Product Design

A University of Oregon product design student has been selected as one of sixty-six university students nationwide to become University Innovation Fellows for Epicenter, a program collaborated through Stanford University and The National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation.

Claire Sakaguchi, a senior at UO pursuing a major in product design and a minor in business, will learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurial strategies during her participation with Epicenter. She is the first UO student to be admitted to the program.

Product Design Program Assistant Professor Wonhee Jeong Arndt has been named one of the Top 10 “Women in Industrial Design” by the Women in Design section of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). A selection of her work will be shown in a juried exhibition on Saturday, June 14, during San Francisco Design Week, June 13-20.

Two very different research projects driven by A&AA faculty members have been awarded grants from the UO Idea awards program. While one project delves into the relationship between barnacle growth and ceramics, the other seeks to answer the microbial problem of poor indoor air quality.

Both the “Barnacle Project” and “Office Oasis” received $5,000 through the UO Idea grant program. The Product Design Program matched the funds.

The University of Oregon Product Design Program is showing work in Milan, Italy, during the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano, also known as Milan Design Week. The event is the global benchmark of the home furnishing industry.

A student-designed and created drinking cup from the ARTC 410 “Prototyping and Manufacturing” course may end up on a table in Carson Dining Hall or the A&AA Willcox Hearth in the future.

The experimental course, under way in winter 2014, combines the disciplines of product design and ceramics and introduces students to social practice, design, and manufacturing. The class instructs students to formulate a design for a cup that is suitable for UO campus food vendors.

Six students from the Product Design Program recently took home $5,000 in prize money from a “Shark-Tank”-style competition—dubbed “Duck Tank”—open to students across campus to develop a new mobile app. A total of $15,000 was handed out to four interdisciplinary teams to help them take their ideas to the next level.

Bulging bags of used condoms adorned tables less than an hour after students arrived. Comments including “Oh wow, that is really gross, it looks like a worm,” and “That’s, like, no lubrication, it’s already dry” could be heard as forty-five students clustered in small groups, laptops open to spreadsheets, iPhone stopwatches primed, cobalt blue plastic phalluses upright on tables before them.

The eighty-five flags gracing the ceiling in the “Track Town Studio” this term aren’t mere decoration. They set the tone for the product design and architecture students collaborating beneath the banners, helping them gauge how and where to display 175 flags from participating countries in the 2014 International Association of Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) World Junior Championships.

Assistant Professor Trygve Faste of the Product Design Program was honored recently with a Sony Scholar award.

The annual award recognizes outstanding junior faculty who have shown promise or demonstrated achievement in instruction, research, or both. The faculty selection committee also factors in the potential impact of the award on the faculty member's ability to further demonstrate achievement in teaching and/or research.

Fifth year BFA major Daryle Hawkins leads an intense dual life, packing in training and games as a Duck receiver with product design studios in Portland three times a week. GoDucks.com Editor Rob Moseley spent a day with Hawkins to get an idea of how his passion for both design and football coalesce. Read the full story at goducks.com.