Rack Your Brains

In 2019 we paired up Dundee based designers with young people from local schools and community groups, to design cycle racks for Dundee Cycle Forum’s Rack Your Brains’ competition!

Young people from Blackness Primary, CLD East Youth Team with Link Up Whitfield and Hope Bilingual Youth Group worked with local designers; Kirsten Manzi, Louise Kirby and Laura Darling on their designs.

See the participating young people’s designs here

This was a great opportunity for young people to experience the design process from research and development through to production. Each participant selected a location and worked with their allocated designer to produce designs which were functional, fun and celebrated their chosen location. These were then submitted to the competition where five out of the seven winning designs were created by the young people who took part!

Over 30 entries were submitted from the young people that we worked with, who each took inspiration from shapes, patterns, plants, animals and local stories.

The winning designs have now been taken from drawings on a page and turned into 3-dimensional structures by Dundee’s P&G Blacksmiths. The creators of the winning designs visited P&G Blacksmiths to learn more about the process taken to create the final cycle racks as well as observing various welding techniques.

With thanks to Dundee City Council, Dundee Cycle Forum, P&G Blacksmiths, Kirsten Manzi, Louise Kirby and Laura Darling who each worked with us on this project and to all of the participating young people for their fantastic designs.

We cannot wait to see these cycle racks installed across the city!