Monday, July 20, 2015

Royal College of Art Graduate Exhibition 2015

My office is right opposite the Royal College of Art's Kensington campus so I went down to the recent graduate exhibitions they held there. The work put out by the students in Global Innovation Design (MA) was amazing and made me feel optimistic about the future. Here are the five ideas I felt compelled to write down.


Antton Pena is working on a navigating system that will enable drones to fly around and cause minimum disruption (by, say, avoiding busy areas), and not crashing into one another. I simplify but it will defo be a must when that delivery system really takes off.

Morten Gronning Nielsen has developed a special tool that increases the power of the hand in sculpting objects, a bit like a glove with mini sander machines fixed on the fingertrips: who would have thought sculpture could get disrupted?

Pate Natwilai Utoomprurkporn has developed a way to make an object move without having to use a joystick or pad (with its limited up/down/left/right options). All you have to do is point with your phone and move it about. It's called Trick, and her demo was magic!!

I loved this idea by Vidhi Mehta: a simple science toolkit for anyone to use, allowing you to test samples of what's around you and see if they contain substances with antibiotics. As s/he describes it: it's open source drug discovery. I don't know enough about medicine research to say whether it is a very romantic idea or not, but the little orange agar plates were too cute.

Air pollution in London is very bad, so I'm really hoping Hsin-Hua (Sheana) Yu's prototype will soon become a fully fledged product I can buy: it's a personal air purifier. You attach it to your shirt and it "utilises air flow to generate a stream of filtered air, creating an invisible shield that protects people from breathing in polluted air". Obviously, in my ideal world, the government would sort the pollution out in the first place, but I'm not holding my breath (ba-dump-ching!).

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