Mike Harmon | 2010 IDSA Mideast District Student Merit Winner - College for Creative Studies

While growing up in Michigan, Mike Harmon enjoyed the tours of Ford’s design studio his father would take him on during “Take Your Kid to Work” day. The more tours he went on, the more he fell in love – with the design studio.

Victor Shapira, IDSA | 2010 IDSA Northeast District Student Merit Winner | Massachusetts College of Art

Steven Madsen, IDSA | Ion Design

IDSA Western District Student Merit Winner: 2010

Teddy Lu, IDSA | 2010 IDSA Midwest District Student Merit Winner | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Arvin Abadilla, IDSA | Essential Design

Arvin is currently working out of Boston, Massachusetts for Essential Design.

Originally drawn to industrial design by an interest in people, Arvin is a generalist who combines creative tools and technical skills to create simple solutions for systems-level design problems. He is an explorer in pursuit of discoveries that reveal opportunities for innovation.

2008 Western District Student Merit Winner

After being born in Durango, CO, Gabriel Lamb embarked on an odyssey that has taken him to Australia, Brazil, Italy and South Africa. While traveling in Brazil at age 15, he had an “A-Ha” moment that presaged a career in ID.

2007 Western District Student Merit Winner

Design may or may not be a laughing matter, but when Soyun Kim sees bad design, the experience for her is just not funny. “Sometimes I see an object make a user uncomfortable, like a bad joke,” she said.

Kim is a natural problem solver who took an interest in design at an early age. “I found I was sometimes bothered by poorly designed objects and I often wondered, ‘Why can't this be different?’”

Naturally, that led Kim to focus on product design and fostered a keen interest in the user experience. 

2009 Southern District Student Merit Winner - North Carolina State University

Chris Owens’ design career started in a garage. It was there that he helped his father tinker with various crafty projects throughout his childhood.

“One year, when I was around seven years old, we turned my bicycle into a police Harley for a neighborhood parade,” Owens recalled. “It had working sirens and a megaphone.”