A partnership between Napoleon Home Comfort and Georgian College has allowed students to think outside of the box.
The company, located just north of Barrie, reached out to faculty of the college’s honours bachelor of interior design program proposing a design competition, said faculty member Andrea Vorstermans-Zado, noting this year students were tasked with designing a gas stove.
“It’s a really exciting project for the students and it’s done outside their curriculum. They get to be creative and really think about how they can present to the client,” she said.
On Tuesday, April 4, students from the five different groups — each consisting of 16 students — had the opportunity to present and showcase their designs to judges from Napoleon. The top three winners received scholarships ranging from $2,000 for the first-place design to $1,000 for the third-place design.
“There was a bit of a gap in what won. The top two went to more traditional designs, but that took a modern approach," Vorstermans-Zado said. "Napoleon’s current gas stove designs are very traditional and that’s why they came to us with this project. They said they needed out-of-the-box thinking."
The top two winning designs, although considered to be more traditional designs, opted to use more modern materials, colours and tried to adjust a shift in how the interiors of how houses are designed, she added.
These types of partnerships serve as a great opportunity for students to learn in a different way, said Vorstermans-Zado.
“It’s an amazing opportunity for them to be put in the position where they have a client and to be able to practise the steps of working with clients," she said. "It also gives them a really unique piece to put in their portfolio. All of the schools in Ontario have the same projects and classwork to get through all the different types of design typologies — everyone does a restaurant, a house, a medical facility — so these types of design contests are a really nice way for students to stand out when they go looking for jobs."
Design competitions focus primarily on the ideas and allow students to take a different take on the assignment.
“With our coursework, of course we try to push the designs and try to encourage students to step out of the box, but at a certain point they have to do their working drawings whereas in a design competition they just get to do pure design," Vorstermans-Zado said.
The competition showcased many diverse and high-quality entries, making it an extremely difficult decision to select the winners, said David Shulver, vice-president of research and development with Napoleon.
"We were delighted to partner with Georgian College for another year in a design competition aimed at fostering innovation, sustainability and creativity in design," he said. "Our commitment to innovation and nurturing creativity is strengthened by partnerships like this one, and we look forward to continuing to collaborate in the future."
Sarah Chisholm, Vanessa Millian and Marianna Arce-Rodriguez were the first-place winners, and were grateful for what they called an “incredible opportunity.”
“(This has been) invaluable to our development as designers, innovators, and professional speakers. Being able to showcase our design and receive feedback and recognition for it has made us immensely proud. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who made this event possible, it has been an invaluable asset for our future, and a real personal accomplishment for us as designers,” the trio said in a joint statement provided to BarrieToday.
The Napoleon gas stove design competition was a challenging yet gratifying experience as a team designing a gas stove fireplace, said second-place winners Melissa Bartolini, Hannah Kyla De Vera, Reece Sullivan, and Farima Ghahramani-Tabrizi.
The students said they not only gained a wealth of knowledge regarding the complex mechanics, venting systems, materials, weight, and OBC requirements that go into developing a genuinely innovative and distinctive fireplace, but were also able to push the envelope of what is attainable through their combined efforts — ultimately producing a fireplace that not only meets but also surpasses expectations.
