Vision of Youth - Students help victims

Dec 11 2006 By Alastair Gilmour, The Journal

Six North-East design students are all the richer by combining their skills and energies to benefit others, as Alastair Gilmour reports.

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In the traditional student kitchen, the tin can is for pouring beer from and for slopping baked beans out of. Any other use is generally beyond their post-lecture concentration. However, a group studying engineering design at Durham University has combined imagination and innovation with a dollop of altruism by taking the everyday container into another dimension.

The team has won a national award for re-designing the humble tin can to help victims of natural disasters.

The students' all-in-one tin not only contains food but also provides a pan, spoon and stove with fuel and matches that could mean the difference between life and death.

The £3,000 prize money from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) Design Directions Award - sponsored by The Worshipful Company of Tin Plate Workers - was divided among all six team members, Jon Lee, Mark Atkinson, Chris Crabtree, Elliott Hampson, Chris Webb and Chris Taylor, to help them develop their education and future careers.

The programme invites design students to take up projects with a strong social context designed to encourage academic inquiry, cross-disciplinary thinking and wider consideration of the role of the designer in the modern world.

Tim Short, senior lecturer in design at the School of Engineering, says: "The RSA brief, the tin can and what we can do with it for everyone's benefit, was deliberately broad to allow them to narrow it down.

"It had to demonstrate commercial opportunities as well as philanthropic ideals. It represented real engineering problems addressing real issues as opposed to something at a distance from reality using difficult mathematical equations.

"By their third year, students have the necessary electrical and mechanical knowledge before they begin to specialise, then in their final year they specialise further. I acted as a support on the competition, like a consultant, on hand to answer questions if needed.

"It was a paper exercise to real design parameters, complete with a detailed report to manufacturing level." Chris Taylor plans to spend his prize on a trip to Europe to research people's attitudes to renewable energy, a field in which he plans to start his career. He says: "We were aiming to make the tin can more useful when distributed as aid after a natural disaster.

"We wanted it to be able to store more than just food, without becoming too difficult or costly to manufacture.

"After speaking to people who work in aid distribution, we identified the basic needs people have after such a disaster - water, shelter, food and health.

"We tried to solve as many of these problems in one design. With the exception of the shelter, our tin directly provides these needs."

The design is similar to a standard can, but is split into two sections internally.

The top section holds food while the bottom section acts as a stove.

Solid fuel tablets and matches are stored in the stove section and are reached by three air holes, which are opened with ring pulls.

After heating the food, there is sufficient fuel left to boil 4.5 litres of water, which purifies enough for at least two people for a day.

A handle is attached to the side to allow for safe operating and doubles up as a useful tin-opener. Built into the top of the can is the spoon-like utensil which allows the contents to be stirred and removed.

Chris says: "The design also encourages self-sufficiency, providing a psychological boost for the communities in need and does not require disaster victims to have access to other resources provided by the aid agencies.

"The manufacturing cost for one tin, excluding the food, is £1.30."