In conjunction with Southern Water we asked Key Stage 3 students in five schools in the South East to calculate how much water their school uses and then work with designers to design a service, product or campaign to improve the way their school uses water.
The World's Smallest Water Museum
The £5,000 first prize was awarded to Sholing Technology College for their design of the World's Smallest Water Museum. Judges including designer Wayne Hemingway, Southern Water's Darren Bentham and WWF's Rose Timlett, awarded the school the prize because of the way they had used design techniques to come up with such an original idea.
Designers from Common Ground - Angela Morelli, Vincenzo Di Maria and Bruno Taylor - helped the team of students from Sholing College to design a fun and interactive exhibition that would fit in a portaloo that could be moved around local schools to raise awareness of why we need to save water.
The team created a user persona, called Normal Norman, after interviewing lots of water users and using the double diamond design process to help them understand how a typical person uses and wastes water. They wanted to show how a small change to behaviour can make a big difference to water conservation and decided to design the World’s Smallest Water Museum in a portaloo, with a talking toilet seat and interactive sink, because it would fun and informative.
The World's Smallest Water Museum has now been built and it arrived at Sholing Technology College on 18 October 2010. Students can start experiencing the interactive exhibits and learn more about how they can make simple changes to the way they behave in order to save water.
Runners-up
A team from the Isle of Sheppey Academy were commended for their work, done with help from John Corcoran of Wire design, on a rainwater collection system. The team realised that while the school playground often had too much water and sometimes flooded in the winter this water wasn’t being collected or put to good use. Since their school was being rebuilt the team thought about what materials they could reuse to help collect this rainwater and store it so it could be used on new garden areas. They made prototypes to show how gutters and collection tanks for the new school could be made from material recycled from things like old plastic school chairs.
The Aquadabra team from Rochester's Thomas Aveling School designed communications, products and adverts that bring to life “the magic of saving water”. The catchy strapline was one result of the team’s investigations into where the most water was wasted in their school. They worked with designer Ella Britton from thinkpublic who helped them find out that school urinals flushed continuously, costing the school £4,000 a year in water bills. They designed the Aquapad and created prototypes which showed how the pad could be set into the floor in front of urinals and trigger a small electric timer that would flush the urinal only after people had used them.
Tanbridge House School created a Crystal Clear multi-media water saving campaign to encourage fellow pupils to save water. With help from designer Dave Moxey from Round & Red, they designed a cartoon water drop character that could appear in animated film adventures and on posters to raise awareness of how precious a resource water is. At the last minute the team also designed a rainwater harvesting system for a new part of their school playground that will be created by the removal of some temporary classrooms. The school governors are going to help the team turn this into a reality by July 2011.
Thomas Bennett Community College from Crawley whose team created H2Jo, a cartoon character which, in comic book stories and on posters, would raise awareness of water wastage. They worked with Jason Allcorn from Redesign on designing a campaign to promote water saving measures in their school.
The students celebrate their winning ideas at a celebration event at Bewl Water in July 2010
Browse through photos from the day on flickr