Parsons Students Named Finalists In Fast Company’s Innovation By Design Awards
For the second year in a row, Parsons students are finalists in Fast Company’s Innovation by Design awards. Last year, Howard Chambers and Bland Hoke, both 2012 graduates of the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons, were named winners of the Student Design category for their thesis project, Softwalks. This year, Hello Compost is a finalist in that same category from MFA Transdisciplinary Design students Aly Blenkin (’13) and Luke Keller (’13).
Hello Compost addresses several socially and environmentally important goals with little more than a simple canvas sack. The project collects food waste from low-income families, which are delivered to a composting organization to help alleviate the burden on landfills and produce environmentally responsible fertilizer. Then, participating families are given monetary credit for the value of their compost, which they can use to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables, thus helping promote good nutritional habits. Blenkin and Keller also developed an app that helps users keep track of their credits.
“Put simply,” Blenkin and Keller write in their description, “food is too valuable to be wasted.”
The winners of each category will be announced at the Innovation By Design Awards ceremony, on October 2nd, to be held here in New York City. To learn more about Hello Compost, visit Fast Company’s website.