Students Win National Awards for Innovative Product Designs

Two days before classes began in fall 2010, Teressa Hamje had no plans to go back to college. She lived in Portland and worked as a professional muralist. Her fiancé had left for an all-boys camping trip so she was sulking with her dog on the couch when Netflix suggested a documentary, “Objectified,” about the expression, identity and sustainability that go into product design – from potato peelers to tech gadgets.

In the middle of the film, “I had one of those moments,” she says, “and all of a sudden I knew what I wanted to do. The next day I did some research and discovered UO's product design program. Two days later, I was attending my first class and have been going strong ever since.”

So strong that by mid-August she was one of only three national award winners in a product design competition, earning $2,000 for herself and $1,000 for the product design program at the University of Oregon.

Hamje wasn’t the only UO winner in the competition; fellow student Dan Nicholson also walked away a $2,000 winner in the Interzinc Awards, which gives just three awards annually for the best product designs using zinc.

That UO took two of the three awards is no surprise. UO product design students have won every year since the PD major launched in 2008. Last year, UO’s Tara Nielsen won with her “Billow Napkin Dispenser.” In 2009, UO’s Jessica Richards won with her “Rock Band Microphone.”

The Interzinc competition challenges students with a different theme each year – this year’s was for “any type of handheld, portable, cord or cordless power tool.” Zinc was required for the main component. Both Hamje and Nicholson designed hedge trimmers.

A common denominator in UO’s outstanding Interzinc performance is professor Kiersten Muenchinger, who mentored four students to Interzinc awards when she taught at the California College of Arts in San Francisco prior to being recruited by UO in 2008 to develop its product design program. Every year since, at least one of her students has garnered an Interzinc award.

Muenchinger uses her winter-term Objects and Impacts class for the competition. In the class, students “learn how to redesign an object, think about manufacturing design requirements, and create a suitable entry for the competition,” she says.

“The competition is a nice carrot for the work that students are already doing. It also supports the importance of designing for manufacturing requirements, which is not usually the most beloved subject area (but) it’s the difference between an idea and a realizable product.”

To make that happen, she encourages students to tear things up.

“She brought in power tools for us to take apart and see how they were made, which was extremely helpful,” Nicholson says. She also organized tours of factories so students could learn “the different manufacturing processes in person, which helped us on our designs for the power tools,” he says.

Oregon-based power tool company Blount, Inc. supported the class with donations of power tools to benchmark tool redesigns, interviews with product developers, tours of their manufacturing facility in Milwaukie, and design and manufacturing critiques.

Nicholson grew up designing and building things for fun. “It went from pencils to LEGOs to cardboard and then on to bigger things such as wood and metal. I was always spending my time inventing something new,” he says. “What I didn’t realize was that the things I was doing for fun could actually be a profession.”

Hamje, on the other hand, was a novice at product design. With a degree in liberal arts from The Evergreen State College, she had worked as an artist for nearly a decade but never designed a product. That made Muenchinger’s hands-on approach especially helpful.

“Working on my hedge trimmer was a crash course in design process, which was a framework for learning about materials and manufacturing,” Hamje says. “I learned about material requirements, manufacturing techniques and user experience. The homework was broken up into phases of the design process, from brainstorming to model making.”

Her biggest take away from the competition? “Allowing myself to have crazy ideas, look at the problem from every angle and consider all options.”

Nicholson says the PD program has taught him the importance of pre-design. “Before, I would think about what I wanted to make, do a few sketches and then have at it. Now, there is more time spent on researching, ideation, prototyping, testing, user feedback, final design and presentation, and other important considerations such as environmental impact, materials and ergonomics.”

Muenchinger plans to use the $2,000 her students won for the PD program to purchase manufacturing equipment, possibly “a vacuum bag for complex furniture forming or a drill press and hot wire cutter for quick prototyping.”

The program will welcome 45 new students when fall term begins Sept. 26.