We don’t usually stop to think about pens. They show up in our bags, our drawers, the bottom of every tote we own, and when the ink runs out, they quietly end up in a landfill. That’s the mundane life cycle of the humble ballpoint, and most of us have just accepted it. Which is exactly why Shoot, a bamboo writing instrument designed by Sarthak Prajapati, feels like a quiet rebuke dressed up as a very beautiful object.
Prajapati is an Industrial Design undergraduate at the National Institute of Design in Assam, India, and Shoot is his entry in the 2026 Green Product Award, currently shortlisted as a finalist in the Consumer Goods category. At first glance, it’s a precision pen carved from a single piece of bamboo. But the more you learn about how it was made and why, the more it becomes a kind of design manifesto condensed into something you can hold in your hand.
Designer: Sarthak Prajapati
The name itself is a clever one. A “shoot” is the young, fast-growing sprout of a bamboo plant, and that material is the entire premise of the object. Bamboo is one of the fastest-regenerating plants on earth, and Prajapati uses it here not as a trendy green overlay but as a functional, structural choice. The bamboo handles the grip. The bamboo handles the form. The bamboo is the design. There’s no layer of branding on top trying to convince you it’s sustainable. The material speaks for itself.
Shoot’s most compelling quality isn’t even the material. It’s the thinking behind how it was made. No electricity. No factory floor. No complex supply chain. Prajapati built this using low-energy, hands-on craft methods, which aligns with a wider movement in design circles pushing back against the idea that innovation always has to be high-tech to be meaningful. Sometimes innovation looks like stepping back and asking whether the thing we already have, meaning the plant, the material, the traditional skill, was actually good enough all along.
The pen is also refillable, which sounds like a small detail but isn’t. Disposable pens are a genuinely staggering problem. Billions are discarded every year globally, and most of them are made from mixed plastics that can’t be easily recycled. The refillable design of Shoot positions it directly against that culture of single-use convenience, and it does so without requiring the user to sacrifice function. You still get a proper writing instrument. You just don’t throw the whole thing away when it’s done.
I’ll be honest: I have a soft spot for design that comes from a student context. There’s a kind of fearlessness to it. Prajapati isn’t working within a corporate brief or trying to satisfy a retailer’s margin requirements. He’s solving a real problem the way he actually believes it should be solved, and the result has the clarity that comes with that freedom. The pen looks exactly like what it is. A bamboo stalk. A writing tool. Nothing more, nothing less, and somehow that is enough.
The Green Product Award itself, now in its eleventh year, evaluates submissions on approach, innovation, sustainability, and design. The fact that Shoot made the final shortlist tells you a lot about the kind of thinking that’s being rewarded right now. The jury isn’t looking for products that simply add a bamboo component to something otherwise unchanged. They’re looking for objects where the sustainability logic runs all the way through, from material to manufacturing to end of life.
If Shoot ever goes into production, I’d buy one. Not because I’m trying to make a statement, but because it looks good, it works, and it represents a genuinely more considered way of making things. The design world produces a lot of concepts that never leave the rendering stage, but Shoot has a physicality and simplicity to it that makes it feel ready. It’s a pen. From a bamboo shoot. Made by hand. And right now, that feels surprisingly radical.
The post A Student Just Made a Pen From One Bamboo Stalk. No Factory Needed. first appeared on Yanko Design.
