One "Writeous" Pen Design Earns Student $10,000 Prize

University of Cincinnati student Jacques Laramie is drawing a straight line from his studio classroom to professional – and profitable – success.

Laramie, 22, an industrial design pre-junior from Great Falls, Va., recently submitted a two-week classroom project (to design the perfect pen) to the 2007-2008 Marksman Design Award contest, and he just found out that he’s the global winner.

He theorizes that the design won because he deliberately homed in on a simple, intriguing design that he thought “would appeal to millions.” That’s probably the reason his design won out from among more than a thousand original applications and submissions from students in 54 countries.

He explained, “This was a ‘blast’ class assignment, an appetizer assignment for a two-week period and meant to encourage creativity. The first week, I tried any number of concepts, like one where I considered a pen with a fruit-candy top so that a person could literally chew on it while thinking.”

In the second week of the assignment, Laramie got serious, as it were. He really focused on the competition’s parameters: Design the perfect pen that was commercially feasible, suitable for production, relatively low cost, had space for a logo or message and was sustainable.

It was this last requirement that, more than any other, led to what Laramie titled his "Hohle" pen. ("Hohle" is German for hollow.) It’s an ink cartridge resting inside of a metal "barrel," a barrel made transparent via a matrix of holes. As such, it’s a design that plays with form, emptiness and translucency. It’s strong, durable, breathes well, uses less material and can be recycled.

Regarding sustainability, Laramie strategized that the pen’s elegant and distinctive framework will prevent it from becoming landfill fodder. “The pen is of metal, and metal is easily recyclable. The pen itself could be made from recycled metal. My thought was also that the pen design is so unusual that it simply would not be thrown away by the user. The difference between something that people lose easily and something that people hold onto securely lies solely in that object’s perceived value. The user would indeed replace the ink cartridge and keep this pen for years because it’s also an art work to be displayed on the desk, used as a conversation starter, even given as a gift. It retains its value and commands interest. So, it won’t end up in the landfill.”

Laramie found out about his big win via an e-mail from a classmate while on his current

cooperative education

quarter at Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc., in Blue Ash where he is contributing to designs for medical devices. “I did the design in a winter-quarter class, and I’m now on my spring-quarter co-op. So, the contest was no longer on top of my mind for me,” he explained.

Then, right after lunch one day, he checked his e-mail. Reading them in reverse order of  arrival, he found one from a classmate congratulating him. Below were five or six other messages also offering congratulations. “I really wasn’t looking for the news because I thought the competition results would be announced in July. So, it really was a big surprise. I jumped out of my chair and said that I’d won $10,000. People were saying, ‘What?!’ I pulled up the project and showed them… . I guess I didn’t get too much more done that day at work,” he admitted.

Laramie thinks that working on the pen competition during the first two weeks of his winter quarter class with Sooshin Choi, associate professor of design, helped to produce a winning design. “I rendered about 30 models of the pen down in the computer lab when I was working on it. I had just about every computer running. I experimented with different placements, different lighting, the inside ‘shot’ of the pen’s design. I would never have been able to do that much experimentation at the end of the quarter when many more students are completing projects in the lab,” he explained.

The best part of the project for Laramie is, surprisingly, not the money which he may use to further his own plans for a Web-based design company or may use to fund a travel quarter. The best part, he stated, was presenting “Hohle” to his classmates. “I hadn’t shown it to anyone before the formal presentation in class. I always like to present a surprise.”

Another plus is the boost to his confidence. Laramie transferred into UC’s internationally ranked School of Design, part of the top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, as a sophomore – coming from another design program because he wanted to participate in UC’s cooperative education program. (UC is the global birthplace of co-op, which was founded here in 1906. Today, UC’s co-op – which requires students to alternate academic quarters with professionally paid work quarters – is ranked in the nation’s Top Ten by U.S. News & World Report.)

He recalled, “In my first year here as a sophomore, I had a project, and it flopped. I was even late on the day of the final critique of the project, and the design was not even done. The project was a wreck, and I was a wreck because that project was the capstone of the quarter. It was a rough beginning, and I really doubted myself. And confidence is very important in design. You need to be pumped about your work. Then, I definitely wasn’t. Now, I definitely am.”

And while confident about his pen project, Laramie admitted that he would probably improve upon it if he given the chance. With more time for refinements, he said he might vary the current design with its uniformity of oval shapes: “As it is now, the pen’s strength is that it’s an elegant, simple solution to the question of the perfect pen. The only design alternative I’d add would be to mix in different shapes and sizes, like hexagons, pentagons and ovals of different sizes to see if it would add even more interest.”

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