"The combined Oscars and Olympics of Inclusive Design,"
Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC
Bath-based design agency Matter has been announced as the winner of the 2009 DBA Inclusive Design Challenge.
A collaboration between the DBA and the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre and sponsored by Sanctuary Care, the challenge was launched in 2000 as a creative response to the inadequate level of design in the disability aids and equipment sector.
This year's Challenge, open exclusively to DBA members, was entitled 'Sedentary Lives' - encouraging designers to look at solutions to address our increasingly immobile culture, from couch potato kids and office workers who barely leave their desks, through to those who live in supported care schemes at the end of their lives.
Matter highlighted a number of product areas that needed reassessment, however it was only when they discussed how people adapt to, and work around, ill-conceived seating products, that they started to focus their attention on a particular product area - the cushion.
They began to question and evaluate how well current seating cushions actually perform and if they were appropriate to the situations that people use them in.
This lead to the creation of a more health-positive, supportive structure for the cushion, called 'mo.dynamic seating.
Praising the extremely high quality of all the entries to this year's DBA Inclusive Design Challenge, the judges called 'mo. outstanding, an 'intelligent journey from start to finish'.
They felt it was a thoroughly researched, compelling, single-minded, technically clever and genuinely inclusive solution with a great deal of potential that could encourage people to venture out. In the care home context, its ease of cleaning and disinfection would cut costs, reduce storage needs and help cut their carbon footprint. They praised the team for the multiplicity of scenarios of use they had opened up for the product - in the home, for children, nomadic workers and frequent travellers.
Winner
Matter
'mo
Physiologically sitting needn't be bad for us, its up to the products and the environments we sit within to support our bodies in a comfortable and healthy way. For this years challenge we worked alongside one of our existing clients Herman Miller to redefine an everyday icon of sedentary adaptation, the cushion.
'mo is a lightweight portable seating product that spreads its load evenly across its surface and with its dynamic support it accommodates the users micro movements providing a comfortable, stimulating seated experience. mo provides people with a health positive solution to adapt inadequate furniture at home, in the office, on public transport or wherever they feel existing seating solutions are letting them down.
Get up and grow is a dynamic campaign encouraging teenagers and the elderly to get together and grow food. Through a national network of community gardening projects based at care homes, the campaign will provide opportunities for residents to get involved in a more active way of life.
Shift is a communications initiative to tackle the growing problem of sedentary lifestyles. A fun approach to a serious subject, it uses a range of ambassadors to deliver the message in different ways to a diverse target group: the whole UK. It engages, educates and then encourages people to get involved.
Over the last 50 years our lives have become increasingly sedentary. We now do far less day to day than previous generations and are eating more. The influence of fast food with take-aways, all-you-can-eat buffets and gigantic plates of food has changed our eating habits leading to a situation where nearly 1 in 4 of adults and almost 1 in 3 of children in UK are now overweight or obese.
Rodd have produced a series of concepts that are aimed to provide simple and easy ways to get people eating the right amount without the need for scales and measures. The range, titled ‘Divide Equally’, provides users with tools for preparing, serving and storing the correct amounts of food.
Preparation aids range from chopping boards, which indicate the correct portion size, a ‘one cup’ marking system, through to a flat-pack cone that can be used to measure a single portion of many different food types.
Serving and storage aids include crockery that highlights the fact if you’ve been eating too much and provides you with the correct size meal; a baking dish system allowing easy reference to a correct portion and a set of portioning tools and crockery with lids that allow extra meals to be stored easily.
Whether we eat too much or not enough, are active or sedentary, the issue of portion size affects most of us. Divide Equally educates and enables people to take more control over their health and nutritional wellbeing through better portion control.
'Id' is designed to help individuals with inactive lifestyles. Developed in three parts, the system helps people to adopt a positive attitude towards change before enabling them to map their own personal barriers and potential. Finally, Id connects individuals with their most appropriate first steps and like-minded mentors who can help to support long-term lifestyle change.
Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre Centre The Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre works to advance a socially inclusive approach to design through practical research and projects with industry. Its Challenge Workshop Programme, which runs the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge, aims to include the needs of disabled people in new product and service innovation and is part of InnovationRCA, the College's innovation network for business.
Sanctuary
Care
A subsidiary of Sanctuary Housing Association, Sanctuary Care
was established in the mid 1990s to provide high quality nursing
and residential care. Sanctuary Care has 52 Registered Care
Homes, 5 Extra Care Schemes, 4 Home Care businesses, with
over 2300 staff and a turnover of £51 million. The homes
cater for older people, learning and physical disabilities,
mental health, EMI, general nursing and residential.
Sanctuary Care is passionate about the quality of services it provides and all surplus income is reinvested into the business which allows us to provide residents with excellent standards of care from well managed and well maintained homes.
