By Martin Vedris
SYDNEY: The winner of the 2007 Breville Young Design Award Final was final year industrial design student, Toby McInnes from the University of New South Wales, who was recognised for his Breville Fruit Bowl concept.
For his efforts, McInnes was awarded the John O’Brien Scholarship, named in honour of Breville’s late Chairman, and will join Breville’s award-winning design team for a 12-month work placement internship. According to Breville, the highly coveted work placement program is the first initiative of its kind in Australia.
With triple the entries of last year’s inaugural awards, the task of short-listing only three finalists was a difficult task for the judges.
According to Richard Hoare, Breville’s Director of Design and Innovation, this year’s competition was fierce with outstanding designs submitted by students from a range of leading universities throughout Australia including, University of Technology Sydney, University of South Australia and Monash University.
“Following much deliberation and considering criteria such as design, innovation and marketability, the judging panel – comprising representatives of Breville Design and Marketing teams – selected Toby as the winner for this year’s Breville Young Designer Award,” said Hoare.
“Toby’s Breville Fruit Bowl not only showed great design, but also demonstrated great commercial feasibility. It cleverly uses off-the-shelf technology to both ripen and maintain fruit freshness; and is intended to be a companion device to Breville juicers and food processors.
“As an Australian brand, renowned for design and innovation, we strongly believe in the importance of developing young Australian design talent.
“The Breville design team is very much looking forward to working with Toby over the next 12-months and to nurture and develop his design skill,” Hoare concluded.
For the 2007 Breville Young Designer Award, final year industrial design students were invited to design an accessory which complements a current Breville appliance, in accordance with a detailed brief developed by the multi award-winning Breville design team.