Anthony Harrison

If you ask student Anthony Harrison, product design is about more than designing aesthetically pleasing objects. 

For his final-year project in the Bachelor of Design in Product Design (Honours), Anthony designed a reusable endoscope, a camera-enabled device used to look inside the human body. 

Called the Rescope, the project sought to address the significant volumes of medical waste generated during endoscopy procedures, in part due to single-use endoscopes becoming increasingly common in health care environments.  

“Endoscopes used to be reusable devices, but there has been a transition to a single-use design because of issues to do with sterilisation and proper cleaning of the device between operations,” Anthony says. 

The Rescope design solves this issue by separating out the parts of device that come into contact with the patient. Those pieces can be detached and disposed of, while the remaining components — more than 80% of the total device — can be cleaned and reprocessed for future use.  

For Anthony, who had never designed a medical device before, the year-long Honours project gave him a unique opportunity to apply his three years of product design learning to a pressing real-world problem. 

“Medical devices are a really fascinating area to work in because you’re dealing directly with people who need help. It’s not just something that’s going to sit around and collect dust; it’s going to be a really practical and useful device,” he says.  

It means you’re designing to make a difference.

Design for a sustainable future

Rescope is a tangible example of the values that underpin the UTS Product Design program. The degree has a distinct focus on designing for the circular economy, something the teaching team are hugely passionate about in their own professional and research practice.  

The course really emphasises sustainability, designing for circularity and looking at the end life of a product rather than just its use. It really gave me a passion for wanting to design sustainably.

That commitment to sustainability was evident everywhere in the degree, including the state-of-the-art facilities that product design students have access to. These include a 3D printing lab where students and researchers grapple with new opportunities to create biodegradable 3D printing materials.

It was in this lab and in the Protospace advanced manufacturing facility that Anthony developed his 3D printing skills, a core capability in the world of contemporary product design and a critical piece of the Rescope project. While Protospace is a professional industry-research environment, it’s also open to product design students. 

“In the first year, you do a lot of classes in the 3D printing workshop, which is really exciting. There are also some high-level industrial-grade 3D printers in the Protospace lab that you can use to make high-fidelity models,” Anthony says. 

A lot of my learning about 3D printing and how it works came from just interacting with the staff there.

From honours to the wide world of product design  

At the end of his UTS journey, Anthony exhibited Rescope to an industry audience at the UTS Product Design 2024 Graduate Showcase. He has since landed a job at Sydney sustainability hub Banish where he’s applying his passion for sustainable design to making objects from recycled plastics. 

Banish might be Anthony’s first step onto the product design career ladder, but he’s already excited about what the future holds. 

“One of the main reasons I chose to do honours was because I almost felt like I needed a little bit more education and to build my skills a little bit more before I closed the door on university study,” he says. 

Honours has really helped me grow as a designer and develop my skills. There’s also something about working on a project for a whole year that really shows you the design process from start to finish.

I definitely feel ready to go out and work in the field.