Last week I went to see the Designs of the Year 2013 exhibition at the Design Museum. It’s intriguing to say the least. A real mixture of more traditional design and modern, technologically driven stuff like Little Printer and Lytro. For me, some of it was more art than design – where the object was highlighting some aspect of change or the human condition rather than solving some problem. But there was lots and lots of cracking stuff.
A number of entries resonated, but one thing that particularly stood out for me was the simple genius of “Kit Yamoyo”, which is an anti-diarrhoea kit. Each of these kits contains “sachets of medicine inside specially designed packaging, which also acts as a resealable measure and drinking cup”. Which is pretty cool in itself. But the challenge is really one of distribution – how to get these kits into the hands of people in very remote areas in an affordable way. The solution lies in Coca-Cola. Or rather with Coca-Cola. ColaLife (“Building unlikely alliances to save children’s lives”) found a low cost solution. Coca-Cola was already available in many of the villages that the medicine kits needed to reach. So Kit Yamoyo is designed to fit in the spaces between the bottles stacked in a crate. So kits get to where they need to go with hardly any cost. Marvellous.
Child ViSion Glasses are also pretty amazing!
