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Graduate Design is Top of the Pop-ups

 

Pop-up tent A BU design graduate has created a product that is sure to prove top of the pop-ups over the summer.


Across the UK in the coming weeks, most of the summer's music festival-goers are likely to pay more attention to the stage to see who's ‘top of the pops' rather than the adjacent fields for their entertainment.

But for Bournemouth University graduate Franziska Conrad, the tented villages that emerge during these major events are likely to be the key attraction as she looks to see whether her latest invention is ‘top of the pop-ups'.

Two years ago, as a Product Design student at BU, Franziska designed and displayed a new pop-up tent as her final year project. The innovative angular design – totally unique for a pop-up – became a ‘must have' item for those visiting the student design show. The product also caught the eye of Bournemouth University 's Centre for Research and Knowledge Transfer (CRKT) whose experts stepped in to help Franziska to protect and register her design whilst seeking a possible commercial partner to develop the idea further and eventually produce it for the retail market.

Two years on and the Quick Pitch SS is now available from Gelert, one of the UK's favourite camping brands and is set to be one of the summer's biggest sellers amongst festival goers and weekend campers. One of the first tents available has gone to BBC Radio 1's Rachel Jones, a fellow BU graduate and producer for the Chris Moyles programme who said she was looking forward to using it herself at some of this year's festivals.

“I used to spend ages just watching people on campsites struggle against the weather to put up a tent who then, after two hours, or so, ended up sitting in a puddle of mud,” says the 27-year-old originally from Hellental in Germany . “I wanted to create something that anyone could put up on their own. Targeting festival-goers just made the project a little bit more fun. It allowed on a wider range of colour and graphics schemes and relocated research and prototype testing to events like the Isle of Wight Festival.

The Quick Pitch SS, which measures just over two metres in length, one metre in width and a metre in height (at its front peak), takes just seconds to put up and could, with further development, have other more serious uses.

“I was approached by a member of the Metropolitan Police about the possibility of adapting the tent for use in homicide investigations to cover a body at a crime scene, for example,” Franziska explains. “I've also thought it would be easy to adapt to provide instant shelter in a disaster situation. It only weighs two kilograms, thousands could be dropped from a plane in an isolated area, even if we were to scale it up in size.”

The tent's original design specifications called for the 'skin' to be bio-degradable – an idea that Franziska is hopeful of pursuing. “As a student project, I had the whole 'eco' aspect in mind so wanted to make the tent environmentally friendly,” she emphasises. “But to make the outer material bio-degradable would drive the cost up and there really was no ideal material available at the time that was both breathable and bio-degradable although that aspect of the project is an aspiration that I would like to pursue.”

“Imagine the clean-up operation after the Glastonbury Festival,” Franziska imagines. “People leave their tents behind, especially after a rainy weekend. If those tents were bio-degradable they could be left behind and the clean-up team could just dispose of the tents with the help of industrial composting rather than having to deal with them as plain old rubbish. Maybe even the poles can be made of some sort of bio-composite in the future.”

In terms of its commercial development, the Quick Pitch SS is still in its early days although Franziska credits Bournemouth University with helping to take it from student project to finished product.

“When the University saw the first design, they helped in protecting the intellectual property of the project by registering the design,” Franziska continues. “The University has also been really supportive in going to Gelert, based in North Wales , who now have a licence agreement which means that the University gets a share of what I get from Gelert,” she concludes. “Gelert has worked hard to get the tent in full production and ready to sell in time for the summer so hopefully we'll begin to reap some financial rewards very soon as well.”

Geoff Bell from the CRKT at Bournemouth University explained that Franziska was an ideal Graduate to work with. “Franziska energetically assisted in the marketing of the pop-up-tent with the generation of brochures and marketing material. We need the support of the graduate to be able to succeed and often graduates ‘go off the boil' after graduation, but this did not happen with Franziska. She was so positive that there was a market for her tent and she passed her enthusiasm on to the CRKT team. We had every confidence in her and her design and wish her every success with the product.”

The Quick Pitch SS retails for £34.99 and is available from Gelert via the website: www.gelert.com

To see the current crop of innovative creations by this year's design graduates from Bournemouth University , the Festival of Design and Innovation is the place to be. Opening to the public from Friday June 30th, the Festival presents the largest showcase of graduate talent in the South and West of England. To find out more, please visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/festival

 

CONTACTS

Bournemouth University Press office:

press@bournemouth.ac.uk

Charles Elder; Tel: +44 (0) 1202 961032; Mob: (07768) 771870

Zoë Monk ; Tel: +44 (0) 1202 961033; Mob: (07738) 143100



News 16th June 2005

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