Award Announcement: Introducing the Winners of the 2021 i-PRO Future Design Challenge

The i-PRO Future Design Challenge was successfully conducted in Autumn 2021. One Gold Award and Two Silver Awards were chosen among many entries from all over the world.

The i-PRO Future Design Challenge was a global design competition presented by i-PRO, the leading company for advanced sensing technologies in the fields of intelligent surveillance, public safety, and industrial/medical imaging.

We at btrax joined this competition as a competition host.

In this article, I‘ll introduce the winners and their amazing works, and then I will dive into the risk which we should pay attention to for 2022 by associating with the theme of i-PRO Future Design Challenge this year.

What is the i-PRO Future Design Challenge?

The i-PRO Future Design Challenge was a newly launched design competition created to provide opportunities for up-and-coming problem solvers to win prestigious awards for innovative design excellence.

The theme for 2021 was “Solving crimes in a future society where technology has become too advanced.”

We had 4 judges for this competition;

• Bjoern Eichstaedt – Managing Partner & Co-Owner of Storymaker GmbH, Germany
• Brandon Hill – Founder & CEO of btrax, Inc.
• Casey Lau – Co-host of RISE & Web Summit Tokyo
• Mariko Nishimura – HEART CATCH Inc.

You can view further details on this website.

Who won?

The Gold Award went to “PORTA” by Ms. La Myra Bening from Indonesia. The Silver Awards went to “Glass – A Future Interface” by Mr. Arnav Nigam from India and “QGene” by QGene Solutions, Mr. Vinay Sudhakaran, Mr. Mohd. Saim Nasim Lari, and Mr. Arun Thangaraj from India.

“PORTA” by La Myra Bening from Indonesia

The comforts provided by a smart home can dull our intuition for danger and make us unaware of abnormalities in our surrounding environment. PORTA, which means “gate” in Latin, is a “digital gate” for the smart home.

This innovation automatically terminates the Wi-Fi connection when it detects abnormal activity within the smart home and then uses backup data to operate the devices. PORTA uses voice-based passwords to increase your home security.

Check out this design: https://youtu.be/laZcYpsY8NM

“Glass” – A Future Interface by Arnav Nigam from India

With the increasing complexity of the world around us, it is hard to manage and control our interactions and their repercussions.

Glass works as a control mechanism that provides a seamless digital experience using signals from your brain to connect to the digital world. With these advancements in brain-machine Interface and AI, we might be able to control our parallel (digital) universe.

Check out this design: https://youtu.be/nE_dryVtZKk

“QGene” by QGene Solutions with Vinay Sudhakaran, Mohd. Saim Nasim Lari, and Arun Thangaraj from India

QGene is a polymorphic DNA-based tattoo designed to prevent future digital impersonation attacks.

Once applied to the skin, it extracts the user’s DNA and key behavioral traits to generate a unique digital matrix based on their genome sequence – i.e., the order of their A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s. This digital matrix acts as the ‘Digital Gene’ of your digital avatar on the internet.

Check out this design: https://youtu.be/tHdMiJEfbEM

One reason for the high evaluation given to these three designs was that the concept ideas were visualized and incorporated into each product.

How to get along with technology in the future

The theme for the 2021 competition, “Solving crimes in a future society where technology has become too advanced,” came from the idea that technology is a double-edged sword.

Technology offers two potential outcomes; one is problem-solving, and the other is turning into another problem itself.

As technology evolves, its inherent flaws become more fragmented and sophisticated. What you may have found useful at first will gradually reveal some drawbacks as well.

The three winning designs were created by focusing on the technology that is currently dominating the industry today and the issues that may arise from it.

Smart homes, the metaverse, digital twins, and personal genomes are all areas that are attracting attention and are expected to grow in the future.

It is certainly very difficult to predict the future and to prepare for the changes in that future.

However, having the foresight to prepare for the potential risks that we suspect will be produced by these changes will greatly help us to solve these challenges of the future.

For more information on the judges’ evaluations of these innovative designs, please take a look at the official announcement of the winners here.