RESEARCH General Arts

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Team of students takes a new tack in redesign of office icon

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

8/1/2001

Photo by Bill Wiegand Scott Kochlefl, a May graduate of the UI, and classmates tackled the redesign of the thumbtack for a class project and won a first-place award in a contest sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Redesign a better thumbtack and the world will use it to stick up all kinds of things.

At least that's the hope of a team of recently graduated University of Illinois industrial design students whose class project, called "Re-Thinking the Thumbtack," earned them a first-place award in a contest co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine.

The redesigned tack features two prongs and a hollow, horseshoe-shaped space in between the prongs, which a wire or other material can fit through. The double-pin design provides extra strength and support; because of this, fewer tacks are typically needed to attach items to a surface.

"You can use it to hang wires, lights, hooks or pictures," said Scott Kochlefl, a May graduate of the UI's industrial design program. Kochlefl and classmates Teresa Barin, Laura Naughton, Michael Vostal and Matt Wertz won a Gold Award for their project in the student category of the Industrial Design Excellence Award competition.

A description of the winning design on the IDSA Web site at http://www.idsa.org says: "Only a designer or a design student would be bold enough to tamper with such an icon as the thumbtack. But this simple yet clever update facilitates the many unauthorized services into which the conventional version is pressed."

The students created the design to fulfill an assignment in industrial design professor William Bullock's professional practice class last spring. "The students worked in teams, and I asked them to do a business plan for a new product that was supposed to be going into an existing product line," Bullock said. "I wanted them to understand what goes on through the design and production process."

Winning an award for their work is "a feather in their hats," said Bullock, who noted that IDSA Gold Award recognition is the most prestigious honor industrial design students can earn.

While brainstorming project ideas, Kochlefl said, his group started out from the concept that "we needed something simple."

"Nobody ever touches simple," he said. "They don't touch anything that's an icon, like the paper clip. So we decided to take a little office item like a thumbtack. We figured, ‘What do we have to lose?’ "

As it turned out, nothing. They will pick up the Gold Award at the IDSA's national conference Aug. 15-18 in Boston. The design also received a Design Distinction Award in the Student Work category in ID magazine's annual design review and will be featured in the August issue. And if that’s not enough, Bullock said the design is being patented and may actually end up on store shelves.