I would say the ‘Beasley designs of the year’, held at the Design Museum, London, is one of the most important shows of the year. Timeout London says: ‘We never miss this show’ and well, neither do I. It’s a wonderful snapshot of the state of the world and the amazing solutions humans are capable of.
Now in its ninth year, Beazley Designs of the Year celebrates design that promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year. It encompasses multiple disciplines from architecture, product design, graphic design, engineering, fashion and transport design.
I thought it would be a good idea to explore, in more detail, the stories behind some of our favourite designs, with a focus on the eco and environmental design solutions which excited us. There were quite a few that we believe will, or could have a fundamentally positive effect on our planet and therefore need promoting as much as possible. So over the next few months, we will go into a bit more depth into each of them so please stay tuned and sign up to the blog, so you make sure you don’t miss out.
Our Ecotribo Design of the year 2016/17 is the ‘WITT Ltd – Harvesting Energy from motion’. Designed by Martin and Mari Wickett, with Schaeffler Gibbs Gear and funding from Innovate UK.
This design is so exciting as they have created technology that can create clean energy, simply by moved about. This design truly has the power to transform the world.
The Witt is a device that creates electricity from motion, providing an alternative, sustainable and unlimited power supply. Proudly developed right here in the West country it has recently been patented with tests carried out at Southhampton University. This wonderful product works in extreme conditions; is corrosion resistant and magically converts all movement into harvestable energy.
Under the hood there is a 3D pendulum that drives a transmission system, converting any motion, however chaotic, slow, fast or erratic into a unidirectional rotation of a flywheel to produce electricity. No other energy harvesting system can capture this full spectrum.
The possibilities are endless as WITT could be used to power boats, buoys and anything floating on the sea where power is required from powering data-buoys, meteorological data gathering and subsea monitoring (RNLI and global survival company, Survitec, have already agreed to deploy the WITTs at sea). It can also provide power for personal use in a rucksack powering laptops and mobile phones for hikers and business people on the go. In the long term, it could also be used on a much larger scale to generate grid level wave power with the first 10-15W WITT units ready in 2017.
For us here at Ecotribo, this design wins hands down because it’s enabling an accelerated transition towards sustainable energy models. We see this device as having as big an effect of sustainable energy creation as the solar panel and wind turbines. Go check out their site at WITT-energy.com share the great news with friends as this is a major milestone for our sustainable future.