Tag Archives: Social Awareness

This NFC enabled sleep aid device keeps you away from late-night scrolling and improves sleep!

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Sleep is personal. Each night, we curate the best conditions for optimal sleep. You might have a preferred meditation app, a favorite essential oil for your trusted aromatherapy diffuser, or the only sleep apnea breathing mask that won’t make you feel like you’re going into combat come morning. Whatever your ideal sleeping conditions call for, we all know how important it is to set the tone for a good night’s rest. Mark Stanisic recently debuted his design, Oblak in order to provide a sleeping bedside device that helps manage nightly routines and promote effective rest.

Oblak is essentially a smart speaker that walks users through their nightly sleep routines. Through the use of smart technology, Oblak introduces each individual user’s optimal bedtime environment ideal for effective rest. Many factors can contribute to sleep deprivation, but in today’s world, the overconsumption of media on our smartphones is perhaps the leading cause. In order to step away from smart technology doing the work for us, Stanisic takes a holistic approach instead, encouraging users through Oblak to make conscious decisions that benefit their sleep patterns. For instance, Oblak uses NFC technology to register when its user is ready for bed.

In order for Oblak to operate, the user simply places their smartphone on the induction charging zone, then through connectivity pairing, an accompanying app will ask if they’re ready for bed. Once ‘Yes’ is selected, NFC technology communicates with the bedroom’s additional smart technology such as lightbulbs and thermostats to transform the bedroom into the ideal environment for good sleep. Stanisic found that optimal sleeping conditions require a room’s average temperature to be set between 18-28℃, that the lighting should emanate warm, red wavelengths, and that ambient sound should provide a low-decibel and stable range of sound to cut through distracting outside noises.

All of these conditions work to provide the ideal environment for effective sleep and once a user tells Oblak that they’re ready for bed, the sleeping bedside device maintains the conditions throughout the night so users can sleep soundly. Lights fade from cool blue to warmer red hues, the thermostat adjusts to find the most suitable temperature, and ambient soundwaves permeate the user’s room, creating a sort of sound bath to get some rest.

Designer: Mark Stanisic

Once Oblak’s user is ready for bed, smart technology adjusts the bedroom’s lighting to provide the ideal environment for a good night’s sleep.

Today’s younger generation spends a lot of time looking at their laptop’s or smartphone’s digital screen, which negatively affects our relationship with sleep.

Oblak’s simple interface and textured surface invite users to power on the sleep aid device and securely place their belongings when ready for bed.

Oblak’s friendly appearance prioritizes the user’s peace of mind by utilizing inviting fabric and layers of translucent surfaces that echo the fogginess that follows a good night’s rest.

These ergonomic glasses were designed specifically for Black People’s wider nose profiles

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It’s weird to think that a design as basic and universal as spectacles or sunglasses can have a racial bias. The truth, however, is that like almost every product you see, spectacles often are designed for the default human, which is, in most cases, a caucasian male or female. Spectacle brand Reframd is correcting that racial bias by designing spectacles specifically for the facial profiles of Black people. The eyewear takes into account the placement and shape of the nose in relation to the eyes – features that distinctly set all races apart.

Most black people have much wider noses, causing spectacles to either pinch the nose-bridges or sit at a slightly higher level, resulting in distorted vision. “At some point, I realized the problem wasn’t with me or my face, but with the product itself,” says Ackeem Ngwenya, product designer and founder of Reframd. “It became clear that the product was not made for people like me, and that I could do something to change that.” The company was founded a mere 5 years ago, although Ngwenya says it’s rooted in years’ worth of “personal frustrations” and an “unwillingness to just accept the world as it is”.

Reframd’s range of spectacles feature a wider nose-bridge, and smaller lens-rings spaced further apart. Reframd works by using a parametric algorithm that runs in a 3D program. Put simply, customers use the front-facing camera on their smartphones to capture their “face landmarks”, reports DesignWeek “Essentially, it’s a pair of glasses that adapt in response to different inputs such as head width, bridge height, pantoscopic tilt, temple length, and more,” says Ngwenya. “These parameters drive frame creation for a particular person and that frame is then sent to our production partner and made for the customer.” This allows each frame to be custom-made for its wearer, ensuring a more personally-suited pair of spectacles that prioritize comfort and break the racial bias around the notion that a product can simply be made to ‘universally’ serve everyone, including people that weren’t considered during its design process.

Designer: Reframd

This earring helps diabetics read their blood sugar levels without the pin-prick

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Revolutionizing how Type 1 Diabetics monitor their blood glucose levels, the Sense Glucose Earring is an innovative non-invasive wearable that incorporates reads blood-sugar levels in the ear-lobe using safe, high-frequency radio waves.

The earring requires just a single lobe piercing (as opposed to the daily pin-prick tests that diabetes patients have to take) and sits on the ear at all times. When you need to read your blood-sugar levels, the earring uses sensors and algorithms to collect data, which is then sent to your smartphone. This massively reduces medical waste, while offering a pain-free solution for checking your sugar levels. At the same time, it turns a medical apparatus into a fashion wearable, removing the social stigma of having to carry clinical-looking blood glucose meters around with them. Instead, the Sense Glucose Earring is fashionable, safe, environment-friendly, and pain-free!

Designer: Tyra Kozlow

This mobile cabin comes with it’s own cargo drone delivery service that saves the local environment from destruction!

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Nowadays, I can’t even keep track of how often I think about traveling. Following the onset of stay-at-home orders, the travel bug seems to have surged in numbers and we’re all daydreaming about getting away from it all. If only we could tie up hundreds of balloons to our roofs so could finally stop talking about travel and just do it. Well, now you can – sort of. Studio SFSO, a San Francisco-based industrial design duo, noticed the increased urge to travel as well as social media’s role in promoting tourism and conceptualized a new travel experience that transports mobile cabins to uncharted territories with help from delivery cargo drones.

Known for their often bulbous and quirky home designs, Studio SFSO now turns to travel for inspiration. Studio SFSO’s mobile cabin delivery service aims to help mitigate the unfortunate byproducts of overtourism like land degradation and wasteful construction activities. In addition to these preexisting problems, the COVID-19 pandemic has moved many people to either ditch previous travel plans or embrace unsafe modes of travel. In order to offer their own solution to these problems, Studio SFSO’s mobile cabin delivery service incorporates the use of drone technology to first transport prefabricated holiday cabins to unique, faraway places and then, once that travel itch has been scratched, send the mobile cabins back to the user’s home in their respective city. This mode of travel from Studio SFSO promotes nonintrusive tourism that protects the environment and won’t disrupt the local community’s way of life.

To get the whole holiday started, users will decide on a single location from a map made available by the delivery service’s accompanying app and reserve that location as the chosen delivery address for the drone to deliver the prefabricated cabin. After the location is selected, just like how city e-bikes can be returned to any available charging station, the guest’s cabin is picked up from the chosen destination’s closest ‘droneport’ and delivered to the onsite location. All the drone takes care of is the delivery service, so guests will have to unfold and assemble their cabins before enjoying their stay. Once the holidays come to an end, travelers simply fold up their prefabricated cabins and a drone takes care of the rest, bringing it right back to a nearby droneport.

Constructed from a combination of both plastic and wood, the cabins are cuboid boxes that measure 2.2 meters in length, 1.5 meters in width, and 2.2 meters in height. To help reduce overall waste, each cabin collects leftover food and garbage in tanks that leave no trace of tourism behind. Further reducing the problem of waste brought on by tourism, Studio SFSO’s mobile cabin delivery service also delivers pre-cooked meals to guests in a similar fashion to airline dining services. Once the cabin reaches the chosen destination, additional furniture, blankets, and portable toilets are subsequently delivered. To provide heating, electricity, and water, each cabin is also outfitted with the necessary equipment to provide comfortable stays for safe modern travel.

Designer: Studio SFSO

Unveiled at CES 2021, the world’s first robot dog with decentralized AI does everything but walk on water!

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Robot dogs have come a long way since Sega Toys’ Poo-Chi hit the scene. I still remember the day I got my Poo-Chi, whose digital bark soon turned into what sounded like a chain-smoking robot’s panic signal. Since its debut in 2000, Poo-Chi, along with many other robotic dog products have seen some major modifications and upgrades. Today, the world’s first decentralized AI robotic dog has been unveiled at CES 2021 by KODA Inc. Designed to offer both emotional companionship and practical, physical support, KODA, Inc.’s DAI robotic dog “is the perfect combination of function and performance,” as CEO of KODA, Inc., Emma Russell puts it.

Unlike the Poo-Chi, who couldn’t even hold its note singing “Ode to Joy,” KODA, Inc.’s robotic dog comes with four 3-D cameras, a single 13-megapixel front-facing camera, an ergonomic structure that incorporates realistic dog-like features such as a purely aesthetic tail, 14 high-torque motors with two on the neck offering full-range mobility for activities like climbing the stairs or trudging through snow, along with an 11 Teraflop processing unit. Since KODA, Inc. is dedicated to providing technology-based solutions to help people with everyday problems, either chronic or otherwise, the secure blockchain network of KODA robot-dogs is closely monitored and cross-checked for consistent and effective AI improvements. For instance, a KODA, Inc. robot-dog in Detroit might be the first to slip on a patch of ice, but thanks to a “futureproof,” supercomputing network, robot-dogs who find their home in a warmer climate will know not to slip on a patch of ice even if the dog’s home ground temperature might never call for one.

The development of decentralized artificial intelligence is integral to the success of robot-operated emotional and physical support products. Decentralized AI essentially equips the built-in software with the ability to solve the reasoning, planning, learning, and decision-making problems that centralized artificial intelligence does not compute. By endowing the robotic dog with Decentralized AI technological capabilities, KODA, Inc. provides a robotic, smart companion that can offer care and guidance for several different purposes including but not limited to, simple companionship, walking guidance for blind users, protective services as a tech-savvy guard dog, or KODA, Inc.’s robotic dog can operate as an animalistic personal assistant capable of solving ordinarily complex issues.

Designer: KODA, Inc.

This tiny home in the Community First! Village is built for previously unhoused individuals

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Beginning in 1998, a mobile food truck based in Austin, Texas, with the help of thousands of volunteers, has helped serve food to unhoused individuals seven days a week and 365 days a year. That food truck has since transformed into Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a social outreach ministry responsible for the development of “the most talked-about neighborhood” in Austin, Texas, Community First! Village. The village is one of MLF’s three core programs that were started to serve the unhoused population of Austin, Texas, and offers permanent and sustainable housing for an affordable price in a mutually supportive community.

Teaming up with Bailey Eliot Construction, McKinney York Architects, an architecture firm based in Austin, recently designed and constructed a micro-home for one of the residents of Community First! Village. In order to meet the new homeowner’s tiny housing criteria, McKinney York Architects planned to design a micro house that met both the homeowner’s requirements for privacy and the village’s commitment to community support. The home’s final design incorporates a butterfly roof, which implements the use of a central valley where the two pitched roofs meet to collect rainwater for further irrigation use. Additionally, installing a butterfly roof allows for plenty of natural lighting to enter through the windows without having an impact on the homeowner’s privacy.

Taking full advantage of the 200 square foot area limit for each micro-home, McKinney York Architects also installed a screened-in sunroom for the homeowner to have the option of either opening the screens up to the rest of the community or keeping them closed for optimal privacy. Inside the home, original pine timber lines the walls, giving the feel of a blank canvas for the homeowner to leave as is or design as they’d like. The tiny home manages to include a bedroom with room for a twin-sized or larger bed, a modest kitchen, a relatively spacious working area, dining space, and a cozy den for relaxing.

Community First! Village is a 51-acre development planned by MLF over the course of two phases which spanned over four years and has expanded to include a total of 500 tiny homes as well as community amenities such as gardens and behavioral healthcare facilities. In 2014, the first phase of Community First! Village commenced after Tiny Victories 1.0, a design competition in partnership with Mobile Loaves & Fishes and AIA Austin DesignVoice, invited firms to design sustainable, tiny housing solutions that take up no more than 200 square feet. Following the first phase, which culminated with a 27-acre master-planned community for the “chronically homeless” population of Central Texas, the village’s second phase kicked off in 2018. Today, Community First! Village offers permanent housing and encourages a safe, uplifting community space for more than 250 formerly unhoused individuals.

Designer: Mobile Loaves & Fishes, McKinney York Architects, and Bailey Eliot Construction

Designing products that break biases with Render Weekly and Ti Chang!

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If you are a part of our Instagram community, you could have not missed this viral (and controversial!) post that shed light on gender bias in the design world. As conversations progressed, I realized the bias goes beyond genders and there are MANY segments of our audience who are underrepresented. We need to talk to and more about women, BIPOC, LGBTQ, and disabled groups – pay attention to their experiences, their needs, parts where they have felt left out of consideration when using a product or service. The post was a conversation starter but it needed to be followed by action, so Yanko Design teamed up with designer (and powerhouse) Ti Chang as well as Render Weekly to encourage participation from the global community with the aim of designing to break a bias.

“This is a chance to start to redesign products and experiences that do not address the needs of womxn and many underrepresented groups and historically marginalized communities. Let’s reimagine what could be! Let’s get these ideas out there by collaborating with EACH OTHER! Talk to your community, reexamine your privilege, reach out to this community and see if you can team up with them! Offer to realize other people’s ideas if you are super strong in rendering! If you have a great idea reach out to someone who is a great sketcher! Just get these ideas out there for us to see what a more equitable world COULD look like,” said Ti Chang.

Here are some of our favorites from the #RWDesignBias challenge –

CURVD by Amin Hasani

Hasani is one of the co-founders of CURVD, a universal mug that works for everyone! “Disabilities do not exist, design flaws do. When a product fails to serve a person, that person is not disabled, the product just wasn’t designed right. The CURVD mug was designed to allow all hands, regardless of their hand capability or shape, to be able to enjoy a beverage without limitations,” says Hasani. The mug was launched as a human-friendly design with a patented handle that allows all people, regardless of their hand capability, to be able to enjoy a beverage without limitations. Enjoying a warm beverage is a universal joy and deserves a universal design.

Maria Contraceptive Pill Dispenser by Romane Caudullo and Theotim Auger

Maria is a smart pill dispenser specially designed for the contraceptive pill with the aim to free women from pill omission pressure and its side effects. “Because, while the pill benefits the whole couple, the woman is often alone in managing this contraceptive, the constraints, and stress associated with it. It seems to us right and necessary to use design to improve this treatment,” says the team. Maria makes it easy for women to take the pill and improves its effectiveness by making the process more efficient. A much-needed redesign that comes 60 years after the FDA approval of birth control pills!

 

Changing Station by Claudia Miranda-Montealegre

Baby stations in public are only found in women’s bathrooms and do not take into account the needs of male caregivers. The current design does not feel safe, or hygienic, which leads to people using surfaces that might not be ideal (cars, floors, and counters/tables). This puts the burden on the female partners and takes away equal access from male partners. This conceptual baby changing station has a touch-less opening system, includes UV and alcohol self-cleaning capabilities, as well as integrated adjustable lighting. It upgrades the safety features to provide a comfortable experience for parents and infants alike. It also includes details such as hooks for bags, safety belts that can be adjusted using one hand, and a diaper dispenser for a seamless experience.

Pivot by Iris Ritsma

Even in 2020 majority of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is still being designed for the male body including body armor which is made to protect people from being harmed or even killed by gunfire. 71% of women working in emergency services wear PPE that is designed for men – it doesn’t fit women, their bodily movement, health issues, and more. Pivot is a soft concealable armor designed to optimally fit the anthropomorphic characteristics of women’s bodies. Each size comes with three variable chest sizes and the diagonal straps fit neatly around women’s naturally tighter waist with raised sides on the bottom provide extra freedom of movement in the hips. Pivot provides optimal protective coverage, maximizes women’s mobility, and increases women’s comfort significantly.

Liberia by Nipuni Siyambalapitiya

Current luggage scales in the market assume that most people can lift up a 50 lb/23kg on a hook/strap and weighed, it doesn’t take into account the elderly or those with disabilities. Liberia is a pneumatic luggage scale that allows you to weigh your bag WHILE packing! It is a pillow-like scale and accompanying app. It comes with an electronic air-pump that inflates it and a pressure-sensitive valve that records change in air pressure inside the scale as the weight on top changes. Buttons and tabs are large enough for people with low grip strength and have different tactile qualities, making it easy to maneuver the scale even if you can’t see too well. Simply place the deflated scale on the floor, put your bag on top, inflate the scale via the app and start packing while Libera tells you the weight in real-time.

Interruption Buzzer for women by Kristi Bartlett

Trump interrupted Hilary Clinton 51 times during their debate and in 2020. This buzzer is inspired by the board game Taboo and aims to make group discussions easier. The AI-enabled meeting assistant combats the phenomenon of women being talked over in meetings. Put it in the center of the table at your meeting and adjust the dial to reflect the gender makeup of your group to make sure the contributions follow the proportions. The device will buzz annoyingly and loudly when it detects a woman being interrupted by a man or another woman. It will also turn blue if it detects that men are speaking more than 50% of the time and pink if the same applies to women. The goal is to keep your meetings purple – equal chances!

Diffuser by Caterina Rizzoni

This diffuser re-imagines blow-drying curly hair, using a handheld form factor to help users offset discomfort and pain when using diffuser attachments on traditional dryers. Caterina spoke to over a dozen curly-haired womxn and relied heavily on design for usability. She aimed to reduce the ergonomic pain points present in the current design. This dryer was designed to protect naturally curly hair – the extra deep bowl saves room for curl pattern formation, while the dished fingers naturally conform to the user’s head. The use of metal for the diffusing end allows for even more drying from radiant heat, which means less airflow and less frizz! The soft braided cord easily swivels out of the way during use, and the soft heat-resistant over-mold on the body is easy to grip + easy to clean. Curly hair people are often forgotten like left-handed people and we need to break this bias.

BAGPAL by Tim Zarki

Public restrooms lack hooks to hang your bag from, and no one likes putting their bag on the gross public restroom floor. It is an uncomfortable and stressful experience, especially for women as they carry bags more often than men. BAGPAL can be used to hang your bag when you are using a public restroom and need both hands to change a tampon or pad. It is a multipurpose hook-shaped product that travels with you to hold your things when you can not. It has a strong stainless steel skeleton and colorful waterproof skin that is easy to clean when you wash your hands. With the pandemic, people are all the more careful of common surfaces and we don’t want to carry germs back home with us on our bags!

Nendo designed an airless football that never deflates!

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Designed as a 54-part puzzle that can easily be assembled on-site, the My Football Kit by Nendo aims at creating a long-lasting football for low-income areas that doesn’t deflate or need re-inflating. The ball’s design is inspired by Japanese woven bamboo balls, with interlocking and interwoven elements that can easily be repaired or replaced on the fly.

Football is a sport that has universal appeal, with even countries in Africa, South America, and Asia being as (if not more) invested as their more affluent European counterparts. However, while footballs are easily and readily available, repairing or maintaining footballs can often be difficult for people from low-income neighborhoods, creating a class-disparity in being able to play the game long-term. Nendo’s answer to it is a ball that never needs inflating in the first place. Named the ‘My Football Kit’, Nendo’s solution is a 54-part puzzle that comes together to form a football. Made from recycled polypropylene and elastomeric synthetic resin components, the resulting ball is robust, soft, and bounces just as well as a regular football, but doesn’t need inflating. Instead, its interlocking pieces maintain the spherical shape of the ball thanks to their structural design.

The interlocking system designed into the football is so uniquely innovative, that even if a component breaks off or gets damaged, the ball will still continue to hold its shape and will not disassemble, ensuring the game goes on uninterrupted. To fix the ball, its missing component can be replaced, and if broken, can be easily repaired. This makes maintaining the football much simpler and provides a much more economically effective alternative to buying a new football or a pump.

All 54 pieces of the My Football Kit come disassembled in a flat-package (sort of like IKEA furniture) to reduce their carbon footprint while shipping. They can easily be assembled on-site (giving people a fun pre-game activity), and the possible inclusion of colored components allows players to customize their football too, helping build a bond between the user and product. A drawstring bag comes included in the kit too, so the owner of the ball can easily carry it back home – either intact or disassembled!

Designer: Nendo for Molten

Finally, a book designed to help you stop doomscrolling on your phone

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A quick Google Trends search will show you that the first instance of the term ‘Doomscrolling’ dates back to April 2020. The word was coined at the starting of the global lockdown following the pandemic, to mean “the act of consuming a large quantity of negative online news, typically without pause, to the detriment of the mental health of the person consuming it.”

It’s no secret that smartphones are designed to be addictive and bad for your mental health. Couple this with lockdowns, confinement, and isolation, and you’ve got a pretty bad combination on your hands… quite literally on your hands! Goodbye Phone, Hello World was published to help take that device from out of your hands and give you back control of your happiness and overall mental health. The book, which combines beautiful illustrations and bite-sized pieces of text (for an easy transition), is filled with ‘ideas, wit, and wisdom to help you break away from technology and get back to living’. Within its covers lie 60 different exercises to help you find happiness, inner peace, and break away from the addictive activity that is staring at your phone. Yes, I get the irony behind you probably reading this on your phone..!

Author: Paul Greenberg

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These modular covid-19 screening clinic designs implements neon color signals to maintain social distance!

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In cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, outdoor COVID-19 screening clinics have taken up residence in gym parking lots, school track fields, and busy sidewalks. On any given day, in cities with high cases, crowds of people wait in line at walk-up clinics for Coronavirus tests. In these cities where some of us have to travel without the added protection of a car, it goes without saying, a need for safer and socially-distanced testing clinics is clear and urgent. FOMSC, designed by Jimun Nam, provides a modular solution for cities with a growing need for outdoor screening clinics.

FOMSC, which stands for, ‘Foldable Modular Selective Clinic/Screening Clinic,’ utilizes modular triangularity, portability, and folding capabilities, in order to appropriately station to various environments – from stadiums to storefronts. Each screening pod is fully enclosed in order to offer a sense of safety and privacy that preexisting outdoor screening clinics do not offer. Walk-up clinics in Los Angeles sporadically pop up on sidewalks like flea markets on Sunday, while city residents wait in lines to reach the final open tent where screenings take place one by one. Ditching this open-air approach for one that prioritizes the individual’s safe space, Jimun Nam utilizes screen paneling and folding mechanisms in order to provide patients their own clean pod where they can get screened for COVID-19, all the while implementing and maintaining safety protocol from onsite medical staff. Designed to function like airport security, roped walkways lead patients to pod centers, similar to body scanners in appearance, which funnel patients in and out according to a color-coded lighting system. Each pod comes equipped with color-coded lamps that indicate whether or not it’s safe for the next patient to enter. While the patient inside the pod gets screened, yellow or red light emanates from the pod’s ‘situation lamp,’ to indicate either ‘waiting’ or ‘diagnosis’ periods, more generally signaling that the pod is occupied. Once the screening is done and the pod has been cleaned for further use, green light pulses from the pod’s base, denoting safe entry.

Being that FOMSC is easy to both install and disassemble, the intention behind its modularity gives it a sense of adaptivity for changing city environments like parking lots and grassy parks. Jimun Num’s modular and color-coded solution also offers some ease of movement when it comes to switching patients in and out of screening pods. The need for screening clinics for hospitals and other essential worksites can not be overstated and thankfully, design can answer the call.

Designer: Jimun Num