Students Create Winning Designs for Visa

Faced with the challenge of creating the local marketing campaign for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler, Visa wanted to embrace both the excitement of the games and the unique identity of the host region. They presented this design challenge to Emily Carr University of Art and Design students in a sponsored course, specially titled Go.Design! The class became a competition for the best local interpretation of Go World, Visa’s global campaign celebrating athleticism and human triumph through the unique stories of Visa-sponsored athletes.

Go. Design! provided students from Emily Carr’s Communication and Industrial Design programs with the opportunity to experience retail super-branding on the world stage. Visa worked closely with student teams to develop 3-dimensional retail Point of Sale solutions for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The initial brief asked students to consider Visa’s Go World campaign, understand the local market, and bring the two together.

The innovative and inspired snowglobe was designed by students Adrien Guenette, Isabel Lau and Scott Piekema. Celebrating west coast culture, the design incorporates a rock, cast from an original found on Stanley Park beaches, as the base of the globe. The overarching theme is the exhilaration of movement represented by the water motion, with the snowflakes acting as a playful tie-in to winter, and the Winter Games.

Merging the interchangeable quality of the stacked stones used in the construction of an Inukshuk, with the heraldic, allegoric levels of a North American First Nations totem pole, the design team of of Sam Dal Monte, Stephanie McCarty and Shelagh McLellan created a modular and modifiable piece. Allowing for a different story to be told with each arrangement, its units overlap to supply a rich illustration of Vancouver as a whole, from sea to sky and in between.   

Visa is one of a growing number of companies that have sought innovative design solutions by working collaboratively with Emily Carr students and educators. The University is providing the next generation of creative thinkers and practitioners who are ‘Citizen Designers’ -- mindful of the consequences of their design actions with concern for real social needs, placing Emily Carr at the forefront of critical design, interaction design, and design for human communication.