Two innovative and imaginative designs for new Scotch Tape and Post-it Note Pop-up dispensers have been unveiled by the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) and 3M Canada. The designs won first prize in their respective categories in the Dispenser Design Competition for third-year Industrial Design students at OCAD.
The competition is the result of a partnership between 3M Canada and OCAD’s Industrial Design program which fosters meaningful relationships between students, clients and manufacturers to develop effective, desirable and responsible products, services and experiences. At the same time, students are provided with real industry experience that enriches and contextualizes their education.
The brief was to develop a Scotch Tape and Post-it Note Pop-up dispenser that spoke to 3M Canada’s sophisticated brand expectation, for both the office and home markets. Not only did the solutions have to be effective, intriguing and attractive, the winning designs had to have an integrated environmental component in their manufacture, life and user cycles, with 3M Canada also being able to articulate this story into the marketing of the product.
The winning concepts by Matthew Pacione and Scott Currie delivered strongly against the overall requirement from 3M Canada for creating an original, environmentally-friendly dispenser prototype made of sustainable materials. Both designs take advantage of pre-consumer plastic waste, are simple, elegant and effective, and like all good design, show little of the complexity and consideration that goes into the product’s creation.
“This was an excellent opportunity to explore ideation with an industry leader,” said Currie. “The experience of working to find solutions for sustainable and environmental products with a specific brand identity, right through to the production phase was invaluable.”
As part of the competition, each design must:
§ address sustainability and environmental impact concerns;
§ appeal to a target consumer;
§ be designed for production at a specific target cost; and
§ uphold the Scotch and Post-it brand promises
“Our students produced brilliant designs that reflect the whole philosophy of design at OCAD, ‘Design and Humanity,’” said Jules Goss, who chairs OCAD’s Industrial Design program. “The most important consideration was making the cradle-to-grave life cycle of the dispensers as sustainable as possible, in addition to the usability requirements — the dispensers had to be usable with one hand, ergonomic, as lightweight as possible, and easy to refill, for example.”
For his winning Scotch Tape dispenser, Pacione received a $3,000 prize, as did Currie for his first-place Post-it Note dispenser. Second-place prizes of $1,000 each were given to Catalina Navarro and Arash Sadr for their respective Scotch Tape and Post-it Note dispenser designs.
The four prize-winning prototypes will be on display at OCAD’s 94th annual Graduate Exhibition, running May 7 to 10. Scotch brand is the Industrial Design sponsor. Industrial Design will showcase the work of more than 50 graduating industrial design students.
To learn more about the Graduate Exhibition, visit www.ocad.ca/gradex.
