{"id":162608,"date":"2025-09-23T00:59:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T00:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/162608\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T00:59:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T00:59:13","slug":"industrial-designer-wins-2025-ig-nobel-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/162608\/","title":{"rendered":"Industrial Designer Wins 2025 Ig Nobel Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This month Boston University hosted the 35th annual Ig Nobel Prizes<\/a>, which highlight scientific research done on decidedly unserious subjects. There is no design category, but this year we got something close: An Engineering Design Prize, awarded to Indian industrial designer Vikash Kumar and student researcher Sarthak Mittal.<\/p>\n

The prize-winning project is essentially about how shoe racks stink.<\/p>\n

Image: BBiDDac<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a> <\/p>\n

Kumar is an assistant professor of design at Shiv Nadar University. While traveling and staying in youth hostels Mittal, a student, observed that guests often left their shoes outside of shared hostel rooms\u2014as a courtesy, as most people’s shoes smell bad. Mittal and Kumar then collaborated on the research paper “Smelly Shoes \u2014 An Opportunity for Shoe Rack Re-Design<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

“This paper is focused on understanding the good experience part of any design, and presents a pilot study conducted to understand how foul smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack.”\u2026Limited research has been reported on understanding how the foul smelling shoes affects the overall experience of using a shoe rack.”\u2026This paper posits that\u2026foul smell affects the users’ experience of using shoe-racks, and re – ports a pilot study conducted to understand the severity of the problem.”<\/p>\n

Mittal is not an ID student, and this wasn’t an ID project, just a research paper; so there’s no actual prototyping or mock-ups to show. Instead, the paper concludes that shoe racks should be designed with a built-in deodorizing feature, like bacteria-killing UV lighting. Yet they found nothing like this exists on the market. So, entrepreneurial designers among you, here’s your next Kickstarter idea. <\/p>\n

Just add UV<\/p>\n


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