This month Boston University hosted the 35th annual Ig Nobel Prizes, 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.
The prize-winning project is essentially about how shoe racks stink.
Image: 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—as a courtesy, as most people’s shoes smell bad. Mittal and Kumar then collaborated on the research paper “Smelly Shoes — An Opportunity for Shoe Rack Re-Design.”
“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.”…Limited research has been reported on understanding how the foul smelling shoes affects the overall experience of using a shoe rack.”…This paper posits that…foul smell affects the users’ experience of using shoe-racks, and re – ports a pilot study conducted to understand the severity of the problem.”
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.
Just add UV