Journeys Fuelled by Ideas represents the stories, journeys and processes that Made in Brunel students go through as young engineers and designers. The Journeys Fuelled by Ideas video tells the stories of Brunel students, their projects and their progression as the creators of tomorrow.

Produced by David Paliwoda and Sophie O’Kelly, with additional production assistance from Dann Emmons, Liam Grant and Alan Manion. Featuring Made in Brunel students.

Can’t seem to get the creative cogs turning?

Why not try the Made in Brunel Fortune Teller! 

(Accessories sold separately, batteries not included)

As part of Made in Brunel 2012: journeys fuelled by ideas, we want to find out Your take on the creative process and finding inspiration -and what better way to show it than some sunny-weather inspired arts & crafts? Mere paper fortune teller or fountain of inspiration? Show us you mean business!

Take a look at the examples below and have a go yourself -we’ll put your work on the site and even try and find space in the exhibition for the best ones, so give it a shot!

How to make a paper fortune teller -Wikipedia.org

Have some fun with it and we look forward to seeing what you can come up with!

Made a fortune teller or have any questions?
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Some of the best practices in design for brands have been several rebranding projects in the past years such as BitDefender, the Romanian-originated antivirus product named best by major testing organizations worldwide, and the revival of ROM chocolate bar, a communist brand that continued, through a well-designed and planned advertising campaign, emotionally connecting with consumers. Thus, the branding industry is slowly learning the importance of using design to communicate correctly the brand and establishing emotional connection with people.

Bitdefender original logo

Bitdefender redesign

ROM Bar

At the same time small businesses understand the importance of having a strong image to maintain their competitive advantage but they still don’t know how to use design effectively and this is still a big gap to be explored in trying to find solutions. And as Wally Olins himself stated, ideas come from everywhere. Therefore brand consultants work with product designers and managers in trying to bridge the gap between design and business. Nevertheless, businesses nowadays are trying not to consider design as a separate component, but rather try to integrate it among the entire activity, interacting with all people involved.

Maybe in few years from now Romania will be a role model in making design and business an entity in itself to create market differentiation for East-European countries and more.

Alina Pirvu – MA Branding and Strategy

As part of One World Week at Brunel, Paul shared with us his climbing and mountaineering expertise and spoke about just a few of the expeditions he has undertaken in the 25 years he has been doing it.

With climbs from all over Great Britain he showed us that you do not have to go far afield to find amazing climbing and scenery and he regularly packs up the car on a Friday night, to go climbing in Scotland for the weekend and get back Monday morning ready for work again. This amazing photograph was taken on a climb in the Lake District, another favourite destination.

However, if you did fancy venturing out of the country you would get views such as this one, which Paul took on an ascent of an unclimbed 6000 metre mountain in the Himalayas in India.

 The Himalayas form the planet’s highest mountain region, containing 9 of the 10 highest peaks in the world. On this expedition Paul’s group climbed in a previously unexplored range.

Or this, taken in Antarctica, where he had to manoeuver around deep hidden crevasses all while avoiding stray penguins. This was a 6 week trip, starting in South America, and included sailing across the Southern Ocean in a 40ft yacht, battling hurricane force winds, huge waves and icebergs on the way.

Throughout the rest of the podcast, catch up on the latest news and on goings with in Brunel’s school of engineering and design, and find out about some of the projects springing to life within the workshops.

Enjoy!

Made in Brunel Podcast 3 – rAndom International, Berg & Glen Ward by MadeInBrunel

There’s no better way to procrastinate guilt free than visiting design exhibitions, and so far in 2012 there has been some wonderful work on show.

The Design Museum’s most recent exhibition focuses on Sir Terence Conran and his incredible body of work over the past 80 years. As well as founding Habitat, Conran is also known for being an entrepreneur, maker, interior designer, restaurant owner and author. In comparison to the preceding exhibition on Kenneth Grange, Conran has no distinctive style. This was particularly evident in the way he furnished his growing portfolio of restaurants: from the use of Thonet chairs to red leather cushions and tubular steel, every interior had only one thing in common: the viewer was unable to determine which was designed in 1959 or 2009.

‘Home’ is a design accessories trade show, exhibiting annually for three dates at Earl’s Court. For me, there were two categories that really excelled at the show: lighting and eco design. Cardboard lampshades by Graypants showcased a beautiful profile of the second hand material, with defects just adding to its character. The Plumen lightbulb (Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2011) was on show, with its simple aesthetic challenging the stereotype of unattractive energy saving lightbulbs.

Finally, one of the most inspiring exhibitions I’ve visited recently was the pop-up exhibition ‘Moving Schools’, an initiative by Lousie McKillop and David Cole. This wonderful space showcased design proposals for a moveable school unit for use in Thailand.

Barely a year ago, in January of 2011, McKillop and Cole were travelling – at the Thai/Burmese border they met a wonderful community, but lack of suitable school buildings. If the land rent was raised, or if the school had to be vacated, then the building would be left empty. Whilst travelling the designer and architect began the charity Building Trust, and began an international architectural competition for students and professionals alike. My two favourite responses used a shipping container and truck to made the school unit compact and moveable at short notice – a huge amount of engineering and design went in to making these possible.

Emily Tulloh – Level 1, Product Design Engineering

http://www.emilytulloh.com

In a packed out auditorium, hundreds of aspiring designers, entrepreneurs and students alike sat down to listen to the journeys of former technology & design graduates (some from Brunel’s School of Engineering and Design) and their exploits in the worlds of design and business -and how often those paths cross. Co-organised by Made in Brunel and the Entrepreneur’s society on the 31st January, the Made in Brunel: Technology & Business Event brought together a range of speakers from London’s burgeoning technology industry to discuss their insight, experiences and journeys in an ever changing business sector.

Proceedings were started off by a talk from Chris Moore, a technology specialist currently involved in the development and establishment of Tech City, a wide-reaching government project undertaken by UK Trading and Investment to put London’s East End on the world stage, not only as an incubator for new businesses but also as a European hub for web behemoths like Facebook and Google. Chris Moore painted a vivid picture, of building a platform for real web innovation and progress, championing greater emphasis on the importance of the web technology sector in further evolving our service based economy to meet the challenges of a post-recession world.

Next up was a talk from Stuart Wood and Flo Ortkrass, former Brunel design graduates and directors of rAndom International, a studio dedicated to looking at technology and human interaction -and how the two can cross over in beautifully minimalist art installations. But this was not the result of years of planning or structured growth -rather the winding tale of creative experimentation, insightful failure and an organic evolution of a studio that’s now going from strength to strength. rAndom as it is today has carved a niche in its full-scale, interactive installations, ranging from crowds of social mirrors, chatting amongst themselves before going dead silent to stare at passers-by, to raining rooms that visualise the bubbles of personal space of the people inhabit.

Matt Jones and Jack Schulze were up next, telling the story of Berg’s rise to its current position as a studio pushing the boundaries of human-internet interaction. Berg’s place in this world was hard won, with a series of projects that spread across the internet through a string of word-of-mouth and viral video successes -their most prominent product to date being the enigmatic Little Printer, delivering printed summaries of your online world -it is in this fringe between the internet and human interaction that Berg resides, with a clever intersection of the social norms and frameworks of the internet being brought in to the real world through projects such as SVK, a cyber-thriller with the mechanics of Alternative Reality gaming woven the pages of a traditional format comic, filled with hidden surprises for anyone savvy enough to use the featured ‘SVK Object’ to scan the print.

Rounding out the night was the keynote speech from former Apprentice candidate Glenn Ward. His personal experience in establishing himself as an entrepreneur from a technology background offered the perfect distillation of experience and ideas that seems to bring together Made in Brunel and Brunel’s entrepreneur society: it is through the sharing of our journeys, ideas and views that we can progress as young designers, entrepreneurs and communicators in a changing climate -truly Made in Brunel.

It was great to see that a new collaboration within Brunel was such a huge success. With over 170 attendees, the cross over of student disciplines made the event diverse and exciting. The collaboration with Made In Brunel is one that I am sure will continue for the many years to come and in doing so I am sure can aid the tech, design and entrepreneur crossover. I really enjoyed the event and took away a lot from it! Looking forward to the next one!

Andrew Baker, Brunel Entrepreneur Society President

 -David Paliwoda, Level 3, Studying Broadcast Media Technology & Design BSc

The BTHA Toy Fair trade show, held at London Olympia, hosted a ‘Design Student Day’. A group of Brunel design students were given the valuable opportunity to attend the show, normally just for trade, and presentations on entering the toy design industry.

John Stewart, Co-Director of Worlds Apart (http://www.worldsapart.co.uk/) greeted the students and introduced Andy Partlett, the 3D Development Manager at Worlds Apart. As Andy explained, “Kids are enthusiastic and honest consumers, they want to love your work.” Designing for children and infants generates such exciting responses, and their imagination is inspiring to work with – to children, “Technology is magic”. It seems such a satisfying development process and company to work in, only enforced by the passion that Andy and John spoke with.

Introducing many to the ‘sizzle’ acronym, Andy shared some fantastic insights into new product development within Worlds Apart, and how they develop the techniques for pitching to retailers. Of course, he also presented the important process of conforming to toy standards, sharing an interesting case where the difference in American and British standards required some major design changes.

Ieuan Hopkins of the V&A Museum of Childhood (http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/), was next to present. He shared a fantastic insight into the history of toy design, standards, and the effect of fashion and the ‘real world’ on toys. Particularly interesting to see was the changes in materials used in toys, and one case where the plastic used to make baby dolls became ‘poisoned’, resulting in a strange reaction, still preserved at the museum.

David Fry of Agile IP, presented a very different topic, sharing the importance of IP and patent law to students at the event. Most useful, were the examples that David shared of products known to most of us (eg Blow Pens) and the huge court cases surrounding infringements of patents. Just a few words in a contract can create a multi-million pound court case, it certainly helped realise the severity of these situations.

Students were given the opportunity to explore the rest of the Toy Fair (and given a free lunch voucher – get in). For those interested in entering the toy design industry, the day was a first insight into the real world of toy trade shows. Personally, having attended many on placement, the talks from Andy and John only enforced my interest in entering toy and children’s product design.

 Sophie O’Kelly, Level 3, Studying Product Design BSc

With a number of students designing medical devices this year for their major projects, the opportunity to attend LEG (London Ergonomics Group) and UKUPA (Usability Professionals’ Association) event at UCL’s Interaction Centre on the design and usability of medical devices last week was fantastic. The event was lead by four speakers that complimented each other as they were all from different backgrounds and specialised in different areas.

Patrick Jordan, who has already given us a guest lecture here at Brunel on other areas of his work, kicked off the event with a talk about designing with a human-centred approach for health and well-being products and systems. He discussed a range of issues in healthcare from a practical and psychological point of view including the design of the services, systems, products and messages that affect people’s health.

One of his key points was the misunderstanding of labels and bad instructions complicating procedures and administration of drugs in hospitals leading to unnecessary fatalities. In the US the preventable medical malpractice deaths is equivalent to two 727s crashing every day.

Patrick Jordan has been working closely with Brunel University’s Inclusive Design Research Group lately on a paper that has been accepted for publication at a conference on inclusiveness.

Next to speak was Polly Shelton, who spoke about some of the practical aspects of incorporating and embedding human factors into the medical product design cycle. She covered aspects such as, standards for usability testing, to the different types of research that should be conducted, to how best to recruit participants. To summarise she gave some examples of case studies, this talk in particular was really helpful for the stages we are currently at in our designs.

Matt Pattison, who described his journey (very apt timing with the release of MIB tagline last week – Journey’s Fuelled by ideas) talked about how his own experiences through life and the use of behavioural observation helped in designing meaningful and effective products and services.

Chris Vincent was the final speaker and covered some of the research done by UCL’s CHI-MED project. He explained collaborative working practices and shared examples of them and also went through all the stages required for designing and producing a safe medical useable device.

Overall it was a really interesting evening that we all gained a lot from and will definitely be putting the information and advice into practice over the coming months.

Laura Hodges, Level 3, Studying Product Design BSc

The journeys we make through our degrees are what shape our outlook as young designers and engineers. For 2012, Made in Brunel will strive to share the process and development that goes into all of the projects, the progression of the students, and Made in Brunel itself.  We hope to share the growth and character of individuals through their time at Brunel, their time in industry and beyond into the professional world. Every project at Made in Brunel has a fascinating story. We will show the progressions of these projects from conception, through iterations and prototypes, to the final deliverable and why the project is important. Journeys Fuelled by Ideas represents our aim to share all of these journeys, through a host of events, our annually published book, the main exhibition in June and a continually growing online presence. Follow us online to see the evolution of projects and uncover the innovative thinking behind them.

The second instalment of the Made in Brunel podcast covers a visit to the Made in Brunel Design Challenge, a roundup of developments throughout the first term and the launch of the vision for Made in Brunel 2012.