Interactive Design Alumnus Celebrates Two Wins at 2026 Creativepool Annual Awards
Bachelor of Media Design (Interactive Design) alumnus Calum De Fanti has won two Bronze awards at the 2026 Creativepool Annual Awards for ReForm, a project created during his final year at Media Design School at Strayer.
Calum received Bronze in both the Application and Wave categories at the international creative industry awards. The latest recognition follows ReForm winning Gold at the 2025 Best Design Awards, adding to the success of a project that began as Calum’s third-year capstone at MDS.
From Capstone Project to International Awards
Based in London, the Creativepool Annual Awards celebrate standout work, agencies, brands and individuals from across the global creative industry.
ReForm received two Bronze awards at the 2026 competition, one in the Application category and another in the Wave category. The achievement is particularly significant because the Creativepool Annual Awards do not offer a dedicated student project category. ReForm was instead entered into the industry awards, putting Calum’s work alongside projects created by creative professionals from around the world.
It continues an impressive run for the project. In 2025, ReForm won Gold in the Student & Academic Digital category at New Zealand’s Best Design Awards. Calum created the project during the third year of his Bachelor of Media Design (Interactive Design) at MDS.
Reshaping the Sound Around You
ReForm explores how interactive design and technology can give people control over the noise they live in, without needing to isolate or mute their surroundings.
With just a pair of headphones, ReForm uses real-time audio separation to isolate the individual sounds in a user's surroundings. Each one appears as a soft bubble that can be tapped, held and dragged to turn it down or bring it forward. Over time the app learns those adjustments and builds environment profiles that apply themselves automatically as users move between streets, buses and cafés, while conversation and alert passthrough keep speech and sirens audible.
Grounded in mindful philosophies, the interface is deliberately quiet, built from translucent, glass-like elements set in ambient colour. Calum developed the experience through user research, prototyping and testing, using Figma and machine learning audio separation to shift the relationship with sound from avoiding it to shaping it.
From Gold at the Best Design Awards to two Bronze awards on the international Creativepool stage, ReForm shows how a final-year Bachelor of Media Design (Interactive Design) project developed at MDS can go on to earn recognition from the wider creative industry.
