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Breakthrough innovation specialist Cambridge Consultants has taken part in New Designers 2019, in London, UK, where the company celebrated the future of design, awarding the prize for Excellence in Design for Consumer Health to promising talent Rumyana Dancheva of Loughborough University. New Designers provides a unique platform for design graduates to connect with design educators, professionals and consumers, for creative exchange and collaboration. From the belief that great design shapes the human experience, Cambridge Consultants places design at the heart of the product design process.
In addition to the main prize, Cambridge Consultants awarded five ‘Loves’ (highly commended) tags to students that were felt to have exhibited Excellence for Design in Consumer Health. The six recognized young designers were each presented with physical awards that were designed and manufactured in-house from mechanically-fastened laminates of recycled plastic, reflecting the importance of sustainability within product design.
The winning design from student Rumyana Dancheva is a smart autoinjector for people with diabetes, named ‘Level’. The device is a stress-reducing glucagon autoinjector, providing life-saving medication to diabetes patients with severely low blood sugar. The device pairs with a continuous glucose monitor attached to the patient. In an emergency, users are guided by light, text and audio to administer the vital drug. Commenting on the design, Andy Pidgeon, Head of User Centred Design at Cambridge Consultants, noted the “high quality of execution on a complex, user-driven problem with a great use of technology.” Dancheva wins £500 and will spend an afternoon at Cambridge Consultants, where she will tour the facilities and participate in a design-focused workshop that combines expertise in consumer and medical technologies.
The ‘Loves’ tags were awarded to:
- Claire Thompson, of Loughborough University, for ‘Cycle’, a reusable pregnancy and fertility test
- Rute Pereira Crespo Fiadeiro of Brunel University London, for ‘ReCleft’, a reusable cleft palate training simulator for surgeons
- Harry Moorman, of Loughborough University, for ‘Drop’, a self-administered drug delivery device for glaucoma patients
- Miles Kilburn, of Loughborough University, for ‘Breathe’, a chest binder co-designed within the transgender community
- James Parry, of Liverpool John Moores University, for his single use HPV home testing kit
Commenting on these inspirational designs, Ross Weir, Mechanics and Design Group Leader at Cambridge Consultants, said: “We were really impressed by these projects for their level of ambition and for identifying real, and in some cases unexpected, user needs. There was clear evidence of design thinking, underpinned by a high quality of execution.”
