Child Vision Wins: Design of the Year 2013

Child ViSion Glasses has won the inaugural Visitor Vote for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2013. Child ViSion Glasses is a revolutionary fluid-filled lens that allows children to self-adjust their glasses. This is the first time the public has been invited to vote for their Design of the Year.
Designed for children aged 12-18, Child ViSion uses self-adjustable fluid lenses that allow children without access to an optician to change their prescription as their eyesight changes and evolves. Child ViSion won with 486 votes and beat other nominations including The Shard, London 2012
Olympic Cauldron and GOV.UK, to be named the publics favourite.
Since June visitors have been voting for their favourite designs from the 99 nominations in a pop-up polling station in the exhibition. The official Design
of the Year Winner 2013 was awarded to GOV.UK at an awards reception held in April. GOV.UK is designed by the Government Digital Service and is
a revolutionary website combining all of the UK’s government websites under one single domain.
Professor Josh Silver, designer of the Child ViSion Glasses comments ‘We are delighted to have won the Visitor Vote. There are two aspects to
eyewear, firstly it has to function properly and give you clear vision, but equally important, it also has to look good! It’s great that the public have
taken this design to their hearts and voted us their design of the year.’ Silver continues ‘The Centre for Vision in the Developing World has had some
extremely talented engineers and designers working on our Child ViSion Glasses, and our challenge now is to get these glasses to the tens of
millions of children whose education is hampered by their inability to see a blackboard in class clearly – a problem our self-refraction glasses will solve.’
The 3D Printed Exoskeleton ‘Magic Arms’, a device that helps children with muscloskeletal disabilities and a non-stick ketchup bottle came in second
and third respectively in the vote.
Child ViSion and all of the 99 nominations are on display at the Design Museum until Sunday 7 July.
Visitor Vote Winners:
1. CHILD VISION GLASSES – Designed by The Centre for Vision in the Developing World and Goodwin Hartshorn Self-adjustable glasses that allow the wearer to tweak the lenses until they can see clearly. Child Vision glasses have been developed specifically for use by young adults aged from 12-18.
2. 3D PRINTED EXOSKELETON ‘MAGIC ARMS’ – Designed by Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware The duPont Hospital for Children treats children suffering with musculoskeletal disabilities and as part of their research, duPont’s Department of Orthopedics developed WREX–the Wilmington Robotic The Designs of the Year Visitor Vote Exoskeleton. It gives teenagers with muscle weakness better movement and the ability to lift objects but the exoskeleton was too heavy to use on a smaller child. They figured out that by 3D printing a wearable plastic jacket it would offer the same aid as WREX but in a mobile form that a child weighing only 25 pounds could wear and would allow them to reprint jackets at a cheaper cost as the child grows.

3. LIQUIGLIDE KETCHUP BOTTLE – Designed by Dave Smith/Varanasi Research Group MIT
LiquiGlide is a ‘super-slippery’, non-toxic, edible but tasteless substance that can be applied to the inside of a bottle, preventing the condiments from sticking to the neck and the bottom where they can’t be reached.