Three projects, four universities and six students are part of the new generation of innovators seeking the James Dyson Award, an award that aims to inspire and encourage engineering and industrial design students to solve a real problem through innovative projects .
In the fifth edition of the award in Mexico, the winning project is ATL-59, a water saving system designed for vertical housing in urban areas created by Brizeth García from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Iván López from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, both graduated from Industrial Design.
“We see that problems like the one Nuevo León is experiencing will become more common and closer to our communities, so we seek to design this product based on the possibility of day zero and with resources that avoid a gap between users,” he said in Garcia interview.
The prototype has a three-component system: a rain collector that uses a three-layer filter, which means that the water can be used to flush the toilet, water the plants or clean the house or car.
The second is a saving system in the shower to avoid wasting cold water while the desired temperature is reached, capturing it with a surface and redirecting it to a container, while the third element is the saving containers to store and transport the water pickup. Its stackable design holds 6 litres, the amount needed for one toilet flush.
For his part, Iván Lopez assures that one of the greatest impulses and inspiration they had from the academy, since they managed to know what the award consisted of and they hope to have more momentum in their project with it.
Other winners are GUIBSA, a project created by Sara Mosqueda, Isabel Aguirre and Guie’banii López, students of Engineering in Innovation and Design at the Universidad Panamericana, who in the pandemic identified a social problem: older adults do not have access to formal caregivers.
“An adult over 70 years of age takes, on average, between 9 and 11 different pills at least three different times of the day, so the organization is very complex. During the pandemic I realized that this also happened at home and that it opens an important social gap, where in case of not having access to a caregiver, the family is the one in charge of this work “Aguirre argued.
For this reason, they designed an automatic medication organizer and dispenser capable of connecting to a virtual assistant, such as Alexa, to support any older adult and generate a help file for their caregiver.
The other project that won was Sunset, created by Jordi Manríquez Albarrán, a graduate of Energy Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Aguascalientes and who seeks to reduce the waste of the Central de Abastos.
According to the Central de Abasto Trust, in 2020 32,725 tons of waste were thrown away, of which 45% are organic, such as fruits and vegetables, which is why Manríquez designed an indirect radiation food dehydrator with a storage system thermal.
Its main objective is to prolong the shelf life of food, thus reducing food waste and facilitating its packaging, transport and storage.
The winning project of this first phase was ATL-59 and will receive 137,000 pesos, while GUIBSA and Sunset will receive support in the dissemination of their projects. In addition to that they passed to the next phase of the global contest.
