The Royal College of Art (RCA) has announced the four winners of its Terra Carta Design Lab.
Credit: Piyaset / Shutterstock
The competition, which was created by Prince Charles and RCA Chancellor Sir Jony Ive, asked students and alumni “to design high-impact, low-cost solutions for Nature, People and Planet”.
The four winners were picked from 125 submissions from students and alumni from all four RCA schools (Architecture, Arts & Humanities, Communication, Design), which had been narrowed down to 20 finalists in January.
Yesterday the four winners were revealed. They were Aerseeds, seedpods made from food waste that can travel by wind to hard to get to and low nutrient areas, and AMPHITEX by AMPHIBIO, the first chemical-free and 100% recyclable outdoor performance textile.
The Tyre Collective also won for developing the first patent-pending device to capture tyre wear (the environment’s second-largest microplastic pollutant) as did ZELP, where a wearable device has been made to instantly neutralise cattle methane emissions.
The winners will be awarded £50,000 (€60,000) to help make their winning ideas into reality, plus their designs will be shown in the Terra Carta Design Lab Exhibition in the RCA’s Dyson Gallery which will run from today until 12 May alongside the work of the other 20 finalists.
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OR:BITAL BLOOM, which turns data into flower artwork, and Shellworks, which uses bacteria to make sustainable packaging also received honourable mentions and will receive £10,000 in funding plus mentoring from the RCA’s entrepreneurship and business support initiative, InnovationRCA.
“The Design Lab is a visionary and imaginative way of helping address the increasingly urgent climate crisis – the greatest design challenge we face,” said Sir Jony Ive, who was previously Chief Design Officer at Apple.
The Prince of Wales, Sir Jony Ive, RCA Vice-Chancellor Dr Paul Thompson, head of Climate Crisis Advisory Group Professor Sir David King, and representatives from Terra Carta Design Lab partners all helped to select the winners.
Read more: Seed-shooting drones could aid in reforestation
Prince Charles is well known for his climate work. In late 2019, the Prince of Wales launched the Sustainable Markets Initiative, in a move to “build a coordinated global effort to enable the private sector to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future”.
In May 2017 he was awarded The GCC Global Leader of Change Award for contributions to global environmental preservation and protection, and in January 2010 he launched the Campaign for Wool, an initiative to repopularise wool as a sustainable fabric.
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