Armed with pink insulation foam, 3D prints, and direct feedback from seniors at a Toronto diner, industrial designer Tobin Nickle-Lott has successfully reinvented healthcare dishware

North Bay’s Tobin Nickle-Lott has gone from tearing down Lego sets to building up solutions for the health care industry.

The recent Sheridan Industrial Design graduate’s new high-capacity, highly accessible cup and bowl system is headed to hospitals and care homes, turning a classroom demo into a commercially manufactured product designed to revolutionize patient hydration.

Armed with pink insulation foam, 3D prints, and direct feedback from seniors at a Toronto diner, 25-year-old Nickle-Lott has successfully reinvented healthcare dishware. The Chippewa high school alumnus’s new ergonomic cup and bowl system, picked up by medical food licensing giant Burlodge Canada, is reimagining how long-term care residents maintain their independence—one sip at a time.

Tobin’s design focuses on accessibility and ease of use, featuring ergonomic grips, easier-to-open lids, increased capacity, and hydration markers.

​Nickle-Lott attended Montessori Learning Centre, King George Public School, and Chippewa Secondary, before doing the Craft & Design Program at Sheridan. He took the four-year Industrial Design Program.

“From a very early age, he was very creative and artistic and loved to design three-dimensional things,” Liz Lott told BayToday. “He especially loved Lego. He would follow Lego design plans, then immediately take the build fully apart, then create a totally new design from scratch.”

This year he began getting teaching contracts with Sheridan. He was a teaching assistant during his last two years as a student there. 

Tobin agrees, saying he chose Sheridan because it is the more practical industrial design program out of the options in Canada.

“I really like problem solving, so I like to be creative, but I also like steady employment, I guess. So I kind of wanted to find a place where I could be creative and also use my smarts and apply them in a more pragmatic way.”

​Nickle-Lott was a teacher’s assistant for the class that was doing this project, and they wanted something to base their work on, so they knew what the benchmark was and what the expectation of quality was. So the teacher asked Tobin to make a cup to show the students.

The teacher really liked the cup demo and suggested that he show it to Burlodge as well.

“Initially, this was a competition between the students, but because the company caught wind of my own design and liked it so much, they opted to go with mine.”

Burlodge Canada is a partner with Sheridan and does mock critiques for the students. As a food licensing company, they produce things like trayware and dishware, and then heating and cooling hubs for those meals for hospitals and long-term care homes.

So what made ​Nickle-Lott’s design special?

“A lot of the students made special designs. We all made things that looked nice, but mine definitely stood out because I took the time to actually meet people who had mobility issues and hand disabilities’

He had a secret weapon!

His girlfriend works at a diner in Toronto where a lot of senior citizens gather, and she has a close relationship with them.

“I took that opportunity to actually sit down with my cup models and say, ‘ What do you think of this? How does this feel for you? And what would you change?’ And then I got a lot of really good feedback.”

So every time he worked on the cup, he was always working knowing exactly what the most common patient-user would want.

“So I was very informed, and I don’t think a lot of the other participants had that opportunity.”

The feedback was valuable, the biggest being that not all seniors hold a cup the same way.

“It needed to work for every style of being held. A lot of people hold cups in a lot of different ways, and I wanted to make a cup that was accessible to every way you wanted to hold it. That was the goal with the design.”

One of the keys was working closely with Burlodge.

“They were the ones who would say, good, bad, yes, no, and they were very blunt with it.”

​Nickle-Lott’s cups are already being manufactured, and he currently has one of them in his own home, but he’s unsure if people will be able to buy individual cups for personal use.

“I assume what they’re going to do is batch orders. I don’t know if there will be the opportunity for single purchases. But I’m not sure. I really would like to get this cup into the hands of more than just people who are in care because I think the cup is kind of designed for everyone, not just a care situation.”

That, however, is very much out of his hands. Once he gave them the design, “It was like, I’m pretty out of the picture as far as they make the decisions on that. I’m purely a design consultant for them.” He did, however, receive financial compensation for transferring the design rights of his project to Burlodge.

The response to the achievement has been overwhelming.

“My mom made a Facebook post, and the amount of responses from people I didn’t even know were astounding. I appreciate all the feedback I’m getting. And it’s also very nice to get messages from higher-up industrial designers in my community who are really impressed with the project and the outcome of it.”

The accomplishment pleased his mother, local photographer Liz Lott. She wrote on Facebook, “​I’m sooooooo beyond proud of my son, Tobin Nickle-Lott! This is such a wonderful and important accomplishment! Congratulations Tobin ❤!!!!

He humbly credits his success to his Chippewa teachers. “A lot of them did a really good job getting the tools I needed for industrial design, like my shop teachers and art teachers.”

Nickle-Lott is currently a teacher himself at Sheridan for 3D modelling, so he is very busy at the moment, but beyond that, he’s looking to do more industrial design, possibly more teaching, and getting into the film business. He’s applying to the Directors Guild of Canada for production design.

“Being able to do stuff like working on a film set or working on designs for movie production, I think would be a lot of fun. I think industrial design has a lot of overlap that’s really untapped when it comes to film production.”

Visit Tobin’s website here.

Read the Sheridan College story by Jon Kuiperij here.