Canadian entry Polyformer is the 2022 James Dyson Award's Global Sustainability Winner

The brief for the James Dyson Award is simple: design something that solves a problem. And this year's Global Sustainability Winner does just that. Polyformer is an open-source machine that recycles waste plastic (like plastic bottles) into 3D printer filament. Swaleh Owais from McMaster University, Canada, and Reiten Cheng from ArtCenter College of Design, USA, joined forces to create Polyformer, which aims to solve two problems: recycling plastic waste and accessibility to 3D printing. Polyformer takes one standard 500ml plastic bottle and produces three meters of 3D printer filament.

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O-Wind Turbine wins James Dyson Award

Two students from the Lancaster University in the UK discovered a way to harness urban wind by inventing a new type of wind turbine. And this project is what won Chilean Nicolas Orellana and Kenyan Yaseen Noorani this year’s James Dyson Award. The two students taking up International Innovation MSc together invented the O-Wind Turbine. Instead of capturing wind travelling in one direction—which traditional turbines do—their invention has a geometric shape capable of generating wind, no matter which way the wind is blowing. The O-Wind Turbine was inspired by the NASA Mars Tumbleweed Rover and features a 25cm sphere with geometric vents. It sits on a fixed axis but spins when wind hits it from any direction. Gears drive the generator and these convert the wind power into electricity. Orellana and Noorani take home $50,000 for their project and another $8,500 for their university department.

In a press release about the win, Sir James Dyson said, “Design something that solves a problem is an intentionally broad brief. It invites talented, young inventors to do more than just identify real problems. It empowers them to use their ingenuity to develop inventive solutions. O-Wind Turbine does exactly that. It takes the enormous challenge of producing renewable energy and using geometry, it can harness energy in places where we’ve scarcely been looking—cities. It’s an ingenious concept.”

James Dyson Award winner in Canada makes touchscreens accessible for the visually impaired

University of Waterloo mechatronics engineering graduates Craig Loewen and Lior Lustgarten developed WatVision, a system that helps the visually impaired navigate our now touchscreen-reliant existence. And this has garnered the top prize of Canadian leg of the annual James Dyson Award. WatVision makes use of three things: a smartphone app, industry standard detection markers placed on each corner of a touchscreen, and a ring worn by the user. The smartphone’s camera will identify the position of the touch screen by locating the four detection markers. It’ll then take a photo of the screen and download it onto the phone. Once the user pints to a button on the screen, with the ring-wearing finger, the app will find the ring and use the downloaded image to read the text out loud.

The international design award gives the team $3,000 in funding to help develop the project. WatVision is joined by two national runner-ups from the University of Toronto. One is for a project called Printem, which is a smart film that lets users go from design to physical circuit in just three minutes—all using a specially developed film that can be used on a home-office printer. The other is called Revertome, which is a surgical instrument that can treat severe burns by delivering cells in a bioink using a compact handheld bioprinter. The three teams will move onto the next stage of JDA, where Dyson engineers will select the top 20 international projects. The international winner will receive $50,000 for the students and $8,500 for the student’s university department. Two international runners-up will get $8,500 each.

James Dyson Award is now accepting entries

Dyson’s international design award, the James Dyson Award, is now accepting entries that will follow the brief “design something which solves a problem, big or small.” The winner of the competition doesn’t just gain international exposure but also $50,000 to develop the idea. Last year’s winner was a team from McMaster University who worked on a low-cost, early detection melanoma skin cancer device called The sKan. If you’re an young designer or engineer who’s still in school or just graduated and have an idea you want to pitch, you can read more about the contest after the jump.

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