Dyson School of Design Engineering students showcase the inventions of tomorrow – iNews

The first cohort of students to soon graduate from the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London have showcased their solutions to a series of modern global challenges, from tackling food waste and reducing non-sustainable packaging to improving office well-being and reusable resistant materials.

The school was partly funded by the James Dyson Foundation with the aim of teaching an applied form of engineering combined with design principles, Sir James Dyson told i.

“My interest throughout my professional life has been helping to fund and support an applied design form of engineering, so students don’t see it as a dry, academic subject, but one where they can apply their skills to a product with a business opportunity.”

The school recently moved into its permanent home in an airy former post-office in South Kensington, London, where a selection of students from the school’s three taught programmes – an undergraduate Design Engineering MEng, due to complete their studies in October, and two MA/MSc double Masters courses run jointly with the Royal College of Art – displayed their inventions during an exhibition to mark the permanent opening.

Aeropowder’s Pluumo feather packaging

Pluumo is the world’s first sustainable thermal packaging made from feathers, designed to be used in place of polystyrene. Its parent company Aeropowder was formed by PhD students Elena Dieckmann and Ryan Robinson in 2016, cleaning feathers and stuffing them inside a biodegradable film to create pillowy liners.

“The feathers are fully biodegradable, within 12 weeks they will break down,” Elena tol i. “It outperforms polysterene in terms out keeping its structure by six hours, and is as effective in insulating the item it’s packed around.

“The feathers are a waste product of the poultry industry – some farmers would generally burn them, which isn’t great for the environment. Otherwise they’d probably get made into animal feed or protein powder.”

Re:flex flexible plastic

Re:flex is a low-cost “shape memory material” consisting of a stiff thermoplastic core and flexible elastomer shell. It was created by Innovation Design Engineering students Pierre Azalbert, Benton Ching, James Fraser and Karlijn Sibbel, who found heating it causes it to become flexible, allowing it to be bent into shape, held in place and left to cool and harden at room temperature to form objects.#

“The interesting thing about this material is because it’s a composite, the parts aren’t chemically bonded, meaning you can cut it open and re-use it for different applications,” says Benton.

“We can make a bicycle saddle which can be fitted to your body shape within a matter of minutes, or a medical cast which can be disinfected, reheated and fitted to someone else, so you don’t need to dispose of it.”

Embla workplace stress tracker

Design Engineering (MEng) students Melisa Mukovic, William Pepera, Alfred Thompson, Oliver Thompson and Richard Zhang created Embla, a smart office tool designed to create a more soothing workplace.

“We’ve made a wearable bracelet which measures biometric data like heart rate and blood pressure for signs of stress,” says Oliver. “It uses Internet of Things technology to connect to various outputs in the room, so the temperature, lighting and sound can be adjusted accordingly – there’s a lot of research on how temperature and colour affects your mood, so this can help to improve their well-being.”

Employers can also track their workers’ stress levels through the wearables’ data and reduce or increase the team’s workload accordingly. The team tried to avoid any dystopian associations by anonymising the data and allowing workers to remove the wearable at any time.

Lettuce Labs futuristic smart kitchen

“Lettuce Labs is a vision of the connected kitchen of 2030, and was born from the need to tackle food waste,” explains Nirav Ganju-Cass and fellow Design Engineering students Ben Cobley, Justice Duruanyanwu, Tom Shakespeare and Joseph Shephas.

Lettuce Labs is a vision of the kitchen in 2030, its creators say (Photo: Imperial College)”We wanted to reduce the amount of food being chucked away in the home, and wanted to use a variety of technologies to help people work out what’s in their cupboard, what’s in their fridge, when it goes off and when they can use it.”

Lettuce Labs’ anti-waste solutions range from tiny cameras positioned inside cupboards and fridges fitted with smart shelves which notice how much you’ve used of a foodstuff like rice or sugar and alert you when you need to repurchase and a Chef virtual assistant suggesting which meals to make with the ingredients you have, to using computer vision technology to scan packaged food waste to combine it with other types of organic waste to produce renewable energy source biogas.

Circular Species biodegradable mammoth

Global Innovation Design student Fernanda Dobal’s Circular Species is a biodegradable woolly mammoth toy, containing seeds and a 3D-printed skeleton children can excavate a couple of weeks after burying it in the ground.

“It’s an educational toy for between 8 and 12-year olds, and teaches them about the carbon cycle,” says Fernanda. “The mammoth’s body is made from a food waste by-product, and the skeleton is made from PLA (polylactide, a thermoplastic polymer), which is technically biodegradable but won’t biodegrade in your garden.”