cake students had a chance to compete against one another in a design challenge to build the highest Jenga Tower. Following on from this the students participated in an exciting typography workshop led by Sarah Hyndman from Type Tasting.

In the afternoon, students and guests enjoyed a careers insight speed networking activity meeting various design and business experts including a graphic designer, product designer, illustrator, and UX/UI designer to name a few.

In the evening, the Design Museum opened its doors to the shortlisted school teams, their teachers, family and friends, Deutsche Bank employees, design industry experts, the Design Museum team and special VIP guests to celebrate the success of Design Ventura 2021-22.

The Awards

Josephine Chanter began by welcoming the schools and guests to the museum. Then, this was followed by Tim Marlow, CEO and Director of the Design Museum and Christoph Woermann, Chief Marketing Officer of Corporate Bank Marketing at Deutsche Bank.

Judges then took it in turn to announce the Design Ventura awards:

OUTSTANDING FINALIST: Ferndown Upper School
OUTSTANDING FINALIST: Upper Hall School
OUTSTANDING FINALIST: Langley Park School for Boys
COMMENDATION FOR BEST DESIGN PROCESS: South Wilts Grammar School
COMMENDATION FOR BEST FIT TO BRIEF: Prendergast Ladywell School
COMMENDATION FOR MOST EMPATHIC DESIGN: Orleans Park School
COMMENDATION FOR INGENUITY: Upton by Chester High School
Third Place: Colchester Royal Grammar School
Second Place: Cambourne Village College

Christoph Woermann announced the winning team The Piggott School with ‘STACK IT‘, A 3D architectural puzzle structure which challenges users to complete different tasks!

Following the award ceremony, the Design Ventura Exhibition was unveiled including all the student made prototypes. This year the display included the past winning product Stack It! by The Piggott School. The exhibition will run from 27 April – 26 June 2023. You can find out more about visiting the exhibition here.

Thank you to all the schools, judges and guests for attending for this very special event celebrating the achievements of the Design Ventura 2021-22 finalists!

All photos ©Richard Heald Photography/Design Museum

Pitching Day: Design Ventura 2022-23

On 22 March 2023, the Design Ventura team welcomed the top ten shortlisted schools to Deutsche Bank HQ, Winchester House, for the 2022-23 Pitching Event. Below is a film of the event:

Each team had a chance to present their product idea and prototypes to our panel of expert judges who were extremely impressed with the professionalism of the students’ three minute pitches.

The judges from left to right: Christoph Woermann, Preena Pate, Sujata Burman, Selasi Setufe and Sebastian Conran.

Amy Harris, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility UK at Deutsche Bank, kicked off the event with a very warm welcome to Winchester House.

The panel had a fantastic time meeting the students, watching their presentations and questioning them about their product ideas. The students were very well prepared and gave fantastic answers!

Whilst the judges were busy deliberating and having to make very difficult decisions choosing all the prize winners, the students took part in a networking session with the other top 10 schools!

The winner will be announced in April when all the schools will return to the Design Museum for the Celebration Event.

All photos ©Richard Heald/Design Museum

Design Ventura 2022-23 Shortlist

We are pleased to announce the shortlisted entries for Design Ventura 2022-23.

Thank you to all the teachers and students who have worked so hard on this year’s project. This year we have a shortlist of ten state schools in the main competition for this year’s celebration event in April.

We had over 15,000 students participating this year, so our panel of shortlisting judges did not have an easy task. After much debate, the final top ten state school entries and top three schools in the International and Independent Category were selected – please see a full list in alphabetical order below.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

All schools that have submitted an entry for Design Ventura will receive feedback from our judges and will be sent participation certificates for their students by post – we will send these soon.

This year, the top ten state shortlisted schools will be contacted with further details about the Pitching event taking place on Tuesday 22 March at the Winchester House. 

DESIGN VENTURA SHORTLIST 2021-22

(in alphabetical order)

Cambourne Village College, Cambridge

Starlight
A constellation projector that works with your phone torch, so you can look at the stars wherever you are.           

Colchester Royal Grammar School
The O-Box
A desk organiser which you can take anywhere to organise your everyday work or leisure items!

South Wilts Grammar School
Texture Turtles
A sensory toy made of recycled materials to help users manage their anxiety.

Ferndown Upper School
Bauhaus in a Bottle
A 3D, interactive frame which brings design history to life.

The Piggott School
STACK IT!
A 3D architectural puzzle structure which challenges users to complete different tasks!

Langley Park School for Boys

Fold’n’Grow

An origami set create your own plant pots at home, featuring a design for every season. 

Upton Hall School FCJ
Globe
A beautiful kirigami kit, with a circular product life and plantable packaging

Orleans Park School
TipTab
An inclusively designed bottle tab opener which users can mould to the shape of their own hands.        

Upton-by-Chester High School
Bee Buddy (BBDY)
A reusable bee-house for your garden, providing bees with both food and shelter.

Prendergast Ladywell School, London
Day Out Dice
A dice game and website, for fun accessible day trips for all the family.

INTERNATIONAL AND INDEPENDENT CATEGORY

(in alphabetical order)

Halcyon London International
Monster Munch
The Monster Mouth is a product designed to encourages children to feed the “monster” their clothing items or rubbish to help tidy spaces!

Kings School Caterbury
Reely
Reely is a space-saving product that will provide a neat, mess-free place for your cables and wires.

St Lawrence College
Aqua Utensil
A kitchen utensil designed with five interchangeable ends which fit onto a bamboo handle!

Design Ventura Shortlisting Panel 2022-23

Thank you to our participating schools for your submissions! All entries will be carefully reviewed by our shortlisting panel of judges. They will have the difficult task of selecting the shortlisted ideas for Design Ventura 2022-23. You can read more about them below, in alphabetical order:

Clare Moore
Clare is a Chartered Architect, with a wealth of experience delivering projects in public and private sectors of the industry. This is complimented by her extensive experience as an educator at UK Universities. Clare founded C3M Studio in 2009, a London based architectural practice that provides furniture installations, refurbishments, education and residential projects. Her conceptual approach is characterised by pealing back layers to reveal the original character of existing buildings, by utilising appropriate sustainable materials to creatively reuse and enhance original beauty.

Harry Mitchell
Harry co-founded Beta Design Office, a London based multi-disciplinary design consultancy with a core focus on industrial design. An inventor and maker at heart, Harry’s mechanical intuition and love for how things work means he designs products that last. Previously Associate Director at Sebastian Conran Associates, he has worked on a variety of projects from consumer robotics through to furniture, homewares, and custom motorcycles. 

Richard Brownlie-Marshall

Richard is a multidisciplinary designer who has created work for clients such as Pret A Manger, Zizzi and The Archbishop of Canterbury. He is the Head of Creative at Mindful Chef and has an eponymous line of lifestyle products. Richard’s multi-hyphenate career has seen him work with a diverse collection of brands and over an extensive range of mediums, which has no doubt contributed to his unique perspective in design.

Yelizaveta (Liza) Shinkarenko
Lisa is a UX designer working on Client Lifecycle Transformation and Client Facing Portal projects in Desutsche Bank, London. Prior to becoming a UX designer Lisa was working as a Project Manager and as a QA Automation engineer on various projects across the industry, which gave her a well-rounded understanding of the Software Development process and a critical role that an end user plays in it.
Lisa is passionate about the way art, design and science can bridge the gap between humans and machines, with a goal to create a bright and sustainable future.

Winning Product Development – Eco Seed Student Perspective

Students Amanda, Genevieve, Holly, William and Serena won Design Ventura 2021-22 with their product Eco Seed, a doughnut shaped grid which floats on water keeping seeds moist and provoking them to germinate. Here they talk about their experience of developing their design for sale in the Design Museum Shop.

‘As soon as we got the design brief about the five senses and knew that we wanted our product to be as sustainable as possible, we began coming up with ideas that would fit the design brief. After many different designs, we came up with a concept that allows you to grow a plant without soil or a plant pot. This applied well with the senses of sight, touch, taste and smell.  After many sketches, prototypes, iterations and 3D printed models we developed the Eco Seed.’

Regarding the sustainability side, we decided to use PLA as our 3D printing material because of its chemically degradable and recyclable properties, as well as its durability and waterproof properties.’

‘Once it was time to further develop our design for production and sale at the Design Museum’s shop, we collaborated with amazing designers from Batch Works and Triple Double. Together we discussed how our Eco Seeds could be manufactured and what kind of packaging it should be sold in. 

Changes to our Eco Seed consisted of printing the rings and grids separately (still in PLA), then clipping them back together, to reduce waste and manufacturing time, we also changed the grid shape from regular squares to a honeycomb pattern to make it more aesthetically pleasing.  

Regarding the colour of our Eco Seed’s ring and grid, was decided to test out different colours to see which ones reacted with the water and the seeds the least. After testing we concluded that the colours mustard yellow, and terracotta would be the best fit for our Eco Seed’s long-term use.

For our packaging we liked how our original one was very simple and allowed you to see the full Eco Seed, including the grid. However, to minimise packaging we decided to make it smaller and more compact whilst still allowing a window to view the Eco Seed’s grid, making the design even more playful and eye catching for all age ranges. 

Lastly, regarding the instructions, we were very keen to make sure anyone could understand how to use the Eco Seed. Our solution to this was to have illustrations rather than writing to facilitate universal understanding, and therefore use, of our product.

Collaborating along with designers from Triple Double and Batch Works was extremely enlightening​ ​and eye opening for us. Not only did we get to see how professional designers work, pitch their ideas and improve them based on feedback, we were also able to experience things from a client’s perspective. As the clients, we had a say about the next direction for the ideas and any requests or improvements. Everything was so much more professional.’

‘Going to London was such an exciting and unforgettable experience for us. We participated in workshops before the awards ceremony and had the opportunity to talk to multiple people from a range of design related backgrounds. We also had the opportunity to hear about two successful people’s journeys in detail, relating to their careers, which gave us many insights into these in particular.

When we found out that we had won the competition, all we could do was look at each other in awe while processing this. Everything seemed so surreal, like a fantasy or a dream. We were all hoping to win but couldn’t quite believe it at first. The whole experience taught us that hard work does pay off and it’s given us confidence in our designs and creativity.’

‘We would like to say a special thank you to Triple Double and Batch Works for helping us improve our product and its packaging, as well as the Deutsche Bank for hosting the pitching event and, of course, the whole Design Ventura team and judges for giving us the opportunity to compete in the competition by shortlisting our team.’

Final product available for sale in the Design Museum Shop

“Wellbeing” Mini Challenge Winners 2022-23

This year’s Design Ventura Mini Challenge is open to students in years 7 and 8. The theme for this year’s mini challenge is wellbeing, inspired by the Design Museum’s The world of ASMR exhibition.

Students are asked to come up with an idea for a new product for the Design Museum Shop that tackle’s a related issue to wellbeing (e.g: mental health, connecting with others, being active, take notice of our environment etc.). You can see a shortlist of last year’s winning ideas here.

The brief:

Students are asked to submit an image of their product idea and complete a short form. Winners are announced fortnightly on Twitter and Instagram from October 2022 until February 2023 and winning students are sent a prize in the post.

Here are the winning submissions for the Wellbeing Mini Challenge 2022-23:

Week 1: ‘Small Goals for Everyday’ by Rosie age 11 from the Oakwood School.
A dice game designed to be used each day for self reflection and goal setting. Each dice has a different activity related to exercise, health and wellbeing on to complete in the day.

Week 2: ‘Small Goals for Everyday’ by Ishan age 11 from the Lochinver House.
A cube designed to bring the ASMR experience into a toy which engages the senses.

Week 3: ‘Trash Talk’ by Zach age 11 from the The Bluecoat School.
A set of three desktop trash bins for kids to write down their thoughts on the day and empty weekly.

International and Independent Category Winners 2021-22

This week the Design Ventura team announced the winners of the International and Independent Category from the shortlisted schools.

Each school submitted a 3 minute video pitch, which was reviewed by this year’s judging panel to choose a winner.

Third Place:

American Community School with Soaprise

Soaprise is a product deigned to encourage children to wash their hands. The design idea is to have a small toy in the centre of the soap as an incentive for children to wash your hands and reveal the toy inside.

Second Place:

Merchant Taylors School, England, with RMP: Recycled Music Products

RMP is a unique, innovative jewellery design made out of old vinyl records, fitting into this years design museum brief to be inspired by our senses, taking something you use to listen and made it into something you can wear.

First Place:

St. Andrews International School, Bangkok with Dino Plant

Dino plant is a recycled seed paper based origami set, that will bring fun and creativity to children and teens without the use of an electronic device! Once the origami has been folded to desired iconic shape, it can then be planted, watered and will grow into a plant.

Well done teams!

Design Ventura 2021-22 Winning Product Eco Seed

The Design Ventura 2021-22 winners are Cambourne Village College with their product Eco Seed, a doughnut shaped grid which floats on water keeping seeds moist and provoking them to germinate.

Cambourne Village College’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 18,000 students from 397 schools across the UK. With their entry, Cambourne Village College earned a place in the top 10 shortlisted schools. As one of the shortlisted schools, they were invited to pitch their design idea to a panel of judges on 22 March. After much deliberation, the judges decided they should be the winners of Design Ventura 2021-22. You can watch this video to find out more about what happens at pitching day.

Cambourne Village College team were awarded with the Design Ventura trophy at the Celebration Event. All top ten shortlisted products are exhibited at the Design Ventura exhibition at the Design Museum.

You can see the student team from Cambourne Village College talking about Eco Seed on BBC Cambridge and read about the winning product on Hort News.

Following the Celebration Event, the student team worked with design agency Triple Double Studio and Batch.Works to develop their Design Ventura 2021-22 winning product. The first product development meeting with the designers took place at both design agencies studios in London.

Eco seed launched at the Design Museum on 16th January 2023. The students from Cambourne Village College came to museum to launch the product in the shop. The product is on sale for £10.00 and all the proceeds will be donated to the students charity of choice: MND Association.

On Monday 3rd July 2023 the student team returned to the Design Museum to present a cheque from the sales of Eco Seed. The school raised an amazing £2550.42 for their chosen charity MND Association

All photos ©Richard Heald Photography/Design Museum

Design Ventura 2021-22 Celebration Event

On Thursday 28 April 2022 the Design Ventura team welcomed the top ten shortlisted schools to the Design Museum for a day of celebration.

The event was kicked off by Fiona MacDonald, Head of Learning at the Design Museum. To begin the celebrations, schools were invited to join an insightful talk from Sheana Yu, founder of Aergo and Tiya Dahyabhai, Assistant Curator at the Design Museum. Sheana shared her journey as a designer, engineer and founder, seeking ways for design to empower the users. Tiya talked about her career following her passion for textile design and audience engagement.

After tea and cake and while friends and family were on a tour of the Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, students had a chance to participate in an exciting drawing workshop led by Peter Ayres and a typography workshop led by Sarah Hyndman from Type Tasting.

In the afternoon, students and guests enjoyed a careers insight speed networking activity meeting various design and business experts including a graphic designer, product designer, illustrator, and UX/UI designer to name a few.

In the evening, the Design Museum opened its doors to the shortlisted school teams, their teachers, family and friends, Deutsche Bank employees, design industry experts, the Design Museum team and special VIP guests to celebrate the success of Design Ventura 2021-22.

The Awards

Fiona MacDonald began by welcoming the schools and guests to the museum. Then, this was followed by Tim Marlow, CEO and Director of the Design Museum and Christoph Woermann, Chief Marketing Officer of Corporate Bank Marketing at Deutsche Bank.

Amy Harris, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility UK at Deutsche Bank announced Ben Myers from Ferndown Upper School as the Teacher of the Year award. Judges then took it in turn to announce the Design Ventura awards:

OUTSTANDING FINALIST: Prendergast Ladywell School
OUTSTANDING FINALIST: The Piggott School
OUTSTANDING FINALIST: County Upper School
COMMENDATION FOR GOOD DESIGN PROCESS: Ferndown Upper School
COMMENDATION FOR MOST MARKET READY PRODUCT: South Wilts Grammar School
COMMENDATION FOR INGENUITY: Orleans Park School
COMMENDATION FOR BEST PRESENTATION: Liverpool Blue Coat School
Third Place: Salford City Academy
Second Place: Tiffin School

Christoph Woermann announced the winning team Cambourne Village College with ‘Eco Seed‘, a floating doughnut shaped grid which keeps the seeds or plants moist, provoking them to germinate.

Following the award ceremony, the Design Ventura Exhibition was unveiled including all the student made prototypes. This year the display included the past winning product Grow Wild by Heckmondwike Grammar School. The exhibition will run from 29 April – 26 June 2022. You can find out more about visiting the exhibition here.

Thank you to all the schools, judges and guests for attending for this very special event celebrating the achievements of the Design Ventura 2021-22 finalists!

All photos ©Richard Heald Photography/Design Museum

Design Ventura Pitching Event 2021-22

On 22 March 2022, the Design Ventura team welcomed the top ten shortlisted schools to Deutsche Bank HQ, Winchester House, for the 2021-22 Pitching Event. Below is a film of the event:

Each team had a chance to present their product idea and prototypes to our panel of expert judges who were extremely impressed with the professionalism of the students’ three minute pitches.

The judges from left to right: Rosa Bertoli, Christoph Woermann, Preena Patel, Yuri Suzuki and Sebastian Conran.

Lareena Hilton, Global Head of Brand Communications & CSR at Deutsche Bank, kicked off the event with a very warm welcome to Winchester House.

Fiona MacDonald, Head of Learning at the Design Museum thanked everyone for coming and passed over to Ellen Ferguson who invited each school up to pitch.

The panel had a fantastic time meeting the students, watching their presentations and questioning them about their product ideas. The students were very well prepared and gave fantastic answers!

Whilst the judges were busy deliberating and having to make very difficult decisions choosing all the prize winners, the students took part in a fun design challenge, seeing who could create the tallest Jenga tower!

Cambourne Village College won the challenge with a very tall tower!

The day ended with the judges giving constructive feedback to all the teams. The winner will be announced in April when all the schools will return to the Design Museum for the Celebration Event.

All photos ©Luc Schol/Design Museum

Design Ventura Shortlist 2021-22

We are pleased to announce the shortlisted entries for Design Ventura 2021-22.

Thank you to all the teachers and students who have worked so hard on this year’s project. This year we have a shortlist of ten state schools in the main competition for this year’s celebration event in April.

We had over 18,000 students participating this year, so our panel of shortlisting judges did not have an easy task. After much debate, the final top ten state school entries and top three schools in the International and Independent Category were selected – please see a full list in alphabetical order below.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

All schools that have submitted an entry for Design Ventura will receive feedback from our judges and will be sent participation certificates for their students by post – we will send these soon.

This year, the top ten state shortlisted schools will be contacted with further details about the Pitching event taking place on Tuesday 22 March at the Winchester House. 

DESIGN VENTURA SHORTLIST 2021-22

(in alphabetical order)

Cambourne Village College, Cambridge 
Eco Seed
A product which allows users to grow seeds and watch seeds germinate and allowing the user to observe the plant’s growth the entirety of nature in its fullest form.

County Upper School, Suffolk
Sunny London
A fun craft kit for children and families featuring great British design icons to create stained glass windows.

Ferndown Upper School, Dorset
The Flippy Book
A Flip-Book to mix and match iconic designs and unlock your creativity.

Liverpool Blue Coat School, Liverpool
Designosaur
A dinosaur shaped buildable and customisable plant pot to grow herb.

Orleans Park School, Twickenham
The Sturdy Stabiliser
Portable and reusable pads to fix your wobbly chairs and tables when out. 

Prendergast Ladywell School, London
Grow Your Story
A biodegradable fairytale storybook with a plant kit.

Salford City Academy, Manchester
Tongue Twister Game
A card game with alliterative phrases challenging the players to pronounce individual words.

South Wilts Grammar School, Wiltshire
Gender Jigsaw
Jigsaw pieces with preferred pronouns to be worn on your clothing.

The Piggott School, Berkshire
Corky
A quirky pineapple soft toy made of cork, bamboo and felt.

Tiffin School, Kingston upon Thames
Drummable
A DIY cardboard drum-kit creating a wide range of textures and sounds.

INTERNATIONAL AND INDEPENDENT CATEGORY

(in alphabetical order)

American Community School, Amman
Soaprise
A soap with a surprise toy hidden in inside.

Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School, Crosby
RMP: Recycled Music Products
A stylish and chic jewellery made of old vinyl records.

St Andrews International School, Bangkok
Dino Plant
A recycled seed paper based origami set of the iconic Loch Ness monster.

Winning Product Development – Grow Wild Student Perspective

Students Alice, Emily, Hannah and Naomi won Design Ventura 2020 with their seed launcher design, Grow Wild (formerly called Sow Beautiful). Here they talk about their experience of developing their design for sale in the Design Museum Shop.

“The process of developing the Grow Wild seed launcher has been a real eye opener. Having the opportunity to work with practicing designers gave us an excellent insight into the importance of carefully considering many different aspects of a design before it can be launched.

At the centre of all decisions is the customer. Ultimately, in order for the product to be successful, the customer must appreciate every aspect of it, from the name, to the packaging and the function of the product.

We were led through the development process by the brilliant duo of Huw and Mark of the Tom, Dick and Harry design studio in Leeds. Our first meeting was focused on the name of the product. We were all in agreement that although our original name of Sow Beautiful worked reasonably well, it didn’t really give an accurate representation of what the product does. To generate a range of potential product names we first recorded numerous words related to the function of the product. We then combined these words in different ways and discussed the most effective outcomes. After discussing the different options with members of the target audience, we concluded that Grow Wild would be the best name as it is a fun play on words and gives the customer a good idea of what the product does.

The next stage of the development process was focused on branding. Huw and Mark mocked up the packaging in a range of different designs from traditional and floral to modern and minimalist. Seeing the hexagonal packaging in these different styles really brought the product to life and gave us the opportunity to talk about which design we thought would be most appealing to our chosen target market. Again, we took feedback before deciding on this fun, hand illustrated style. The main deep yellow colour is not only eye catching and representative of summer and growth, it also ties in well with our school colours. 

It has been an incredible experience to be involved in and we are beyond excited to be launching our product at the Design Museum in early 2022. We can’t wait to see and hold the finished product!

We would like to say a huge thank you to Deutsche Bank and the Design Ventura team, without whom none of this would have been possible.”

2021-22 Waste Age Mini Challenge Winners

This year’s Design Ventura Mini Challenge is open to students in years 7 and 8. The theme for this year’s mini challenge is waste, inspired by the Design Museum’s Waste Age exhibition.

Students are asked to come up with an idea for a new product for the Design Museum Shop that either tackles a waste issue or uses a waste material. You can see a shortlist of last year’s winning ideas here.

The brief:

Students are asked to submit an image of their product idea and complete a short form. Winners are announced fortnightly on Twitter and Instagram from September 2021 until February 2022 and winning students are sent a prize in the post.

Here are the winning submissions for the Waste Age Mini Challenge 2021-22:

Well done students and be sure to keep those submissions coming!

Mini Challenge Shortlist, Design Ventura 2020

The mini challenge offers a taster of the Design Ventura programme for younger students, which can be run in a single lesson, set over rotation or given as homework.

For Design Ventura 2020 we received 3,000 submissions from students across the country during lock down. Of the 25 winners, a shortlist of 6 student designs were displayed at the Design Museum as part of the Design Ventura exhibition from 12 June – 22 August 2021.

Below is that shortlist:

Hand Holding Gloves
Betsy, Davison High School
A pair of gloves designed to simulate the feeling of holding hands for those struggling with loneliness over lock down.

Rainforest Rescue
Ivy, The Nottingham Emmanuel School
A play scene that teaches children why it is important to look after the world around us.

Sensory Rubik’s cube
Emma, Simon Langton Girls’ Grammar School
A Rubik’s cube with different surfaces on each side so that the cube can be used by those who are visually impaired.

S.O.S (Save our seas) Dominoes
Tom, Liverpool College
A family game made from beach plastic, each domino features an endangered marine species. Aimed at ages 3+.

Spring Rain Shoes
Lara, Walthamstow School for Girls
Comfortable and breathable shoes with a hydrochromic design that is revealed when the shoe gets wet.

Wild Wrapping
Aoife, Didcot Girls’ School
Biodegradable wrapping paper which has flower seeds embedded in it. The pattern is made with natural, non- toxic dye. Instead of throwing it away, the gift receiver is able to plant the paper and it will grow flowers that will attract bees and butterflies to their garden.

The Design Ventura online mini challenge for years 7 and 8 will return for Design Ventura 2021-22. This year’s challenge will be waste themed, inspired by the Design Museum’s upcoming Waste Age exhibition.

Find out more about the Waste Age mini challenge here.

Product Development Meeting for Sow Beautiful

On Monday 19 July 2021 the Design Ventura 2020 winning team from Heckmondwike Grammar School visited Design Studio ‘Tom Dick and Harry‘ for the first product development meeting for ‘Sow Beautiful’. The students have written this blog post about their experience:

We had the opportunity to visit Huw and Mark at the ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ Design Agency at Castleton Mill in Leeds to discuss the development of our project.  

The main topic of discussion was to explore the potential for renaming the seed launcher to be more suited to its function. After initially writing down a wide range of words associated with our product and its use, we then experimented with different word combinations and discussed which title was most appropriate for the product.  

We haven’t yet decided which name to take forward, but it has given us plenty of food for thought. Mark and Huw then led us through ways in which we can use illustration and typography to ensure the branding is appealing to our target audience.  

The ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ Team will now apply their creative skills to explore different design opportunities to make the product appropriate for manufacture. We are looking forward to meeting up again in September to consider the next steps of our design journey.  

We can also highly recommend the toasties at the Castleton Mill Café!