Julie Frost’s ‘Mvura’ Water Purifier Wins Design Award:
The Mvura (African Shona for ‘water’) was one of the student exhibits at ChangeX, which we noted earlier this year. It has been granted Bronze Prize in the student category of the 2006 Australian Design Awards. Julie Frost identified that “1.2 billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water and 6, 000 children die every day from diseases that can be prevented by improved water and sanitation.” Her answer to this dilemma was to create a household water purifier that use pasteurization using direct solar heat to treat water. 15 litres of water is added to the drum, this can then be carried in traditional manner, on one’s head. Back at the village the drum opens out into a wide black disk, so water can be heated, in about two hours, to 65ºC. At this temperature harmful bacteria are said to be neutralised, and a soybean wax is used to indicated that the correct temp has been attained. Made from polyethylene, one of the more benign plastics, the drum is designed to be field maintainable. Cameron ’Design Like You Give Damn’ Sinclair and Victor ‘Design for the Real World’Papanek, would, I’m sure, be very proud of Julie’s endeavours. We need more like her. Other pics after the fold, and also at ::Australian Design Awards and ::University of NSW.
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brilliant…