Hi everyone, we're Reuben and Iris, final year Product Design students in Leeds School of Arts!

We’re always thinking of new ways of how to build a future as designers in industry. When we saw Challenge Week it immediately caught our eye as a perfect chance to get involved in some design projects outside of our course. Giving us the opportunity to build on our CV and portfolios to become graduate product designs.

Reuben's story

Challenge 1: Leeds 2023 Tote Bag Design Challenge

I got stuck in straight away before Challenge Week began by working on my designs for the Leeds 2023 Challenge. Creating lots of rough models and then using my Adobe suite skills to refine them. After lots of feedback I submitted a final design, which later got shortlisted and I was invited to attend the winners announcement ceremony at the Leeds 2023 offices.

This was a great chance to meet their design team, get some feedback and grow my network. I then returned the next day to speak with them about working more with them in future projects and facilitating a selection of workshops.

Challenge 2: Product Design Commercial Challenge

Beckett Food and Challenge Week collaborated and set a team-based business/product design brief around attracting and retaining more international students to university campus food.

This was a high intensity, fast paced experience that pushed me outside my comfort zone like never before. Working with other students from a range of courses and international locations gave insight into other LBU experiences. With such a diverse team we could specialise our knowledge and work effectively to our proposed product. And as a team we collated research, meticulously narrowed it down and found a genuine problem to solve using design thinking.

We pitched our idea to a panel of judges and received first place prize for our proposal. As a result I earnt a cash prize and my team’s design will be taken forward to the next academic year in September 2023.

Challenge 3: Transform Your Futures Live Brief with Overbury

Transform Your Futures Live Brief with Overbury Interior Design was given before Challenge Week and on March 29th we met their team first hand to discuss the brief.

As a cohort of LBU students from Interior design, Fine art ,and Product including myself, Iris and Satch Kulangara got a chance to network with students from the other courses and discuss our ideas to collaborate as a multidisciplinary team. From this visit we developed our networking skills and we have built our team up for a challenging design project to be pitched in early May.

Iris's story

Taking part in challenge week was an amazing opportunity that enabled me to develop many soft skills from teamwork to design thinking to pitch presenting. I wanted to gain experience related to Product Design and work with other people and live clients as this was something that is currently lacking on my CV.

Working with a team as part of the Commercial Challenge and designing a product that would attract international students to Beckett Food was a great opportunity to put what I learnt in my degree into practice and as part of a real life scenario. This was a challenging and engaging day to be a part of, as there many new things to learn, for example, using design thinking in a business setting.

As I am interested in Furniture Design and Interiors, the Transform Your FuturesLive Brief with Overbury also caught my eye when I was looking at the Challenges on MyHub. This is an exciting and ongoing opportunity and as part of the brief I am keen to work with other students and people from different disciplines, for example, Interior Architecture Students. Visiting the Overbury office in Manchester was an insightful day as I was able to learn and observe how design is done in the industry.

What we got out of Challenge Week

We would totally recommend Challenge Week to any student as many valuable lessons were learnt on all the events. Just having the chance to apply course knowledge and skills learnt over the past three years in industry scenarios has been a long awaited expectation of our university experience.

All the challenges were ideal to boost oursoft skills and design skills for our CVs and personal and professional development. We’re so pleased that LBU Challenge Week provided this as it’s a perfect chance for other students from any course to do the same and build their CV with real life examples.