[TOA] Design Students Devise Architectural Solutions in One Day

The One Academy interior design students Alison Leong and Belle Chin receiving their Third Prize award.

The Roca One Day Design Challenge is a design race against the clock aimed at students and young professionals under 30 years old who are starting out in the design and architecture sectors. This year, the third edition of the Roca One Day Design Challenge was celebrated at the PAM Centre in Kuala Lumpur and attracted over 300 students participants from all over the country.

Organised by Roca to support young talents in their early professional career by providing them with a platform to boost their creativity, participants tackle the challenge of creating original solutions and innovative concepts related to the bathroom space in just one day. Participants can take part individually or in groups of two members. They remained unknowing about the design brief until it was announced live at the venue of the competition itself.

This year’s brief entails the necessity of installing public toilets faced by all major cities to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods. Hence, participants were challenged to design an urban public toilet that is feasible in function and improves cleaning and hygiene conditions.

Participants working on their designs at the venue.

At the end of the day, members of the jury deliberated to choose the winning projects from the submissions. They based their evaluations on the creativity and originality of the designs, as well as on their viability, while also giving credit for the clarity, legibility and graphic design of the presentations. All designs must take into account the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the saving of water in order to aim for the prizes.

Participants working on their designs at the venue.

Alison Leong Wing Yan and Belle Chin Jia Xuan, interior design students from The One Academy, won the Third Prize and received RM3,000 for designing a piece of remarkable flexibility. The duo’s design titled “The Orbit” is a portable public restroom, conceived as a simplistic circular space with an overall harmony between form and function, which blends within its surrounding through its play of external features. Its use of the natural force of wind and buoyancy to deliver cool and fresh air to the area, as well as energy-saving qualities such as natural daytime lighting, curvature design for better ventilation and material use of aluminium to reflect 95% of heat, also scored them points in the judging.

Though finding it pressuring and rushing to think of an idea and come up with a design under eight hours, they both agreed that it was a great experience and were surprised on winning. “I honestly didn’t prepare much because we didn’t know what the topic was going to be. I’m more of a ‘go with the flow’ type,” said Leong. The only preparation Chin did was making sure to get enough sleep before the competition day.

The biggest challenge for Leong was “definitely building the 3D model because of the shape and overall design itself, but we experimented and managed to work things out in the end.” For Chin, it was literally a race against time as there were more things she wanted to show but did not have enough time to put them in.

“The first things that came to my mind were air flow and environment-friendly. So, we created a curved space with a skylight for the roof,” said Chin on the inspiration behind their project. They both attributed their learning at The One Academy for helping them win, as they were taught to focus on the concept first before working on the 3D modelling.

The One Academy is committed to providing the best art education programmes and continues to nurture its students passionately through its “Masters Train Masters” coaching philosophy, which has been practised for over 30 years, by providing diploma and degree courses in Advertising & Graphic Design, Digital Animation, Digital Media Design, Film Visual Effects, Interior Architecture & Design, Illustration, Fine Arts, Paris Fashion Design & Pattern Making, Computer Science, Game Design and Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation. For more information on The One Academy, visit www.toa.edu.my or call +603-7875 5510 or e-mail your enquiries to [email protected].

Participants, organising committee and judges of the Roca One Day Design Challenge.