CCS Students ‘Create the Change,’ Winning Honors at 2020 Creative Conscience Awards

Three CCS students have won the top three honors at the 2020 Creative Conscience Awards. Teresa Evan (‘20, Product Design) won the Gold Award in the Product and Structural Design Category for her design, “Pod”. Product Design Junior Daniel Heilbron won a Silver Award in the Architecture, Engineering and Interiors Category for “Stackable Affordable Housing”. And the Bronze Award went to Leon Rinne (’20, MFA Transportation Design) for “Pop-up SR Fleet” in the Product and Structural Design Category. Creative Conscience also awarded three commendations for designs by CCS alumni to Jacqueline Franciosi (’20, Interior Design) and Chunxiao Lu (’20 MFA Interaction Design) and Transportation Design Senior Chanwoo Park.

Creative Conscience promotes and encourages human-centered design that addresses persistent social problems and inspires people to create change through design in their communities. The organization offers education, talks, workshops and events, and sponsors the annual Creative Conscience Awards for inspiring designs by students and recent graduates.

Teresa Evan’s “Pod” is a phototherapy incubator for neonatal care units. Every year, three in five newborns are born with jaundice because of high levels of bilirubin in their blood. The required phototherapy can be traumatic for newborns who are taken from their mothers during treatment. Evan’s “Pod” mimics the mother’s cradling by eliminating the traditional flat service of phototherapy units and replaces it with a soothing hammock-like mesh. The design is intuitive for nurses to use, decreases light loss during the treatment and is easy to clean between uses.

“Stackable Affordable Housing,” designed by Daniel Heilbron, aims to address the shortage of low-income housing and improve the quality of housing for families in extreme poverty by developing sustainable communities with permanent, modular and self-sufficient residences. Through strategically-arranged compact, stackable, and sustainable housing units, Heilbron’s design transforms marginalized neighborhoods into safe and communal environments.

From what has become routine “snowpocalypse” events in Northern climates to deadly hurricanes in the South, climate change has produced extreme and destructive natural disasters across the globe. And the problem will only worsen. Leon Rinne’s MFA thesis project, “Pop-up SR Fleet,” offers a two-part instant rescue and medical service. A system of instantly inflatable and deployable autonomous search-and-rescue drones, the fleet locates and evacuates residents in high-density urban areas from extreme weather events, particularly flooding.