Design association

By Kris Herbert, March 17, 2008 @ 8:53 am

Want to label yourself? Dunedin’s Ooid can help

A team of young Dunedin designers is tackling social and environmental issues through clever product design. What started as a polytech environmental design assignment has become the impetus for a fast-growing company.

Machiko Niimi and Elizabeth Vanderburg created the Sprout Bag in their final year of product design at Otago Polytechnic as a way to showcase their graphic design work and promote reusable shopping bags.

Two-and-a-bit years later, 17 designers have contributed to the range of 25 limited-edition designs, 18 of which have sold out. Sprout Bags are stocked in 35 outlets around New Zealand and in London, Edinburgh and Shanghai. Around 18,000 bags have sold to date.

“It’s about supporting graphic artists and giving them a place to grow,” says Vanderburg. Hence the name Sprout.

“It’s grown into much more than we thought it would be. We now have this pool of graphic designers and we’re at the stage where people are approaching us to be part of the Sprout Bag design team. People really like the ethos behind the bag, the way it’s created a product around a community of designers,” says Niimi.

The project has also been used to support Plunket and, more recently, the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust.

On the back of the success of the Sprout Bag project, Vanderburg and Niimi joined Kurt McEwen to start Ooid (pronounced like ‘fluid’ without the ‘fl’). Ooid has a regular stable of commercial clients including the Port Chalmers Design Store, Loft and Aki Kurihara textiles. In 2007, the company followed their Sprout Bag project with a jewellery project in July and the Belong Badge project in September.

They call Belong “a range of urban tribal affiliation badges”—old-style metal club badges that read ‘Urban Bird Watchers Society’, ‘Local Food Enthusiasts’ or ‘Carbon Credit Collector’. Each badge refers to its own online blog community.

Vanderburg describes the Belong project as “a bit of a social experiment”. It’s based on the designers’ belief that thoughtful design can be both cool and supportive of sustainability and community. The idea came from a discussion about declining club memberships and associations in a time-poor society.

“We wanted to challenge the concept of clubs in today’s scenario. Belong canvasses some pretty hefty issues, but lightens the load a little. It allows individuals to be able to interpret the idea their own way. Everyone’s doing their own thing out there in the world, and Belong celebrates what they’re doing and hopefully connects people.”