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Michael Tougher 'Dots'
Michael Tougher's award-winning 'Dots' concept.
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Michael Tougher 'Dots'
Glasgow School of Art Product Design Engineering student Michael Tougher's interactive keyboard.
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Michael Tougher 'Dots'
Glasgow School of Art Product Design Engineering student Michael Tougher's interactive keyboard.
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Michael Tougher 'Dots'
Each Dot is made from a polypropylene shell with a flexible, thermoplastic elastomer centre creating a flexible button.
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Michael Tougher 'Dots'
Michael Tougher receiving his award from Richard Northcote, CSO, Bayer MaterialScience.
The Design Innovation in Plastics Student Plastics Design Award is one of the most respected and coveted accolades in the industry for up-and-coming product designers and this year's winner struck the right chord with judges with his tactile, interactive keyboard.
Fourth-year Glasgow School of Art student Michael Tougher walked away with a £1,000 cash prize in addition to an industry placement at Bayer MaterialScience in Leverkusen, Germany, and an internship at Hasbro in the UK for his Dots concept. The origins of which lie in his passion for music.
"I started looking at basic, introductory instruments and simple keyboards," he explained, adding how he explored how people - particularly non-musical people - interact with instruments and how they struggled to create tunes or limited themselves to playing one note at a time.
"I wanted to create something simple - an instrument that would empower people to create music. One thing about keyboards is that they are linear in layout and in the tests I did, people just hit the white notes, not the black," which led Tougher to explore plotting the keys in a way that would encourage different arrangements and chords, teaching the user about music as they play.
Tougher used young relatives as his test group and spotted how they interact with Dots and play it alone or in a group. This tactile, interactive quality is as much to do with the colour and user-friendliness of the design with its unique stackable buttons, as it is the materials.
"Because the buttons are quite flexible themselves, it adds a percussive element to it and that's what people struggle with - the rhythm side of it.
"I came back to polypropylene for the top and bottom parts of the keyboard and I looked into TPEs and Dynaflex, which gave the keyboard a nice but durable feel. Each of the dots is designed with the principle of disassembly, so they clip together and there's no adhesive. Disassembly is really important and I see the product as being something you can build up with collections of dots and pass them on to brothers and sisters," Tougher explained.
"I do feel this product is something that hasn't been done before and innovation is something I strive for. [Winning the prize] feels great - it really does to get that kind of recognition and also two very good placements and the money. The whole experience has been great and my tutors who gave me a lot of support at university are chuffed. It wouldn't have happened without them."
Prototyping, putting your work out there and entering competitions are the best things young product designers can do if they want to succeed, Tougher believes. "Go for it, keep working at it, do competitions and show your work to other people. If you have an idea then go for it."
Fellow Glasgow School of Art student Helen Campbell's Mü STACKPAKS was first runner up to Tougher's Dots. Campbell's entry was a system for stacking recycled dairy packaging to form a toy. Nottingham Trent University's Nikian Aghababaie's Musical Chairs - an interactive, educational toy for autistic, deaf and visually-impaired children - came in third.
Chairman of the judging panel Richard Brown praised the very high quality of this year's entries and how talented this cohort of designers is.
"The judges are challenged every year with the excellence of the entries. It demonstrates the quality of the teaching at our universities and the design talent there is in the UK," he said.
Michael Tougher's work is available via his website and you can follow him on Twitter @Michael_Tougher.
