After her late grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Sha Yao felt helpless. It was especially frustrating, she recalls, to sit with her during meals while she struggled to perform basic functions, like using silverware without spilling. “There was nothing I could do,” Yao says. Inspired by her grandmother’s plight, Yao created Eatwell Assistive Tableware, a dining set designed to make mealtime easier for people with Alzheimer’s and other diseases that affect brain and body function. (Among the design hacks: using bright colors to help people distinguish their plates from their food and putting wide rubber bases on the cups to prevent spills.) The goal, Yao says, is to “bring back the joy of sharing a meal together.”
The All-Purpose Shelter
Better Shelter / Co-developed by The Ikea Foundation
Last year, Ikea made headlines when its philanthropic arm, the Ikea Foundation, helped launch Better Shelter, a line of temporary houses—equipped with features like door locks and solar panels—that could be shipped flat and assembled in under four hours, much like the retailer’s popular furniture. But now that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has helped send more than 16,000 of these units all over the world, they’ve taken on a life of their own. Just as DIY experts have found ways to remodel Ikea staples into expensive-looking furniture, refugees and aid agencies are turning Better Shelter structures into hospitals, reception areas and more. In Greece and on its border with Macedonia, the shelters are being linked together and used as early-childhood-development centers; in Djibouti, their walls have been retrofitted with “air conditioners” (plastic bottles cut in half to facilitate air flow). Now designers are trying to revamp the Better Shelters to allow for even more flexibility. After all, says Johan Karlsson, managing director of the Ikea Foundation, “we cannot design a one-for-all shelter.”
A Stronger, Softer Hair Dryer
Dyson Supersonic / $399 Shop it
James Dyson has famously streamlined all kinds of air-centric appliances, most notably vacuums and fans. Now he has set his sights on the hair dryer. Unlike traditional models, which Dyson dismisses as “noisy, heavy and not that fast,” the Supersonic does its job with remarkable efficiency. It’s quiet, thanks to a tiny, jet-engine-like motor that reaches 110,000 revolutions per minute (making it ultrasonic and therefore inaudible to the human ear). It’s fast, thanks to a design that multiplies air flow. And it’s consistently gentle, thanks to a sensor mechanism that keeps hot blown air at one of three exact degree settings. This is hair drying as Dyson thinks it should be, even if it comes at a cost. “We never design down to a price,” he says.
Sweet Potatoes That Could Save Lives
The Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato / Developed by The International Potato Center (CIP) and Harvestplus
In sub-Saharan Africa, vitamin A deficiency afflicts more than 43 million children under age 6, leaving them vulnerable to blindness, malaria and more. It’s inefficient to provide entire countries with pills, so plant scientists from HarvestPlus and the CIP are helping countries grow their own solutions—in the form of sweet potatoes. The key is biofortification, or cross-breeding locally grown sweet potatoes with versions rich in vitamin A, so that over time the crops naturally get better at addressing the deficiency. Plant scientists have also bred them to be more resistant to droughts (as Maria Andrade did in Mozambique) and viruses (as Robert Mwanga did in Uganda). This year, Andrade and Mwanga shared the World Food Prize for their work, alongside agricultural economist Jan Low and HarvestPlus founder Howarth Bouis. Sweet potatoes may once have been seen as “a crop of the poor,” says Low, who’s helping to bring the super-spuds to more countries. Now they’re “a healthy crop for all.”
A Drone With Mass Appeal
Dji Mavic Pro / $999 Shop it
In recent years, drones have become smarter flyers, faster racers and better photographers. But for the most part, they’re still too big and bulky to carry around comfortably, which can turn off more-casual consumers. Not so with DJI’s Mavic Pro, which debuted in September; it’s got all the trimmings of a state-of-the-art drone—obstacle-avoidance technology, a 4K camera and the ability to track subjects while flying—but it can also fold down to the size of a loaf of bread, smaller than any of its competitors. Realizing that goal required DJI’s engineering team to “rethink all the aspects” of a typical drone, says Darren Liccardo, who helped lead the project. But ultimately, he adds, the effort paid off: because of its smaller size, the Mavic Pro is more nimble and less prone to accidents—yet another selling point that could attract new users.
The No-Touch Thermometer
Arc InstaTemp / $40 (for the InstaTemp) and $350 (for the InstaTemp MD)
