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Leon Widdison is a product designer with substantial experience in the sporting goods industry.

He was part of the team that created the Flow snowboard binding during the mid-nineties, at a time when the whole industry was looking for new binding solutions. The Flow binding has gone on to establish itself as the main alternative to the traditional bindings.

Currently he works for a wide range of clients including Dynafit, Salewa and FTWO. He has been a jury member for the ispo BrandNew Award from the outset.

design a mountain

The heart of the winter sports industry is the mountain resort; a good reason to make it the focus of this workshop.

We will turn back the clock and make a new start with a view to creating a better winter sports mountain resort. The challenge will be to find a balance between the delicate mountain eco systems and the fun-hungry winter sport and leisure industry.

The teams will be challenged to create radical solutions for a whole host of inter-related issues from transport through to architecture, infrastructure and sports activities.

We hope to ignite your enthusiasm for this truly challenging project, after all it is not every day that you get a chance to design a mountain!

design a mountain

by LeonWiddison

In total, ten amazingly imaginative teams took part in the challenge to design a mountain.

Not surprisingly, considering both their mixed backgrounds, and lack of mountain designing experience, the results were, to say the least, very interesting!

Though the whole event was light hearted, the majority took a sustainable approach to their mountains, with the exception of one group who stayed ‘realistic’ and proposed an anti-eco design!

Time will tell if future mountain resort developers are willing to embrace a sustainable approach and thereby go some way to making our (most of us) dreams come true.