Hasta La Gadget!

At Design Tokyo 2011 held earlier this year we came across an interesting piece on display from a team from Osaka University working under Dr Kazuo Kawasaki, the illustrious Japanese designer well known amongst other things as the designer of the glasses chosen by Sarah Palin. The “Vaccine Refrigerator” is a backpack style unit and parachute built in one, and part of Kawasaki’s Peacekeeping by Design (PKD) series which features a number of concepts aimed at “maximizing the power of design in a concrete tangible way”.

The pack itself is a small refrigerator designed to hold different types of vaccines. The unit houses a built-in battery capable of keeping it refrigerated for three days. The whole piece weighs no more than 6 kg and the casing is built to be particularly durable so that it can be dropped from an airplane deploying the built in parachute in areas where there is conflict and disease is rife.

Kawasaki has been Design Director in the past at a number of companies such as Apple, Fujitsu and Sony and his designs have earned him a place as one of “Japan’s most influential 100 people” according to Japan Newsweek. After being confined to a wheelchair for a period in his life following a traffic accident at the age of 28, he has focused a lot of his efforts since on designs that aim to benefit human life,. In 1989 Kawasaki designed a titanium framed folding wheelchair that was a revolutionary design of its time and now part of the New York MoMA’s permanent collection.

Another of the concepts born out of Kawasaki’s experiences and designed for the Peace Keeping Design series is a folding disposable vaccine injection syringe kit. Helping to produce vaccines for kids in poverty stricken and remote areas. The simplicity in the design and the packaging itself are particularly striking, and shows Kawasaki’s awareness of not just form but function.

Similarly simplistic in design but fantastic in concept are the set of triage tags that are color coded to rapidly identify patients’ treatment priority. The tags can be changed easily and are designed to be worn by patients where doctors are working in areas of severe pressure and tension in times of crisis.

It is interesting that with the recent events in Japan this type of innovation that Kawasaki originally designed for use in third world areas can actually be established to just as much effectiveness within his own country. Kawasaki himself noted that, “the designer must be a witness to the end of industrialism by placing oneself on the cutting edge of the times, foreseeing the future”.

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