Graduate design students from the Global Grad Show take on unique approaches to the travelling experience. Their innovative designs address travelling necessities for those in wheelchairs, refugees, and even the adventurous trips for hikers, campers. Below is a selection of projects being showcased as part of the Global Grad Show that re-imagine the way we travel.
Graduate design students from the Global Grad Show take on unique approaches to the travelling experience. Their innovative designs address travelling necessities for those in wheelchairs, refugees, and even the adventurous trips for hikers, campers. Below is a selection of projects being showcased as part of the Global Grad Show that re-imagine the way we travel.
Flashlight – Chorock (Green) Park
Flashlight is a platform that designs an inclusive traveling experience for wheelchair users. By building a wheelchair traveling community, curating the accessible city and travel guides and making recommendations to the user, filtering the sights, landmarks and hotels by accessibility, sending a user weather change notification, requesting assistance for the user when he/she approaches the hotel, and helping the user with a broken wheelchair or other emergencies, Flashlight encourages wheelchair users to travel wherever they want with complete confidence.
DreTrav – Yaseen mekki, Amira Abbas, Ammar Ali Bilal Siddik, Ali Khalid Jalal, Ahmed N AL-Masri, Manal Nasir, Arun Kumar, Arafat Al Naim
DreTrav, standing for dream travel, is a travel simulator designed to deliver the experience of traveling and exploring a place before actually visiting it. Built as a capsule-like room, it has a 360-degree view of special attractions and touristic landmarks of a location, which is simulated through live feed or previously recorded videos and can be interacted with by hand gestures and body movement. Additionally, the user can move and look around to change their view point and the sounds they hear to resemble the real experience. The purpose of DreTrav is to ease the choices of travel and to obtain certain expectations of a destination prior to traveling there, to provide an alternative experience for anyone unable to travel, and to boost tourism of certain countries and locations.
Refugee Protection Guide – Amal Atassi
Syrian designer Amal Atassi, inspired by a sense of responsibility towards his people, hopes to save the lives of refugees traveling in Europe by facilitating NGOs’ efforts in delivering them assistance. His design strategy is centered on a van that has the potential to save lives by offering refugees basic needs to help keep them alive. For example, one of the vans will offer refugees hygiene kits, supplies, food and sheltering products while walking, and another would be placed next to camps offering medical and legal assistance/consultancy.
Voyageur – Alice Huchón Colunga
Human travel is increasing daily, with travelers carrying bulky luggage. Comfort during the journey is essential for the traveler, both for the optimization of space and the health of the traveler. In fact, there are several problems that can disturb the comfort of the traveler: dif?culty sleeping, bad postures, low temperatures, uncomfortable seats, noise, and stress, among others. This project seeks to improve the user's posture with a simple design solution: a polyester travel jacket with a built in pillow. Voyageur comes with inflatable capsules for the lumbar and cervical areas that fill with air through a valve which is blown by mouth.
Cocoon – Nico Landis
Inspired by his experiences traveling the world, hiking, skiing, and camping in the Swiss mountains, Nico Landis created Cocoon, an adjustable sleeping bag for camping, which overcomes the many unfamiliar problems brought about by sleeping in a sleeping bag.
Cocoon combines the functions of a sleeping bag, insulation mat, and cover. The wider shape of the cocoon offers more moving space and comfort than conventional sleeping bags. Cocoon allows you to rest, sleep, and relax in all different. In the cold, the volume can be decreased, reducing the amount of warmth your body needs to produce. In addition, two compartments on the sides store your clothes.
As a result, you only have one compact multi-purpose item to carry for a night in nature.
LighTent - Marisela Sanabria
One of the problems outdoor explorers often face is to deal with heavy backpacks, tents and other camping accessories. LighTent offers a lighter option for the camping enthusiast; it is an Ultralight Portable Camping Tent that works as a hiking pole as well. While the exterior resembles a regular carbon fiber hiking pole, there is space inside the shaft that opens up, revealing a rolled up tarp to set up a camping tent. The overall camping tent size is optimal for one explorer and the material the tarp is made up of is an ultralight, waterproof, resistant fabric: silnylon. The mechanism inside the shaft contains an inner tube that rolls up the tarp as you spin the grip. The tip of the pole is made up of six stakes that together with the pole itself build up the tent. The grip of the hiking pole also contains a long range led lamp that can be turned on by pressing a small button next to it. This lamp can be used to light the hiker’s way or to light up the camping site just by adding a paper, plastic or fabric shade. The other hiking pole may contain another ultralight tent or a groundsheet.
Wudu Drop – Atifah Mohd Yusuf
Inspired by a lack facilities at public spaces, making it inconvenient to perform prayer especially for Muslims who travel or live in a non-Muslim country, Wudu Drop provides a new option to perform the Muslim practice of ritual washing, Wudu. It is designed to solve some of the concerns of performing wudu in public spaces/restrooms: water spillage on the floor, self-consciousness, wasting water, negative perception of others, the lack of public comprehension, ergonomic factors of the sink and space in public restrooms, unfriendliness toward disabled people, and other restrictions for Muslim women who are forbidden to expose certain parts of the body in public. The Wudu Shuttle must be inserted into the Wudu Channel and a special token must be scanned in order to activate the Wudu Channel. Wudu Drop can be squeezed or slightly pinched to burst the membrane and then the water can be rubbed evenly to the body part. Wudu Drop provides clean water balls in public spaces where the performance of Wudu would be inconvenient and is accessible to subscribers of the Wudu Channel.
ASA backpack - Isabel Corção
The purpose of the ASA backpack project is to develop a comfortable and safe way for a photographer to carry and quickly access his or her equipment for daily use or for adventure/war photography. The ASA backpack has individual internal cases that store equipment separately, with multiple customizable compartments, allowing the photographer to organize the material in any way he wants. The backpack includes comfortable straps for continuous use, a pocket for cards and batteries, a secret pocket for valuables, easy access to daily used objects, and an option of attaching larger objects to the external part. This waterproof backpack can hold up to one camera body with three lenses.