“Design to improve life”: The winners of Index Award 2021 are announcedOn September 30th, an international judging panel of 14 including Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA, Philip Battin, Founder and Head of Seed Studio at Google, Simona Rocchi, Senior Director of Design-for-Sustainability & Innovation at Philips Design and Ravi Naidoo, Founder and Managing Director of Interactive Africa and Design Indaba chose five winners from a list of 46 finalists.
This year, the following five companies are being awarded in each category:
- Body category: OUI is being awarded for its innovative non-hormonal contraceptive. Based on a completely novel approach to birth control, the OUI capsule reinforces the natural mucus barrier that exists in the cervical canal thereby making ovulatory cervical mucus impenetrable for sperm cells. OUI encourages women to take ownership of their bodies by utilizing the female body’s own defenses to aid birth control.
- Home category: Flash Forest, an elegant and well-executed way of applying technology in a meaningful way to heal our shared home. The reforestation company uses aerial mapping software, drone technology, pneumatics, automation, and ecological science to accelerate reforestation worldwide and secure the future of our home and planet. Flash Forest is dedicated to developing a community around their work, including NGOs, governments and corporations in order to successfully reforest.
- Work category: BIOHM BIOHM produces environmentally regenerative and natural insulation grown from mycelium: the root network of mushrooms. The building industry is one of the industries with the largest environmental footprints in the world, with limited recycling and often harmful side effects for workers. Sustainable insulation is drastically needed, both in cool and warm climates to lower operational energy consumption, to reduce our energy consumption. BIOHM is opening the door for a tremendous amount of opportunities for other areas to use mycelium.
- Play & Learning category: Truepic Truepic uses groundbreaking technology to authenticate images and videos as they’re captured to ensure what goes online is real. Truepic addresses a huge global challenge and will help in democratizing technology. The online world can be a misleading place but Truepic is using universal technology to bring clarity to what’s really real out there and what’s not. Truepic offers a compelling solution paving a path towards truth and trust.
- Community category: Algorithmic Justice League is a movement uncovering racial and gender bias in AI systems to shift the wider AI ecosystem towards an accountable, transparent and equitable future. As well as being an awareness movement, Algorithmic Justice League offers a range of practical solutions to tackle AI bias. They offer ways to report AI biases, datasets available for AI research, workshops to help educate people about AI bias and harms, and services to audit company AI systems to see how they stack up in terms of ethics.
