SAS Scholarship Winners 2014
Article for Falmouth University website, Tuesday 20 May 2014 [original article]
Creative agency SAS has announced the winners of its annual scholarship award, open to Graphic Design students at Falmouth University and Chelsea College of Art and Design.
SAS set up the award three years ago. It was initially open to students at Chelsea, which the agency has links with, but this year, was extended to include students at Falmouth, where SAS delivers guest workshops and lectures.
Each college is given a different brief and students who submit the top three projects are awarded a cash prize: first place winners receive £3000 each, second place, £2000 and third, £1000.
SAS says the programme aims to support the next generation of talent: the agency also runs a paid internship scheme and says 50 percent of its creative team joined the company after working there as interns.
The project is led by creative director Matthew Shannon and executive creative director David Stocks, with help from project leaders at Falmouth and Chelsea. Students were briefed in February and given until April to submit their finished projects.
“We wanted to help the students develop their skills around investigating briefs, developing design outcomes and delivering presentations,” says Stocks. “It’s aimed at second years as they’re at a crucial stage in their studies, when they’re moving from basic skills to trying to become the finished article,” he adds.
Students at Falmouth were asked to produce a piece of design that would change the supermarket shopping experience, either by enhancing in-store shopping or developing a new app or product.
Third place was awarded to David Pilkington, who proposed a food labelling scheme to combat the UK’s obesity epidemic. David’s system is a simple scale from 1–99 that awards foods a number based on their overall nutritional value. One represents unhealthy foods like sweets or certain kinds of alcohol, while 99 is reserved for fruit and vegetables.
David suggested labels could be placed on packaging and around stores, and receipts could display a nutritional value for each shop based on the average of products purchased. He also suggested creating an online platform to which people could log in and track their nutritional score over days, weeks or months.
As well as allowing people to see how much they are spending on healthy versus unhealthy foods, David says the online platform would allow supermarkets to track regional eating habits and find the healthiest, or unhealthiest stores — an idea that could also provide useful data for the government and NHS.
“Finding healthy food is confusing,” says David. “Things labelled low fat are often high in sugar or salt to compensate, and it seems every week there’s a new diet we’re supposed to follow. I wanted to create a simple, honest system that could be implemented in any supermarket,” he adds. David has paid careful attention to branding, creating a simple Choices logo that could be added to supermarket’s own branding for awareness and promotional campaigns.
Second place was awarded to Joe Sereni’s project, the Common Sense Market — a cross between online shopping and a farmer’s market. Targeted at busy customers who buy online for convenience, but miss out on the sensory experience of shopping for food, Sereni developed a mini market that could pitch up in green spaces in cities and towns around the country at weekends.
The market would contain samples of locally sourced food that customers can touch and try before ordering it to be delivered to their door the next day. It’s a similar concept to the capital’s many farmers’ markets, but Sereni says the difference is that it combines the experience of visiting a traditional food market with the convenience of using a click and collect service and by placing it in parks, families can shop in between activities. Small stalls would also be placed in busy commuter areas during the week.
Sarah Weigold’s idea, which won top prize, was Refill: a cafe which aims to turn the weekly shop into a relaxing or social experience. Situated on busy high streets, Refills would contain interactive touch screen tables where customers could sit down, order a snack and swipe their way through the weekly shop.
The interface would include more product imagery than traditional online shopping platforms, she says, allowing users to rotate and inspect items as they would in a supermarket. Shops could promote new products by offering them up on the menu, and customers could have their shopping delivered to a refrigerated locker, a petrol station or their home, says Weigold.
It’s an impressive effort from each of the winning students, who put together a presentation, concepts and research in just a few weeks. When selecting the winners, Stocks says students’ personal development and methods were just as important as the end result, adding: “We tried not to pour too much realism on an idea that could be a little idealised at this stage — it was more about having an idea, doing the research to back that up and proposing a design and communication outcome.”
