KEY POINTS:
Unitec's Roger Bateman is passionate about nurturing young designers
Anyone who's been involved in the design industry for more than 25 years would find it hard to choose their 10 all-time design favourites.
Which is why Roger Bateman, associate head of the School of Design at Unitec, didn't.
Instead he has focused on some of the projects nearest and dearest to him, and that is where he teaches. Bateman is also one of the prime movers behind Unitec's incubator project, which started in February.
"We wanted to make a space where we could support design graduates," Bateman explains. "We wanted to help graduates who had fantastic business ideas, or even one fantastic product that they may have designed while they were students."
There are five young designers working in the dedicated space but ultimately Bateman would like to see dozens more being catered for, possibly from design schools all over the country.
"It would be great to have at least 40 people in there, at different levels.
"We'd be contributing to New Zealand in a variety of ways, growing enterprise, growing new areas of industry as well as supporting ideas that might not be immediately commercial."
