Avient Design and Georgia Tech Students Team Up to Innovate with Polystrand™ Composites

March 31, 2025

Georgia Tech Industrial Design students, including Anastacia Delvin (top left) present their innovative projects using Avient’s Polystrand™ materials to Avient Design experts and faculty members. 

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CLEVELAND – March 31, 2025 – Avient Corporation, an innovator of materials solutions, is pleased to share a successful collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Industrial Design’s undergraduate industrial design students on a design studio project. The initiative, sponsored by Avient Design, a highly specialized group of industrial designers and project engineers at Avient Corporation, began in September 2024, focusing on mentoring students in designing with Avient’s Polystrand™ thermoplastic composite materials, leading to the development of a range of innovative and practical product concepts.

The six-week project is aimed to harness the distinctive properties of Avient’s Polystrand thermoplastic composites, including their strength, durability, and lightweight characteristics, to create cutting-edge designs for the sporting goods industry. Students were tasked with developing a variety of products, from bike accessories and camping equipment to protective braces and training gear. The collaboration not only challenged the students to think creatively but also provided them with real-world experience in materials science and industrial design.

“Working with Avient Design on this project gave me a good sense of what working in the industry is like. With the critiques, feedback, and presentations, my teammate and I felt supported to really push ourselves in our work,” said Anastacia Delvin, a junior industrial design student at Georgia Tech. “Overall, the project was a great experience to learn about the limitations of different materials and how to consider them in the application of products.”

Throughout the project, Avient Design provided extensive mentorship and guidance to the students. This included regular critiques and feedback sessions, which helped the students refine their designs and push their work to a higher level. Avient’s experts also delivered a guest lecture on design best practices and injection molding, offering valuable insights into the manufacturing process. Additionally, the program included portfolio reviews and a career advice presentation, equipping students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in their future careers.

The final presentations showcased a diverse array of innovative product concepts that effectively leveraged the properties of Polystrand continuous glass-fiber reinforced thermoplastic composites. The designs demonstrated the material's potential in the sporting goods sector, highlighting its ability to enhance performance and user experience. The collaboration was a resounding success, with both Avient Design and Georgia Tech expressing enthusiasm about the outcomes and the students' growth.

“The collaboration with Avient Design has been a valuable addition to our curriculum,” said Kevin Shankwiler, course instructor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator, Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design. The mentorship and real-world material insights provided by Avient’s experts significantly enhanced our students’ educational studio experience. The design team’s generous time giving material education, feedback and critique, and team coaching helped prepare the students for the challenges of the professional world.”

"Working with Georgia Tech's Industrial Design students has been an incredibly rewarding experience," said Jake Salter, Program Manager at Avient Design. "From our very first conversations to the final presentations, the students' creativity and dedication were evident. It was inspiring to see the students’ clever applications of Polystrand materials, and the level of depth and detail they put into the product concepts they developed is really impressive.”

About Avient 

Our purpose at Avient Corporation (NYSE: AVNT) is to be an innovator of materials solutions that help our customers succeed, while enabling a sustainable world. Our local touch and customer engagement, combined with our global presence, allows us to serve customers with agility. We harness the collective strength of more than 9,000 employees worldwide to collaborate and build on each other’s ideas. In doing so, we innovate solutions that help our customers overcome their challenges or capitalize on opportunities provided by the fast-changing world and secular trends. Our expanding portfolio of offerings includes colorants, advanced composites, functional additives, engineered materials, and Dyneema®, the world’s strongest fiber™. By intersecting our broad portfolio of technologies with the product roadmaps of our customers, we help create differentiated and high-performance products that make the world better and more sustainable. Visit www.avient.com to learn more.  

About The Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees, as well as professional development and K-12 programs for fostering success at every stage of life. Its more than 53,000 undergraduate and graduate students represent 54 U.S. states and territories and more than 143 countries. They study at the main campus in Atlanta, at instructional sites around the world, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society. 

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Media Contact
Nicole DeChant
Avient Corporation
nicole.dechant@avient.com