Five designs by students at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei have been selected among the top 100 designs at the International iF Design Awards in Munich, Germany, this year.
The iF Design Awards are regarded as “the Oscars of design” by many people in the field, the school’s Department of Industrial and Commercial Design said yesterday, adding that nearly 15,000 designs from around the world had been entered for the competition this year. The school was proud that 11 of its students’ designs were chosen among the top 300 designs.
Among the five designs chosen in the top 100, the “Blind Jog” by Hsu Wei-tsung (徐維聰) and Chang Wan-chi (張琬琦) is a signalling device for blind people that allows them to go jogging without having to fear running beyond safe boundaries.
The “Connection Cap” designed by Lee Yi-chia (李儀家), Chang Shih-chung (張世昌) and Wang Kuo-chieh (王國傑) ensures that the cap on recycled plastic bottles stays connected to the bottleneck, allowing users to open the bottles with one hand.
In addition, elderly, frail people who struggle to open the tops of specially designed pill jars, as well as people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), can now easily take pills out of their jar by themselves, thanks to a design called “Pill Jar for PD” by graduate student Yeh Ming-chieh (葉銘杰).
“The inspiration of my design came to mind when I was watching the movie Love and Other Drugs,” Yeh said. “In the movie I saw a person suffering from Parkinson’s having a hard time handling pills with trembling hands.”
Yeh said he spent about three months doing research into the difficulties people with Parkinson’s experience in daily life and invented the “Pill Jar for PD” after half-a-month of experiments on the actual design.
Department chair Regina Wang (王韋堯) said the students’ designs were mostly inspired by their concern for elderly or disadvantaged people, as well their relationship with the environment.
She added that the department would continue to encourage designs showing consideration for others.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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