As part of our series on design in 2024, Studio Arc director Lyndsey Bowditch offers her view on what exhibition design might look like next year.

Discussed at this year’s Design Indaba in Cape Town, South Africa, Thomy is a colourful insulin-injecting kit inspired by Souza’s six-year-old nephew Thomás, who was recently diagnosed with type one diabetes. The designer worked with doctors, patients and other designers on the prototype, and conducted research into type one diabetes.

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Souza worked with doctors to develop the pattern for the tattoo, which can now go on to be applied as a template to various designs. She hopes to commission various illustrators in the future to create designs based on this strict pattern.

It is with great sadness that we heard about the passing of the hugely influential British designer, Sir Kenneth Grange.

As part of our series on design in 2024, WeWantMore creative director Ruud Belmans offers his view on what retail and experience design might look like next year.

Having to manually inject insulin into your body is part of the treatment for the disease, and what’s more, the JDRF estimates that a person with type one diabetes will have around 65,000 injections in their lifetime.

Renata Souza, a 24-year-old product design graduate from Parsons School of Design in New York, has come up with a prototype for a new, “fun and intuitive” insulin pen for children, which aims to reduce the stigma, embarrassment and pain that can result from having to inject several times a day.

Thomy is currently a prototype project, and Souza is seeking a company to partner with to manufacture and sell the product globally. For more information, head to the Thomy site.

Madeleine Prior is the English Content Specialist for 3Dnatives, the leading international online magazine on 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing. As part of the team, Madeleine is in charge of defining the content 3Dnatives covers for its english-speaking audience, bringing the latest news about the additive manufacturing sector and its implications to readers.

In December 2023, it was announced that Design Week was closing its doors. However – good news! We’re reopening by the end of summer 2024!

The Thomy kit, which Souza has preliminarily priced at around $32 (£23), aims to improve the current insulin pen market, currently priced between $25-30 (£18-22), which Souza says is drab, cold and clinical and marketed entirely at adults, despite the high number of children with the condition.

For those living with type one diabetes, injecting yourself is a daily occurrence. The chronic disease, which is caused when a person cannot produce their own insulin, can be a life-altering condition, with patients having to inject themselves several times a day, check their blood glucose levels regularly and make big changes to their diets, exercise regime and general lifestyle.

Discussed at this year’s Design Indaba, product designer Renata Souza has created a prototype colourful insulin pen and illustrated tattoo kit, which aims to teach children with type one diabetes how to inject themselves and reduce the stigma of the disease.

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We’re excited to announce the new Design Week editorial team ahead of the platform’s relaunch this autumn. Rob Alderson joins as Editor, with Clare Dowdy as Senior Writer.

But how can a young child be sure they have always remembered where their last injection point was? Souza’s kit comes with a series of rub-on, temporary, “non-toxic” tattoos, which show rotating needle injection points, incorporated into different graphic designs such as a solar system. The tattoo is black, with just the injection points in colour.

Very good on you, but sadly Type 1 (which cannot in anyway be ‘cured’ by diets) and is the whole focus of this article, is very, very different to your Type 2. For Type 1 diabetics (not to be confused with Type 2) the truth is absolutely not “we can get off the drugs and help myself by trying natural methods”. Your body would start eating your fat reserves, making you unwell, vomiting, short of breath etc; you would then go into a coma and die. Think the kids mentioned in this article and myself will keep on taking the drugs, thanks.

As well as making injecting a less painful task, the kit looks to teach kids the more difficult stuff about multiple injections and help them be “independent”, Souza tells Design Week.

It consists of a chunky, colourful insulin pen, with a big handle that aims to be better-suited to children’s hands and easier for them to hold, a shorter needle to make it easier to reach and thermochromatic plastic at the top that changes colour to indicate when someone is finished administering insulin and can release the needle. The changing colour also aims to add a bit of excitement, distraction and fun to the whole process.

Juliette Combe is an application engineer at Formlabs, conducting research on 3D printing workflows for engineering and manufacturing. Her scope of work includes collaborations with customers, in-house testing, and knowledge transfer through the creation of technical content and training. Previously, she worked in the Open Innovation group at GE Power. She has a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from ETH Zurich and carried out research on nano-3D printing at UC Berkeley.

One crucial part of self-injecting, is the need to constantly change injection points on the body – patients need to change the point in their skin at which they inject to avoid a build-up of fat under the skin in one area, known as lipodystrophy. Patients are advised to inject at different points across certain, fattier areas in the body, such as the arm, abdomen and thigh.

I was diagnosed with type 2 Diabetes and put on Metformin on June 26th, 2017. I started the ADA diet and followed it 100% for a few weeks and could not get my blood sugar to go below 140. Finally i began to panic and called my doctor, he told me to get used to it. He said I would be on metformin my whole life and eventually insulin. At that point i knew something wasn’t right and began to do a lot of research. Then I found Lisa’s diabetes story (google ” How I freed myself from diabetes ” ) I read that article from end to end because everything the writer was saying made absolute sense. I started the diet that day and the next week my blood sugar was down to 100 and now i have a fasting blood sugar between Mid 70’s and the 80’s. My doctor took me off the metformin after just three week of being on this lifestyle change. I have lost over 16 pounds and 3+ inches around my waist in a month. The truth is we can get off the drugs and help myself by trying natural methods

Design Indaba took place 21-23 February 2018 at the Artscape in Cape Town, South Africa. For more information on the festival and this year’s speakers, head here, and look out for Design Week’s coverage on the event over the next two weeks.

But that’s diet ‘cure’ is for a lucky few who have Type 2 and nothing whatsoever to do with Type 1 clearly referred to throughout (in fact the whole subject of) this article. Type 1 has never & cannot be cured by diet

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“Not only is this something fun so will make them want to inject themselves, but it will teach them to manage their condition and be independent from a young age,” says Souza. “The black and colour pattern combination is simple, straightforward and intuitive. It could also have psychological benefits and make them happy. Many kids might be ashamed of their conditions and not want their friends to know – this could change that.”

“The insulin pump, which improves on the insulin pen, is a good example of great progression in mechanisms, but on the other hand, it’s a lot more expensive than a pen,” she adds.

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As part of our series on design in 2024, Mia Blume – founder of Design Dept. and Designing with AI – tells us that next year will be a “paradigm

The condition is common in children. According to charity JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), around 29,000 children in the UK live with type one diabetes, and the number of five-year-olds with the disease goes up by 5% every year.

During our pause, we’re re-publishing the occasional article from deep in our archives. This March 1990 column by our founder, Jeremy Myerson, looks at car design trends.

As we head back into our archives, here’s a gem from March 1990. Jane Lewis looks at the creative ways design firms promoted their services through mail-outs.

“There have been great developments in science and mechanisms but humanising products is really lacking in the medical field,” she says. “The existing pens are robotics and un-natural. If people like the way something looks and work, and they can identify with it, research has shown this increases patient compliance and so aids condition management or recovery.”

Just before injecting into a point, a child or their parent can rub the coloured dye spot off with an alcohol wipe, and travel clockwise when a new injection is needed. This shows exactly where has been injected previously, and has the added benefit of cleaning the area before an injection, which is also recommended.

We are excited to welcome Formlabs, a leading company offering professional 3D printers of choice for engineers, designers, manufacturers and decision makers around the world. The Massachusetts-based manufacturer has developed a wide range of SLA machines as well as an SLS solution, the Fuse 1. It also offers its own suite of high-performance materials and software. Watch the replay below!

Injection molding is a manufacturing process that allows for the design of large volumes of parts. The majority of plastic components that exist today are made using this technique. However, the production of a mold – most often metal – is expensive and time-consuming. This is where 3D printing comes in: instead of designing a metal mold, it can be printed in 3D, either via FDM, laser sintering or stereolithography. The costs are reduced as well as the delays, additionally using 3D printing it could be possible to create a more complex mold with for example internal cooling channels.

On September 23rd at 4PM CEST (10AM EDT), join Formlabs Applications Engineer, Juliette Combe and 3Dnatives as we discuss how 3D printing enables in-demand mold fabrication to generate hundreds of parts, from idea to production, in a matter of days. The webinar will cover topics related to plastic injection molding and additive manufacturing. Including, but not limited to, what materials are compatible, what is the life span of a 3D printed mold, what is the cost difference between a metal mold and a printed mold, etc. These will then be illustrated through concrete application cases, while also showing the different steps involved in creating a 3D printed mold. It will be the perfect opportunity to get started with 3D printing of plastic molds for short-run production and thus accelerate your product development, boost your innovation and reduce your costs.

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