Royal College of Art announces the winners of the Helen Hamlyn Design Awards for 2024

The annual Helen Hamlyn Design Awards recognise creativity in people-centred, inclusive design across all disciplines of the College and celebrate the most visionary, inclusive and innovative RCA graduate projects.

The Awards are organised by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design - a global leader in inclusive design, design thinking and creative leadership, endowed by the Helen Hamlyn Trust.

This year’s cohort of award winners propose innovative and transformative solutions to improve people’s lives, solving problems around sustainability, ableism and health.

In 2024, three awards were granted, the Helen Hamlyn Award for Creativity, The Northumbrian Water Award for Inclusive Innovation and The Snowdon Award for Disability. Each winning project is awarded £2000.

Alexander Spencer, Hanju Seo, Maria Asif and Sven Winkler Von Stiernhielm (all MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering) were awarded The Helen Hamlyn Award for Creativity. Their project ‘Pera’, a smart health assistance for people with bowel incontinence, consists of a wearable device that monitors bowel activity and provides people with predictive insights through Pera’s paired app.

A staggering 1 in 10 people have bowel incontinence, often hidden through shame and taboo. Pera allows those suffering to specify their circumstances and background, which forms the basis of a personalised experience. The technology can predict passing stool 40 minutes in advance, offering an alternative to the use of sanitary products that can cause infection and skin breakdown, giving sufferers of bowel incontinence the ability to plan their day, transforming lives.

Sven Winkler Von Stiernhielm (MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering) has been awarded The Northumbrian Water Award for Inclusive Innovation for his project ‘Ziwa Vision’, a device aiding thriving and environmentally responsible food production in developing countries.

Ziwa Vision introduces a way to feed farmed fish more sustainably by improving the evaluation of fish behaviour via real-time machine learning analysis. The physical device is attached to enclosure frames widely used by Tilapia farmers globally and alerts staff to stop providing feed at the optimal time with a speaker sound.

Stiernhielm found Ziwa Vision performed with higher evaluation accuracy than manual evaluation, confirming that thousands of tonnes of feed could be saved annually per fish farm. This will help maintain healthy aquatic ecosystems, positively impact local communities dependent on lake water and reduce environmental damage.

Yiming Pang (MA Fashion) and Jialu Hou (MA Design Products) have been awarded The Snowdon Award for Disability for their project ‘Branches’, a multifunctional caring hanger designed for one-armed individuals to enhance their independence in daily tasks such as dressing and grooming.

Inspired by the natural form of tree branches, it integrates practical features including quick shoelace tying, convenient cuff buttoning, one-hand tie tying, and dressing/undressing aids. Made from lightweight and durable eco-friendly materials, Branches is both aesthetically pleasing and ergonomically sound. It promotes equity and inclusivity, setting a standard for future assistive tools by highlighting the importance of diverse user needs and contributing to a shift towards greater empathy and accessibility in product development.

Each year, the Helen Hamlyn Alumni Award is presented to a former employee of the Centre who has gone on to champion Inclusive Design in the wider world.

This year, the Alumni Award went to Helen Fisher.

Helen is an independent design researcher using creative methods to co-design products and services in health. 

After graduating from the Edinburgh College of Art, she joined the Centre in 2014 as an intern and then became a research assistant. She brought her product design skills, her interest in health and accessibility and all round creativity to projects within the Centre’s Age and Ability Research Space.

Since leaving the Centre in 2017, Helen spent 5 years at Lab4Living at Sheffield Hallam University, exploring the role of design in enabling ‘difficult’ conversations around topics such as dementia, end of life and bereavement.

Helen has applied her skills in inclusive research and design in the NHS, academia, consultancy and most recently in setting up her own practice.

Fixperts is a learning programme responding to our changing world by challenging  students to create ingenious solutions for real persons, addressing problems related to  age and ageing, disability, social change and sustainability. To date, Fixpertshas been implemented in 55 universities across 25 countries.

The Helen Hamlyn Fixperts Award, now in its twelfth year, is an acknowledgment of the incredible work from students around the world. This year we received outstanding student submission from Brighton UK, Israel, Ireland, South Africa and, Japan.

The winning project was Typing Aid for Toyomitsu by Rena Suzuki, Ayumi Takagi and Tomohiro Hatanaka, with their Fixpert partner Toyomitsu Karasawa

Toyomitsu has a brainstem disease that has crippled both his legs and his left hand. He works in a job that requires using a computer for several hours a day. He uses his right hand to work the keyboard, however he has difficulty with tasks that require using both hands to press keys simultaneously.

The Fixperts team created a product that allows him to press and hold more than one key simultaneously.