Students from The Piggott School in Reading won the Design Ventura 2023-2024 competition with their project ‘Colour Countdown’, a portable card game inspired by the childhood classics I Spy and Uno. Designed to encourage young kids to put devices down and ‘look at the world’, it will be available to buy from the Design Museum Shop later this year.
‘You can play anywhere at all,’ explained the four-strong team. ‘You draw cards of different colours – red, blue, orange, green etc – and you have to look around and find objects in that colour.’ Made using FSC-certified card and wood pulp cellophane, the cards have coloured windows to allow for a combination of colours.
It’s a bright response to this year’s brief, set by London-based textile designer Kangan Arora, which asked students to design a new product inspired by the theme of Colour and Community. ‘I set this theme in order to challenge them to think in their teams about the importance of community practices, supporting and learning from one another and also consider the wider community who may be their “core customer”,’ explains Arora.
It’s the second year in a row The Piggott School wins the competition (their 3D puzzle last year was another hit). They clearly know how to impress the judging panel, who said of this year’s winning design: ‘It responded to the brief in a way which was creative, fun and appealing to a range of audiences. We didn’t want to put the product down and we knew that customers in the Design Museum would feel the same.'
Among the other nine shortlisted projects were a modular, tangram-inspired lamp by Comberton Village College, Cambridge; a tool to help you simplify your wardrobe by Dover Girls Grammar School, Kent; a Braille desktop calendar by Haggerston School, Hackney; a self-assembly, flat-packed revision organiser by Heathcote School, Chingford; and a board game inspired by dishes from all around the world, by Upper Shirley High School, Southampton.
Design Ventura offers secondary school students the chance to respond to a real-world brief, bringing the business of design to life. The competition is run by the Design Museum in partnership with Deutsche Bank’s global youth engagement programme Born to Be. Now in its 14th year, it has seen over 110,000 students participate and grow their creative and entrepreneurial skills by designing and developing a product for a real target audience.
The shortlisted and winning entries will be on display at the Design Museum for two months, while the ‘Colour Countdown’ game will soon be available from the museum’s shop, with money raised from the sales going to the winning team’s chosen charity.
