Dr Claire Potter [far right corner] and some of the students who presented at New Designers this year

Sussex students presented their final year projects to industry professionals and the public during week 2 of New Designers 2024

Secondary education students visit the exhibition every year to find out about the design courses the universities offer

The University of Sussex returned once again to the New Designers exhibition in London last month. Nine students from the BA and BSc Product Design courses presented their final year projects to industry professionals and the public during week 2 of the event. The team also included four 2^nd year students who were showcasing a project from the Integrated Product Design module.

New Designers is an annual showcase of the UK’s most innovative emerging design talent. Every year since its creation in 1984, the exhibition welcomes over 3,000 graduates from more than 100 university courses across multiple disciplines. New Designers gives them the opportunity to showcase their work on a global scale, whether to industry professionals scouting for new talent or potential investors looking for projects to back. Even if they don’t get offered a job on the spot, which happened to an alumna last year, it is a real opportunity for them to start their careers and make incredible contacts.

New Designers has also become an unofficial reunion for Sussex alumni. Every year former students meet at the Sussex stand to catch up and visit the exhibition. They speak with the students presenting that year and provide them with feedback and career advice based on their experience since they left Sussex.

For universities, New Designers is also an opportunity to showcase the quality and range of projects their students work on. Prospective students and their parents visit the exhibition to look around universities and find out what they have to offer. Every year our students are our best ambassadors. They answer questions about their experience on their courses and their project work. Our stand also displays posters of projects from previous years to showcase the broadest range of what we do, and members of staff are on hand all week to explain about Sussex and what they will be studying, as well as to provide practical advice on the kind of discipline they might be interested in and what to look for.

At New Designers, Sussex is known as the university that deals with circularity and sustainability. One of our strategic goals is to be one of the most sustainable universities in the world. It is estimated that 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase. For this reason, Product Design students at Sussex are educated from Year 1 all the way through to their final year to embed levels of sustainability and circularity in all their work. This way, even though not all the projects that Sussex presented at New Designers this year were listed as sustainability projects, they were all sustainable due to the way students approached them. For example, Travis Bennet’s E-Beat Drums is not a textbook sustainability project, but it is modular and can be disassembled; it uses open-source elements; and the box is fully removable and can be reprocessed or replaced.

Product Designers address real environmental and social problems. Dr Claire Potter, who leads the Sussex New Designers team, said:

“If something doesn’t need to exist, don’t make it. Product design is not making things for things’ sake, or making things that are cool or hit a trend. That’s not what design is. Design should always be human and planet centred and it should solve a problem for human, planet, animal, whatever, but it should be really focused on creating a solution for a problem, not just creating more stuff.”

Conor Gallagher, one of the Sussex students at New Designers this year, explained how his project, CareConnect, was inspired by his personal experience of having a person with dementia in his family: “Seeing the difference that the support they received made in their everyday lives inspired me to talk to professional caregivers about the issues they faced in their work. This inspired my product looking at helping facilitate clear and easily digestible communication.”

All Sussex Product Design students can sign up to take part in New Designers in their final year. The selection process starts on Week 11 of the spring semester, when they present the final year project they are working on to the Sussex panel. By then some projects are more developed than others, and that also determines who will be able to go to New Designers in the end. Unlike other universities, Sussex only brings fully functioning prototypes to the exhibition. If a student has indicated that they want to take part in New Designers, the team will need to decide whether the student will have enough time to get the prototype ready to the right standard or whether they will need to do some refinements.

Connor Pearce, who showcased his court cactus at the exhibition, says that the main lesson he learnt at New Designers was perfecting his product pitch: “finding the middle ground between explaining my idea in detail while keeping it in a short understandable few sentences to keep whoever I was talking to intrigued.”

“While New Designers is not a competition, our students showcase their project alongside students from universities from all over the U.K. and we want to give them the best opportunity to show their work”, explained Dr Claire Potter.

Emma Pearce, who presented Bioxi a biomaterial-based packaging company, encourages future Product Design students to take part in the exhibition: “New Designers is an incredible experience. It has allowed me to have a peak into the business world; how to sell my product, pitching and gaining connections. It is an opportunity to speak to others who have projects that are similar to yours, or completely different, as well as experts in a multitude of industries and fields. Some may ask you to host talks and workshops, others like to interview you, creating more exposure for yourself as a designer.”