Innovate UK KTN at New Designers 2022 Event Highlights

The Innovate UK KTN Design and Materials teams attended New Designers a few weeks ago and had a great time engaging with the design academic community including course leaders and recent graduates. This article contains some of the highlights from the Show.

Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) Opportunities for design graduates talk

Mark Lynch, Design Engineer & KTP Knowledge Transfer Advisor at Innovate UK KTN discussed KTP graduate career opportunities. Click here to find out more about the KTP programme.

Diversity and inclusion in the design community panel session

During the “Diversity and inclusion in the design community” panel discussion at New Designers, Alexandra Jugureanu, Social Science Business Innovation Knowledge Transfer Manager at Innovate UK KTN, chaired the session and interviewed the panel with over 50 people attending the talk. She began the session by highlighting the importance of sharing your personal stories and experiences to make progress with diversity and inclusion in the design community is so important. The panel speakers were truly inspiring and here are some of the highlights from their talks:

The Design team gave out 6 awards for excellent use of inclusion within design to:

• Adam Weir for the Adaptive Ageing with dignity project
• Abigail Simpson (BSc Product Design) for the Inclusive PPE project at the University of Leeds
• Josephine Teschner, (BSc Product Design) for The Teschner Trolley project at the University of Leeds
• Joe Samuel (BSc Product Design) for the Brew project at Bournemouth University
• Alex Baker (BSc Product Design) for the Atmoz project at Bournemouth University
• Samual Gaze (BSc Product Design) for the Immersive gaming headset at Bournemouth University

Materials and Design Forum

Introducing the Materials and Design Forum, John Bound, Dr. Robert Quarshie, Dr. Neelam Mughal and Dr. Noha Abu El Magd of Innovate UK KTN reported on their experience of the Roving Materials Clinic held at New Designers on 7 July. This involved 1:1 discussions about the role of materials in design with some 60 graduate exhibitors and was hosted by Materials and Design Exchange (MaDE), of which Innovate UK KTN is a founding partner.

Introducing the Materials and Design Forum, John Bound, Dr. Robert Quarshie, Dr. Neelam Mughal and Dr. Noha Abu El Magd of Innovate UK KTN reported on their experience of the Roving Materials Clinic held at New Designers on 7 July. This involved 1:1 discussions about the role of materials in design with some 60 graduate exhibitors and was hosted by Materials and Design Exchange (MaDE), of which Innovate UK KTN is a founding partner.

The panel encouraged product design graduates to continue building strong connections with the materials science community and highlighted graphene and metamaterials as outstanding materials developments of the past ten years during a lively Q&A session.

MaDE Awards for Excellent Use of Sustainable Materials or Consideration of Sustainability were presented to the following design graduates:

• Maddy Bostridge, University of Brighton
• Joshua Dale, Lincoln University
• FLOD (Oscar Keenan, Dominic Lewis, Tommy Linnett, Max Sudbury), Sheffield Hallam University
• Phoebe Oldfield, Nottingham Trent University
• Andrei Petrar, London South Bank University
• Bronwen Rees, Nottingham Trent University

It was great to meet so many students and academics at New Designers 2022. If you would like to discuss design and innovation further, make sure to contact the Innovate UK KTN Design team, and we’d be happy to discuss your idea further and share any upcoming events or funding opportunities that may be of interest.