Design Ventura is the Design Museum’s award-winning national design and enterprise competition. A live brief challenges young people to design a new product for the Design Museum Shop. It places design skills in a real world context, developing creativity, problem-solving, team work and enterprise capabilities. Competition prizes include the chance to see your work exhibited at the museum, support from experts to develop your idea and one winning idea will be developed and sold in the Design Museum Shop.

19 able and ambitious Design &Technology Year 9 students competed to design and make a product under this year’s theme ‘Connect’. They formed 4 groups and developed their products as a team, each taking on a different role of responsibility.

In October we attended an excellent creative workshop run by the design museum to develop initial ideas and we all came back suitably inspired to start finalising a prototype.

Each team presented their final products in November to a panel of judges. The judges were so impressed by the effort and fantastic presentations and choosing a winner was very difficult. Congratulations to the winners: The A Team; Asher Kelvin, Sam Lachmann, Adam Caplan and Zed Shoop. Their fantastic product, ‘The Pocket Alternative’, has now been entered into the national competition.

Products designed were windscreen wipers that connect to your glasses (Darcey Gilston, Evie Raphael, Kate Preston, Sam Cohen-Morgan); a product that connects to discarded plastic bottles, allowing you to juice lemons into your drinking water (Isaac Lobatto, Charlie Leboff, Yuval Proud, Omer Samuel); Coloured plastic that connects to your light to change the mood of a room (Noam Wise, Joe Gelfand, Poppy Gordon, Ruby-Rose Mansoor, Josie Ben-Avi, Miriam Clifton)

The winner was ‘The pocket alternative’ that connects through magnets to fridges and boards, allowing you to keep your board pens, keys, board remotes safe. Team members – Asher Kelvin, Sam Lachmann, Adam Caplan and Zed Shoop.