Success for Imperial students in major international design competition

Postgraduate students Alexandre Kitching and Sheana Yu took home two awards in the LotusPrize competition.

An innovative idea to help long distance partners, families and friends feel closer led an Imperial student team to success in a global competition.

Postgraduate students Alexandre Kitching and Sheana Yu, who are enrolled on the Global Innovation Design (GID) course jointly delivered by Imperial and the Royal College of Art , won gold in their category and took home an overall prize for Best Intelligent Design in the ‘LotusPrize’ International Industrial Design and Innovation Competition 2014.

The LotusPrize competition, hosted by the Provincial Government of Hunan, China, has been held biannually since 2008. This year’s competition brought together more than 40 international companies, including LG, Intel and Microsoft, to set design topics for the competition - each of which gave participants a brief based on real and current needs in society and industry.

The Imperial team won the top prize in the Closer to Your Heart category, sponsored by telecommunications company Huawei, which asked them to come up with a concept that would help people feel closer to each other when they are in different locations.

Their winning concept, Hamon, is an interactive surface which allows users to communicate with each other based on their interactions with everyday objects.

Integrated into a desk or table, Hamon screens would trace the movements of objects placed on them - such as a cup of coffee, a pen, or a notepad. Outlines of these objects would then be visualised on a connected Hamon board, allowing users to experience the presence of another person by observing the movement of the objects they interact with.

Hamon boards would rely on OLED displays – commonly used in the manufacture of curved Television screens. OLED screens are lightweight, flexible and have a faster response rate than conventional LCD screens.  

Explaining their concept, Alexandre Kitching said: “When you’re physically with someone, your mood is shown through your actions and movements, and can be sensed by others around you without you having to articulate your feelings. These subtleties tend to be missed in telephone calls, emails or text messages, which rely upon written or spoken words.

“We wanted to create a new kind of long-distance interaction that would allow users to feel close to someone without having to constantly think of things to say. It’s a more playful, personal way of communicating.

“It could be used by long-distance couples to keep in touch at work, or by parents who could use it to play with their child remotely - moving objects around to create shapes and patterns.”

As category winners, Alexandre and Sheena were also one of just 24 teams to be selected to take part in the competition’s Incubation Programme, providing them with the unique opportunity to work for a week with mentors in Hunan Province, China, to develop their concept further.

After pitching to a judging panel made up of international designers, academics, and representatives from industry, the team took home the prize for Best Intelligent Design in a ceremony held on 10 October 2014.

Offering further insights into the team’s aims in developing the concept, Alexandre added: “We were asked to design something that would be technologically feasible within 2-3 years, which meant we had a lot of freedom to consider what we thought the future of this kind of technology could look like. We wanted to create something that would put the benefits of OLED screens to use and that would capture people’s imagination in the possibilities of this technology.”

Find out more about Hamon