Tag Archives: Women In Industrial Design

This eco-friendly takeaway packaging was inspired by the stacked Indian tiffin

Posted on by

The Dip-In Tiffin by Srishti Garg is a clever solution that takes cues from traditional practices to make single-use takeaway food packaging eco-friendly, modular, eye-catching, and culturally relevant! Its stackable design is directly inspired by the vertically stackable steel boxes found in Indian tiffins (the Indian equivalent of a bento-box), and it uses easily available natural materials to store food, making it safer to dispose than plastic.

The Dip-In Tiffin was designed primarily for dry/semi-dry foods. Since the packaging isn’t air-tight, it tends to exclude foods that are gravy-based, limiting its options, but making it great for dry snacks like doughnuts, sandwiches, etc (the Indian context uses savory doughnuts and fermented rice-cakes). The tiffin’s main vessel is created using a dried, thermoformed Areca leaf, an eco-friendly alternative to conventional disposable plates. These vessels hold semi-dry, saucy, and oily foods really well too, offering a more reliable alternative to brown paper bags/boxes. The Areca bowls are covered with a simple branded paper sleeve, and slots along the sleeve allow multiple boxes to be suspended to each other vertically, resembling the tiffin. The solution was devised mainly for airports, which see patrons quickly grabbing meals and eating them within hours of checking in. It doesn’t use any glue, staples, or seals either, making it safe, and the all-natural makeup of the packaging means it can easily be disposed of after use!

Designer: Srishti Garg

This wearable lets your plants communicate with you

Posted on by

While the term “Plant Parent” has become a pretty standard term in the millennial lexicon, taking care of plants isn’t as easy as it looks! Sure, if you’ve got a dog or a cat, they let you know when they’re hungry, it’s easy to know when they’re bored or frisky, and you can take them to the vet when they’re unwell or unhealthy. With plants, not so much. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a plant’s health – soil, water, sunlight, pests, etc. But there isn’t any easy way of knowing what your plant needs… the BioCollar is changing that.

Designed by students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the BioCaller is a wearable that builds empathy between the wearer and the connected plant. When paired with a piece of hardware that goes into the planter, the collar helps you understand the plant’s needs through real-time feedback. It becomes moderately tighter when the plant needs water, gets warm when the plant has too much sunlight, and vibrates when the plant has an infestation. In doing so, the wearable aims at letting the plant easily communicate its needs to you, and enables you to be a better plant-parent.

The BioCollar was designed as a part of a larger system called the BioPermit – a service that uses the collar to test prospective plant-buyers to see if they’re empathetic caregivers (a lot like how people are interviewed before they adopt a baby or pet). Obviously, the system is a speculative one, with its main aim being to test future scenarios and see if sensors can be developed that convert plant-needs into haptic feedback. I can definitely see this getting translated into something as effective as a wrist-worn fitness tracker that tracks your plant’s progress, or better still, an app that lets your plant communicate with you!

Designers: Sammy Creeger, Elliott Wortham & Maria Jose Tamayo

This prosthetic leg grows with your child!

Posted on by

Prosthetics are expensive and if you have you start using them when you are young, it is an exponential cost that keeps increasing as you grow. It is not convinient or affordable to keep getting new prosthetics, so designer Snezana Jeremic has come up with a concept that grows with you! Ring is an adjustable, custom-made prosthetic leg designed specifically for transtibial amputee children in developing countries to help reduce costs while bettering their quality of life.

The conceptual prosthetic leg aims to make the otherwise rigid medical equipment more flexible especially to fit seamlessly in the life of a growing child. The user will wear the leg and it can be adjusted it as they grow to make sure the fit is always optimal and comfortable. “Ring achieves this thanks to an adjustable foot portion to ensure an optimal stride as well as the upper portion that can be paired with additional rings to suit the person’s body as they grow and develop,” says Jeremic.

Ring is a conversation starter that addresses the need for more modular healthcare equipment. Prosthetics like these make sure that individuals don’t need a whole new device every time they have a growth spurt!

Designer: Snezana Jeremic

ring1

ring2

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

Posted on by

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!

This hand washing machine also disinfects your phone which can be 10x dirtier than the toilet!

Posted on by

We all know that our phone screens have more germs than a toilet seat – in fact, they are 10 times dirtier! So when you wash your hands after using the restroom and touch your phone, you’re thinking it’s all clean but in reality, you just got 10x more germs on your hands now. With the pandemic, we are now washing our hands more often but also touching our phones more often. As we all go back outside to our normal routine with extra caution about what we are touching, it is equally important to remember that our phones are just as bad as the public toilet seat. UVClean is a simple and innovative design that can help reduce the germs we come in contact with!

While you wash your hands, the appliance will also disinfect your phone so all that scrubbing and precautions you are taking do not go to waste. Appliances like UVClean can help people feel safe in public places again as we adjust to life during and after this pandemic. Designers had to make sure that the product can be seamlessly integrated into the contactless environment while taking the new hygiene standards seriously. Simply put your smartphone in the capsule while you wash your hands and UVClean will disinfect it. After washing your hands you can dry them on the sides of the appliance before taking your phone out. The appliance also uses a HEPA filter inside.

“The UVClean is about personal hygiene in public spaces. This is a faucet improved with disinfection of daily use objects, using technologies already available on the market. According to a study, people touch their phones 2,617 times every day, and our phones are 10 times dirtier than a public restroom. Our phone is practically our third hand that we never wash. After UVClean – you can use the phone again and be sure it is clean,” says Grits. I truly hope to see UVClean in public places just like we see sanitizer dispensers now. UVClean was one of the winners of the 2020 Jump The Gap – Roca International Design content. This is your reminder to disinfect your phone and wash your hands!

Designer: Lidia Grits

This biodegradable single-use dental flosser actually takes carbon OUT of the atmosphere

Posted on by

“Increasingly, our material choices have become moral choices”, says Jessica Smith, a design graduate from Pratt Institute and the developer of a new kind of carbon-negative plastic – Carbyn.

Carbyn seeks to mitigate the climate crisis by creating a carbon-negative bioplastic that stores more carbon than it releases throughout its lifecycle. The world generates nearly 10 billion tonnes of agricultural waste each year. When this organic matter decomposes or is burnt, it emits carbon, which contributes to our global emissions in a significant way. Through its unique composition, Carbyn absorbs that atmospheric carbon, and its biodegradable nature means it safely decomposes into dirt once its job is done.

Carbyn is a composite of two materials – PHA bioplastic, and Biochar. PHA is a bioplastic which is produced by bacteria through fermentation. It is unique because it is both home compostable and easily formed using existing plastic processing methods, while Biochar is produced by burning organic material at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. By combining these two materials, Jessica created a carbon-storing biocomposite that can be produced using conventional manufacturing processes. To demonstrate how effective her material was in replacing traditional plastics, Jessica decided to mold a single-use floss stick out of it. The polymer has a signature black color thanks to the Biochar, and can easily be thrown away after a single use. Whether disposed of in a home garden, a landfill, or even the ocean, the Biochar in Carbyn will actively suck carbon from the air around it before safely degrading into dirt. In fact, Carbyn even possesses the ability to make the soil more fertile as it biodegrades, helping the environment by reducing emissions, waste, and increasing soil fertility!

Carbyn made it into the International Top 20 of the James Dyson Award for the year 2020.

Designer: Jessica Smith

This cleverly designed chair encourages you to hang your clothes on it!

Posted on by

Ask a designer what the purpose of a chair is and they’ll throw fancy words about lumbar support and complementing interior spaces. Ask a bachelor what the purpose of a chair is and you’ll get two answers – Sitting, and draping clothes.

The Jules chair by Sarah Willemart explores this unintended yet undeniably popular function of the chair. Designed to function as both a chair and a makeshift wardrobe, the Jules is a functional, aesthetic seating device with a new twist. The backrest of the chair comes with an unusual shape that actively promotes you to hang your clothes, from coats and pants, to even hats and handkerchiefs or scarves (or babushkas – a word I recently learnt). The backrest’s innovative shape comes with a bar on the top for hanging clothes, and a hole running through the cushion for you to hang kerchiefs through. The backrest even has shoulder-like proportions, letting you easily drape a coat on it without worrying about it losing its shape or getting wrinkled. Ingenious, eh? Sign me up for three of them.

Designer: Sarah Willemart

This modular habitat system was designed to save the bees – it is their Good Place neighborhood!

Posted on by

Bees are essential to keep our ecosystem running as we know it, these master pollinators play a huge role in supporting the growth of trees, flowers, and other plants that serve as food + shelter for all living beings. Bees contribute to complex, interconnected ecosystems that allow a diverse number of different species to co-exist. However, majority of the 20,000 species of bees in the world face the threat of extinction. Australian designer Amelia Henderson-Pitman wanted to create something to mitigate this problem so she looked within her own country and found that there are more than 1700 species of native bee in Australia, yet only 11 species living in hives and producing honey. Keeping this in mind, she designed Pollen – a modular system that provides a range of nesting materials to support the native bee populations.

Pollen can be installed in any location and has also been optimized for small spaces to keep it city-friendly. The idea was to have a modular system that could be integrated anywhere from inner-city gardens to exterior building structures. Pollen is basically The Good Place neighborhood for bees. Each nest module contains a variety of materials like recycled hardwood, sustainable bamboo, or handmade mud brick. They also have a series of holes that vary in diameter to provide nesting locations for bees. The shell of the modules is an injection tube crafted from recycled HDPE and has been designed to be easily assembled as well as mounted without fixtures. I love that the internal modules (molded from recycled PET) are transparent because it offers us a closer look at how the bees are adapting. The transparency of the design shows us that seeing is bee-lieving.

“Many of these native bee populations are easily supported by providing nesting material and forage, but there are currently no products that provide both of those features whilst also being suitable for urban areas. The solution arose from seeing the variety of native bees that were present in my city balcony garden, and I realized there was a market for a product that provided these features as well as an educational component,” says Amelia who also made sure to include a comprehensive booklet with easy-to-follow instructions on assembly and information about native bee identification, bee behavior and the best flowering species to plant to attract the bees. This added educational component makes the product more attractive for beginners too!

Pollen stands out from its competitors because it goes beyond the purpose of just helping bees, it includes interactive elements that make the process fun for the user without disturbing the insects through clear tubes which contribute to citizen science and aid in research. It also comes with an optional planter to expand the habitat and will be located behind the assembled modules and can also be mounted to the wall. Amelia’s design has won the 2019 Frank Fisher Prize for the Most Sustainable Design – the Swinburne University of Technology, it has been named one of the 10 Most Innovative Projects of the 2020 Virtual Design Festival School Shows and has also been nominated for the Design Institute of Australia’s 2020 Graduate of the Year along with being a notable entry for the James Dyson Award 2020.

Designer: Amelia Henderson-Pitman

This clever scratch-card sticker helps people remember to take their medicines everyday

Posted on by

If I were entirely honest, there isn’t one thing that I can truly say I’ve successfully done every day. I usually brush every day but if you held me at gunpoint and asked me if I’ve ever missed a day, chances are that I probably have. And while missing a day in your brushing schedule isn’t positively life-threatening, missing your daily medicines can be. FabriSol is an adhesive sticker designed to help HIV+ patients take their daily medicines without fail.

Forgetfulness is one of the major reasons HIV+ patients do not adhere to their treatment. It’s difficult to remember to take medication daily, especially when a condition requires lifelong treatment. FabriSol, developed by Ricky Stoch – a student at the Royal College of Art, is an adhesive sticker that goes right on top of the packaging for antiretroviral medicines (ARVs). The sticker uses a series of 28 metallic scratch-patches to help patients keep a daily track of their medicine intake for 4 weeks. When patients take their pills, they scratch off the day’s metallic coating. This action reveals a tick indicating adherence and provides positive reinforcement.

The FabriSol fits on both bottles as well as on pill-boxes, and comes in a pack of multiple stickers that can go on new bottles/packaging after the old ones run out. Apart from allowing patients to remember to take their crucial medicines, the FabriSol even provides a historical record of any days that you potentially miss. While the sticker was initially developed for HIV+ patients, it can easily be modified and used to treat tuberculosis, hypertension, diabetes, depression, and many more chronic conditions that require steady, daily medication.

Designer: Ricky Stoch

This mouse comes with its own “Undo” button because everyone deserves second chances!

Posted on by

I could really use a Ctrl + Z button in real life, but this mouse gives me the next best thing. Meet the ‘Oops’ mouse, a gadget that respects our human side by encouraging us to undo our mistakes as we learn from them. The conceptual mouse ditches the physical scroll wheel and puts in its place a neat Oops button that activates the Ctrl + Z shortcut when pressed. Designed to sort of humanize the user/computer relationship, the Oops button allows you to make mistakes and swiftly undo them too, whether it’s clicking on a wrong link, accidentally deleting a file, or making a typo in your mail or presentation. To err is human. To forgive is, well, machine!

Designer: Elodie Delassus