5 Designs that impact the world

Products flood global markets every single day, some provide value others are gimmicks or throw away items. Value and Impact are in some ways subjective, what’s valuable to one person may not interest another.

Products flood global markets every single day, some provide value others are gimmicks or throw away items. Value and Impact are in some ways subjective, what’s valuable to one person may not interest another. However, there are some designs that from their inception to release, have the sole purpose of providing a positive impact to a niche or wide group.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but 5 of my favorite products or designs that provide real impact & Value

Tidal (Part of X)

Tidal is part of the Google X Company, if you’re not familiar, X is comprised of a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies with the aim to improve the lives of millions (if not billions) of people. A pretty big task but if you look at the projects they have launched / are launching, they’re on the right lines.

Back to Tidal. Tidal are creating underwater systems that give fish farmers more of an insight into what’s going on beneath the surface. They use a mix of cameras, sensors and machine perception tools that can help bring visibility to our oceans ecosystems. But why is this helpful?

Well, I’m sure we’re all aware that us humans are pretty hard on our environment, from pollution to unsustainable farming practices, on land and sea. According to The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 3 Billion people rely on seafood as a primary source of protein. According to Tidal, 90% of wild fishing stocks are depleted, with populations growing, it’s clear we need to do something about this. So, all in all it’s fair to say it’s important for us to conserve our oceans and Tidal are helping us do that.

Protecting the ocean with technology systems while feeding humanity sustainably

Tidal’s diagram of their system in action and onsite

Tidal’s systems provide vital information and a constant source of data to learn from and to help understand ecosystems, this allows fish farmers to understand the health of their fish and protect fish farms from pests and pollution. This in turn protects the environment and helps to maintain a sustainable source of food. Seems pretty important to me, if that’s not an impactful design I don’t know what is.

Minus Materials — Micro-algae cement

Minus Materials have created a way to produce carbon-neutral Portland cement using Micro algae. The Cement industry is responsible for approximately 7% of global emissions, which is double that of the airline industry. The reason it has such a high emissions output is due to to the way cement is made. To create cement, limestone is heated up, this releases huge amounts of Co2 due to the chemical reactions occurring in the process.

What Minus Materials figured out is that by using algae in the cement making process they could capture Co2 whilst also shortening the time it takes to produce limestone. They combine biotechnology, engineering and nature to grow carbon-negative limestone, big up algae!

The product they’re able to make is Portland cement, the industry standard, so not only are they able to create carbon-negative cement, they can create a product suitable for the industry. This combined with clean energy and carbon capture, could make producing cement carbon negative.

You can check out Minus Materials here and a great article by the Fast Company here where I found out about Minus Materials and got some of this information, well worth a read.

OmiFlo — Waste Water Treatment

OmiFlo have created hydroponic water systems that turns wastewater into beautiful green spaces, without the use of energy or chemicals. They do this by using floating wetlands that naturally filter oxygen into the waste water through its roots. The system requires no electricity or Chemicals or even proper gardening experience! This opens the system up to practically anyone, so they can create aesthetically pleasing wastewater treatment whilst preventing ground contamination.

This has huge implications on areas that don’t have the facilities to treat waste water and make it useful for those that want a aesthetically pleasing and low impact solution to wastewater treatment.

You can check out Omiflo here

Water Gen

Watergen create drinking water from Air. Literally out of thin air. They created a system that produces drinking water from the humidity in the air, a solution to the growing problem of depleting drinking water levels across the globe. The systems don’t need complicated and outdated infrastructure and eliminates the need for groundwater pumping and the worries of polluted sources. This means that they can be deployed in any location at anytime from rural villages to offices.

This has a massive impact on those that have limited access to drinking water and also for everyone going forward. With uncertainty surrounding us in every direction, innovations such as this could prove vital in the future, not to be too dramatic.

Makani — Honorable Mention (My Favorite)

An Honorable mention and one I’m most interested and impressed by — Makani were another project born out of the Google X Company. They used kites to harness wind energy to create renewable energy. This is one of my favorite designs, not only because it looks pretty cool, but the application was effective and something new to the world of renewables.

Makani aimed to enable more people around the world to have access to clean, affordable wind power by developing energy kites, an airborne wind energy technology that used a wing tethered to a ground station, to efficiently harness energy from the wind.

You can see the graphic below which shows how it works

Graphic of how Makami’s kite’s worked and one in action

Unfortunately in 2020 Makani’s journey came to an end. However, in the spirit of their positive and impactful design, the team created and released ‘The Energy Kite Collection’ a portfolio of resources that included:

• A technical report
• Makani’s Entire avionics, flight controls & simulation code repositories
• flight logs for every crosswind flight of the M600 prototype
• Technical Videos
• A simulation tool called KiteFAST created with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• And most incredible of all, a non-assertion pledge for the free use of Makani’s worldwide patent portfolio.

This means that airborne wind developers, researchers, aerospace experts and engineering students can use the materials to learn or develop new airborne projects. Basically a Christmas come early. Makani was a design that had a positve impact and will continue to do so thanks to open source information

You can check out the project here, it’s worth the read, the team also produced a documentary.

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