Design isn’t out to be pretty anymore.
It has much grander mission: To improve the life of everyone on the planet. And most of it ends up looking very, very cool.
The INDEX:Award recognizes this particular blend of design practicality and coolness. It awards prizes in five categories - Body, Home, Work, Play and Community - in the hope that these innovative, potentially life-changing (and cool-looking) products will make their way into the market and into the developing world.
The winners were announced last Friday, and are now on display in (also cool-looking) transparent globe-like structures in central Copenhagen. Metropolismag.com has a beautiful slideshow where you can view all the entries in the competition.
The winner in the Home category is the Solar Bottle, which uses the sun’s energy to disinfect dirty water (a winner of the previous INDEX:Award was the Lifestraw, for a similar purpose). The XO Laptop, of the much-heralded One Laptop Per Child project, won the community category.
But the judges must have had a terrible time choosing the winners, because the range of products - and purposes - are incredible. There’s everything from Daily Dump, a method of home composting, to a design for an Antarctic research station. There’s a method of creating natural barriers to stop desertification, and a prototype for an all-wood school, designed to enhance learning for mentally disabled children. The competition also included Ecological Footprint and Dongtan Eco-City.
My personal favorite is the Refugee Radio, a small, simple radio independently powered by radio waves and designed for emergency situations, or a long-term refugee camp situation. I want one for all situations, but it only receives the AM signal. It’s cheap, it’s efficient, it’s the best way to get information, and you build it and design it yourself.
The common thread of these designs is that they manage to balance sustainability with affordability, and merge beauty into practicality and innovation. So what would happen if all design - by that, I mean the products each of us use on a daily basis - followed the lead of the designs in the INDEX:Awards? How much would it change our lives?
It’s very exciting to be living in a world where these sorts of great ideas are becoming reality!
Wonderful ideas for making life better here and now. They are much better ideas, I suppose, than ones aimed at going to Jupiter
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5237038.stm
It’s uplifting to see so many people working to design solutions to problems all around the world. Some of the designs they considered were really cool. I was a little surprised that the tongue sucker was a ‘work’ category winner, but there were a lot of good ideas in the ‘body’ category already.
I’m a little disappointed the Whirlwind wheelchair didn’t do better. I spent only a few months wheelchair-bound, but even in a “modern” country like the U.S. there were no affordable wheelchair options that could navigate a city well. I would really have appreciated such a versatile and capable ride.
It’s wonderful to see that others do care and are trying to make the earth a better place to be. And people are great inventors too, they just don’t think they have the knack. We need to have more incentives to inventions to encourage people to try it.
It’s AMAZING to see so many people designing things to HELP people AND look cool, not just to look cool like they used to hey!
I have high hopes for the future, with a world obsessed with visual perfection it wont be long before we achieve perfection…In general..Bring on the perfect world!
I’m amazed when inventions help society at large or the whole planet. I don’t think this idea is new, however, “ergonomic”, “sustainable,” and “green” are terms that have been around for at least a couple of decades.
Yes, some of the ideas are old, often with new names. The “radio wave powered” radio is a crystal receiver (galena, germanium or silicon crystal) and have been around for 100 years.
But, sometimes it is very worthwhile to bring out old ideas, and adapt to modern use with better materials, etc — as long as you do a literature search or talk to someone with experience, so you don’t waste time starting all over from scratch.