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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