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A chair, and a laptop cover -- everyday items that underwent an extreme redesign and earned two teams of Ryerson Architecture students first and third place in an international competition.

The students developed concepts for a fun chair for children, and a laptop computer cover that folds into its own desk.

The Flip 'N Slip chair is the brainchild of two fourth-year students, Dov Feinmesser and Aaron Hendershott. It won them first place in the art and architecture category of the Extreme Redesign Challenge, earning them a $2,500 scholarship.

"The idea came about when Aaron watched his son turn his chair over and use it as a slide," says Feinmesser. "We thought that a child's chair can be more than just a seat, we did some research and found there was no product like it."

The multifunctional chair can be configured in many ways to suit the imagination of the child.  It's not like other chairs for kids, which are really just smaller versions of adult chairs. Children can use the Flip 'n Slip one way as a rocker, turn it on its side to use as a table, flip it over to use as a slide ... the possibilities are endless.

The two students have talked about commercializing their product but are too busy with school right now to investigate it too seriously.

Capturing third place in the engineering category were David Di Giuseppe and Arash Nouraee for their Desk2Go. They're also fourth-year Architecture students, and they designed a laptop case that folds into a desk. It's meant to deal with the inherent problem of using laptops in a very bad place - on your lap, where they can overheat. Not good for you, not good for the laptop. Desk2Go morphs into a mini desk that supports the laptop - it could be used in airport, while lying in bed, anywhere.

"It started out as finding a way to make the laptop more comfortable to use on the couch, but it turned into something for professionals who take their laptop on the road," said David DiGiuseppe

Both projects were assignments in Vincent Hui's digital tools class in Architectural Science.

"Projects such as the Extreme Redesign competition are excellent platforms to showcase not only our students' innovation and abilities but also the strength of our program. Our curriculum epitomizes synergies of performance, feasibility and design," Hui said.

The Extreme Redesign contest is sponsored by Dimension 3D Printing of Minneapolis, and it attracted more than 700 entries from around the world. Winners were selected by a panel of experts from the design engineering fields. It's the seventh annual edition of the awards.