How do you encourage Design students to get beyond their own self-interest and to care for others in greater need than them?

According to Veronica Barnes, a 3D Design lecturer at CPUT, you come up with a holiday project in which they must knit toy bunnies, which are then given to a children’s home. This year saw first-year 3D Design students take on the challenge.

The beneficiary was St Joseph’s Home for chronically ill children in Montana. “I would like it to become a tradition among our students. This project shows students how something small can make a big difference in another person’s life,” says Barnes.

Most of the students in her class this year were male and some learnt to knit from YouTube videos, Barnes adds bemusedly. They knitted a total of 59 bunnies. One student had even knitted finger-puppets, which were earmarked to be used by the occupational therapy team at St Joseph’s home.

A few students went along to the home, and handed out the bunnies to the kids there, and it had real impact on them. Barnes says: “They asked a lot of questions on the trip back to campus, and were thinking of other projects that could benefit others less fortunate than themselves”.

She introduced this project in 2015 for the first time. That year the bunnies were given to young orphans, as well as elderly people at Nazareth House.

While there is an educational angle - in that one knits a flat square, which, with clever folding becomes a 3 dimensional rabbit – the project is really more about the heart. Initiatives like these show that the studio is a space in which students can learn a lot more than just a vocation.

Written by Abigail Calata

The Industrial Design first-year students have again shown the power of design to change the perceived value of a material.

The Department was offered timber offcuts by a local furniture-producing factory, Woodlam. The aim of the project was to find a way to use the waste to create employment for small-scale craftspeople. Lecturers Kevin Brand, Craig Thomas and Veronica Barnes visited the factory and retrieved a huge pile of offcuts (largely hardwoods, but including some veneer) from the refuse bins, which found a new home in the corner of the first-year Industrial Design studio.

Students then worked in groups of 4 or 5 on a design project to devise a family of wooden toys.  After agreeing on the design, the students made their toys from the large pile of offcuts available to them. They worked mainly with hand tools, to simulate the limitations of the craftsperson’s environment. The toy families had intriguing titles such as African Robots, Endangered Animals, Global totem pole, and Animal buses.

Soren Lassen, owner of Woodlam Furniture visited the CPUT Cape Town campus recently to see the results.  He was astonished by the innovation and quality of the results.  All the toy families had made excellent use of the variety of timber offcuts from the factory. These timber toys should be further developed in second year by the same group of Industrial Design students, and will hopefully be manufactured in larger numbers as products made from offcuts – as part of a job creation project.

By: Veronica Barnes, Industrial Design Lecturer

Written by CPUT News
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It wasn’t just the quality of these stunning mosaics that blew Industrial Design staff and students away.

Gale force winds nearly wrecked the entire project, which is a new feature of the Cape Town Design building.

The orientation week project by Industrial Design students took a week to complete.

The mosaic tiles are cut out of recycled magazines and hand-glued to the mountain-facing side of the building.

Each image features an important industrial design which impacted hugely society from simple things like a teapot and watering can to the iconic Behrens fan.

Industrial Design lecturer Veronica Barnes, who managed the project with colleagues Vikki Du Preez and Kevin Brand, says the assignment had a triple purpose.

VIEW FROM ABOVE: The bland wall is given a makeover by the colourful mosaics.

Students got to work together as a team, improve their environment and get an introduction into design history.

“We were having a great time but the wind kept blowing the pixels off,” says Barnes.

“We re-adjusted the project slightly so that some of the work could be done inside and we are very happy with the effect.”

Students started by prepping their wall, making at least three design sketches then using the donated magazines, they cut out the mosaic tiles and made a mock-up on cardboard.

Once the mock-up was approved by a lecturer the group applied the mosaics to the wall and sealed the design with a mixture of wood glue and water.

On Friday students presented their designs to one another making sure the entire class understood the significance of each image.

By Lauren Kansley

Written by CPUT News
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The ocean served as the inspiration for a project that saw second-year product design students designing and manufacturing cardboard chairs.

Product design lecturers Hester Claassen and Veronica Barnes tasked the students with this project during the second term and said the functional cardboard chairs needed to hold a 100kg person.

Students drew inspiration for their furniture from plants, sea life, crabs, shells and corals and were required to explore innovative ways to build weight bearing structures.

World Earth Day (22 April) and World Oceans Day (8 June) fell within the second term. The theme for this year’s World Earth Day was “End Plastic Pollution” while “Preventing plastic pollution and encouraging solutions for a healthy ocean” was the theme for World Oceans Day.

For World Earth Day Barnes discussed plastic pollution in the ocean with the design students, as well as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “While not all students enjoy swimming or surfing in the ocean, eventually plastic dumped in the ocean will find its way into the food chain, and that affects us all,” said Barnes.

She then challenged the students to help keep plastic out of the oceans by making at least one Ecobrick whilst working on their ocean-inspired furniture project.

The Ecobrick project, which began in Guatemala, uses disposable waste plastic to create something valuable.

Unrecyclable plastic, like foil crisp packets, plastic food packaging or polystyrene, is compressed into 2-litre plastic bottles to form an Ecobrick. Almost two black bags of plastic waste can fit into one Ecobrick.

These thermally insulated Ecobricks can then be used to build low walls, affordable housing, school play areas and temporary displays.

The students learned first-hand about the critical features of comfortable chair design and the potential of humble cardboard as a structural material and produced inspiring and original chair designs. At the same time, they also gained a new awareness of discarded plastic that makes its way into the world’s oceans and kept plastic around them out of the ocean by making Ecobricks.

Written by Ilse Fredericks
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The Faculty of Informatics and Design is celebrating the success of two academics today, both of whom were awarded their doctorates during Monday afternoon’s ceremony.

Nicholas Pinfold, from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, was awarded a Doctor of Applied Arts in Design. His thesis is titled Testing middle ground: Facilitating community transition to sustainable land governance.

His supervisor was Prof Masilonyane Mokhele.

Veronica Barnes from the Department of Applied Design was awarded a DTech Design. The title of her thesis is: Empathy in practice: A grounded theory in Industrial Design.

Her supervisors were Prof LJ Theo and Dr Vikki Eriksson.

Pinfold said doing his doctorate had been thrilling and demanding “with deep reflection and unwavering dedication”.

“I believe finishing my doctorate is a significant way to wrap things up considering I will be retiring next year.”

He expressed his “sincere appreciation and indebtedness” to Mokhele, “for his unfailing interest and his ever-ready guidance and advice throughout my research”.

Pinfold said he spent the initial twenty-five years of his career, working in both the public and private sectors within the geomatics profession before embarking on a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Free State.

He joined CPUT in 2008.

He said given his academic focus on community engagement, the most rewarding aspect of his journey has been contributing to the development of communal settlements in the Western Cape.

“Community engagement stands as one of the three foundational pillars of higher education in South Africa, alongside research and teaching/learning. I have found great satisfaction in integrating these pillars, through my research in community engagement, and conducting service-learning projects within the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.”

Barnes said completing doctoral studies is a test of endurance, and “a testament to your support network who need to carry you often”.

“I am so grateful for the care I received from my family and friends during this studying period.”

She said studying part-time while continuing her duties as an academic brought its challenges.

“When studying part time as an academic with classes of students, those real people easily demand the best of your attention and it's difficult to prioritise your own studies. However, I love discovering new things, and this is what research is all about. My topic related to empathy and design was vague, contentious and troublesome, and wrangling with that intricacy was very satisfying ultimately (even though it often felt awful in the middle).”

She said her supervisors were excellent at asking difficult questions, which she appreciated.

Written by Ilse Fredericks
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