June 30, 2003

Contact: Becca Ramspott, School of Fine Arts, (785) 864-5567.

KU senior wins coveted international design award

LAWRENCE -- Brian Carter's interest in shortening the life span of plastics has earned him a lifetime seal of approval and recognition from the industrial design world.

Carter, Prairie Village senior in industrial design at the University of Kansas, recently was named a gold winner in the prestigious 2003 Industrial Design Excellence Awards, an international design competition co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America.

The contest, which drew 119 entries from prominent design firms all over the world and includes a category for graduate and undergraduate students, "is watched closely by all of the professionals," said Lance Rake, associate professor in industrial design at KU. "This is the only undergraduate design project to get a gold award in what is really the most prestigious national design competition in the country. ... Any design firm in the nation would love to win a gold award. So Brian is going to get a lot of attention from the most influential people in the business."

In addition to having his name and work published in the annual Yearbook of Industrial Design Excellence, a design review mailed to 3,000 executives in manufacturing, Carter also will be included in a list of winners in the July 7 issue of BusinessWeek.

The award and recognition mark months of experiments and research for Carter. Expanding on a project in one of Rake's classes, Carter worked to develop alternative materials for traditional plastics and eventually produced an identification system to organize 44 "bio-plastics" he created from plant-based fibers. He then demonstrated how his materials and their beneficial properties could be used in industrial design through two design concepts, one for a printer and one for a cellular phone.

"I really wanted to look at this mainstream electronics market," he said. "The plastic currently used in these products outlives their technology."

His biodegradable plastics highlight the importance of environmental responsibility in design.

"The idea is that when they're past their useful life, they can be composted with no problem, and if they need to be fixed before that, then they can just be replaced," he said. "Tooling, recycling and development costs would be reduced."

Carter's next stop will be at the IDSA design conference Aug. 13 through 16 in New York City, where he will receive his award and exhibit his work with other winners.

Carter plans to receive a bachelor's degree in fine arts this summer.