Young Designers Award 2018

St.Cyprian’s school for girls in Cape Town was the winning school of the 2018 Inscape Young Designers Award. Verna Jooste, the school’s design teacher shares her joy on behalf of the winning girls, and of course the school and staff of St Cyprian’s and who are thrilled to have won the 2018 INSCAPE Young Designers Award and also featured five finalists and two Faculty winners.

Ms Jooste encourages all schools and students to enter next year’s competition and says; “The competition is such an amazing opportunity to be designing outside the normal constraints, expectations and marking systems imposed on scholars.  Our students felt it gave them a sense of really exploring their creativity in ways that they, till this point, have not. More than that, the competition gave them an opportunity to engage the real design world/ in real time /really having to meet the brief and deadline and go through the motion of what working outside the secure paradigm of their school classroom has to offer and expects.”

The girls at St Cyprians were required to enter the competition before their teachers marked their work and they had to take/show a screenshot of their entry page.  If they did not enter in time the consequence was that marks would need to be deducted from their mark for school. The teachers drew the parallel of the uploading and entering of their design to that of having to upload a presentation of their design for a conference/TED talk.  This brought an interactive challenge to the work (that the girls had never encountered before but need to start engaging with) in terms of their skills and ability. Biography’s and descriptions of their work were also part of the entering – the girls needed to objectively describe/ think about and understand their own work.

According to Ms Jooste, the school experienced an inspired and productive vibe amongst the students – mainly sparked by the idea that they could design things like cakes, tattoos, stamps, apps, games (things that previously they had not considered designers/themselves doing). This was a result of the cleverly devised way the competitions first step was to start with an “INspiring” word and design from there outward.

The competition, the way it expanded and challenged our students to think and imagine, was a wonderful moment of exposure to their true potential and I would promote it to everyone I can.