Industrial design students from Melbourne's RMIT University may see their glass cider bottle designs appear on supermarket shelves after participating in a collaboration project between the university and glass giant O-I.
Inspired by similar collaborative schemes by O-I in the US, the local project kicked off last year when O-I Australia senior product designer, Julian Ditchburn, saw an opportunity to tap into local students' design skills while at the same time getting them thinking about the benefits of glass as a packaging medium.
“We have been working with universities in such projects for quite a while now, particularly in the US, where we have organised summer projects in conjunction with
a number of colleges,” Ditchburn explains to PKN.
“These projects give students the benefits of working with an organisation like O-I to gain an understanding and appreciation of the factors that go into glass packaging design for real world markets.
“So I got to thinking there was scope for us to work with the unis here too, and I got in touch with my former lecturer in industrial design back when I was a student at RMIT, Ian Wong. He was most keen.”
Fired with enthusiasm, the two then worked on presenting a design brief to present to the students. They hit on the notion of asking the students to try their creative hands at designing a 500ml cider bottle.
As Jess Simes, national marketing manager O-I Australia, explains, cider was felt to be a growing product segment well suited to 'boutique' bottling solutions.
“Cider has been the fastest growing liquor category for a while now. While it may be from a small base, it has had double digit growth and is reflective of where the boutique beer market went,” Simes explains.
“The same is happening now with ciders that happened with craft beers – there are a lot of boutique, quirky, hand-crafted brands out there now.”
While not wanting to rein-in the student's creativity, Ditchburn and Wong were also firm that the students had to work within the constraints of the commercial market.
The bottles had to be suitable for high-speed production lines, so I prepared a brief to explain the the basics of glass and the design and structural aspects of glass – net widths, proportions of bottles, the need for an area for applying a label and branding and mandatory information and so on.”
Thus, in September last year, Ditchburn and Wong presented their challenge to a group of more than 60 first-year industrial design students. After the initial briefing, the students were then broken up into groups of about seven or eight people to brainstorm ideas.
Wong says he was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm showed by the students.
“For students who hadn't even assigned themselves to a group before we briefed them, they showed tremendous initiative in terms of swapping ideas and doing things like going down to nearby bars to get samples of existing cider bottles. We briefed them in the morning, and they were already producing sketches by 3pm in the afternoon,” Wong says.
“It was amazing, it was the closest I have ever seen to a real studio environment for students.”
From this initial sketching and brainstorming stage, the students were then invited to develop their ideas further on the university's WACOM lab, a facility established in 2009 to give budding designers access to the latest electronic software tools for industrial design, using 21-inch WACOM digital design tablets.
“It was like letting them drive a design Ferrari,” Wong says.
Ditchburn says he was “blown away” when, on returning to his office that afternoon, he got a call from Wong to log onto the university's wiki to see how advanced the groups had got with their projects.
“I was astounded, just the afternoon after my briefing, how far advanced they were and how they had managed to spruce up their initial designs with digital renderings,” he says.
“And Ian and myself were able to discuss, evaluate and critique the various submissions via the wiki. Nearly all showed a real depth of understanding of the 3D form.”
By November, after the groups had been given time to refine their submissions, PKN, along with O-I Australia employees from the company’s design and sales and marketing departments, was invited to review and help judge the more than 60 final student concepts.
The designs were assessed on a range of criteria including their level of creativity and adaptability to glass manufacturing processes.
One of the outstanding designs, simple titled ‘Cider Bottle’, by student Dustin Bailey, was commended for its simple yet contemporary design featuring a large surface area for labelling.
“I’ve always viewed glass as a beautiful material which gives products a premium look and feel,” Dustin says.
“I was really inspired by O-I’s brief and to have my design recognised by a leading glass manufacturer is truly humbling.”
Rather than being awarded prizes, for the students the real reward was the chance that their proposals may eventually make it out in to the retail environment.
At the start of the process, the students assigned design rights for their proposals to O-I, so we can look to manufacture in the future,” Ditchburn says.
“We can show these designs to our clients, and see if it suits them, and eventually make them so they appear on store shelves.
“But even more than that, the collaboration with RMIT provided us with a unique insight into emerging design techniques and technologies as well as an extremely impressive talent pool.”
RMIT's Wong says the project provided students with an understanding of the critical considerations that needed to be made throughout the design and manufacturing processes.
“Industry collaboration is vital to RMIT industrial design,” he says.
“The students experienced an authentic industry studio environment and used their skills and the latest facilities to produce outstanding work, including some of the most amazing designs I’ve seen in twenty years of lecturing.”
