The iF awards are one of the most renowned design awards in the world. For over fifty years they’ve been rewarding outstanding designers with a place in the iF exhibition and the right to display the much sought after iF logo on their products.
In 2014 iF selected 1,626 designs worthy of their recognition, ranging from washing machines to watches and coffee makers to condoms. Within this vast collection of different products, there are a handful of wonderful mobility products that have been given iF awards this year. As we continue our never ending quest to bring you every innovative and stylish mobility aid ever designed, there are a few designs that the iFs have tipped up for us.
First of all there’s the Quickie Helium, a wheelchair we’ve mentioned on numerous occasions in the past. There’s little more praise to give this chair that we haven’t already said. It’s lightweight, stylish and versatile. One of the very best rigid manual chairs on the market. They also have a special “What’s Your Style?” offer with free extras until the end of May.
The Voyager Evo was the only other wheelchair to make the iF grade in 2014. Designed and produced by Ottobock, each one of these rigid-frame wheelchairs is built in custom production for every single user. The user can choose what combination of materials, from aluminum, carbon fiber, titanium and magnesium, they want to use to create the right model for their specific needs. You can pick to maximise weight, rigidity and style or go for anything in between. Ottobock don’t appear to have released the Voyager Evo in the UK yet but they do sell their other models here, so hopefully it’s just a matter of time.
Aside from wheelchairs, there were some other interesting mobility products included in the awards exhibition this year. This very contemporary beactive+e walker is something of a standout. Generally speaking, finding stylish wheelchairs can be tricky but finding stylish walkers and rollators is a truly herculean task, so it’s good to see something with a trendier image. It’s very sleek looking and ergonomic too.
Better yet, this walker has an inbuilt electric drive so that you don’t have to exert energy pushing it and can use it purely for stability. It makes it easier to go up hill and it also means that the walker can carry shopping for you almost effortlessly. It doesn’t seem to be in production yet so we’ll keep an eye on this.
Much like the beactive-e walker, this ARTLIFT is something that could help to fill a gaping void in mobility. It’s all to0 rare that you come across any assistive bathroom products which don’t look like they’ve come from a 1950s doctor’s surgery. Even when you do, they’re normally more likely to be shower seats rather than something for bathtubs, but this bath looks fab. With an elegant glass door and a comfortable seat which can be mechanically raised and lowered, this would be an improvement on the types of bath chair you normally see.
A bit of an issue is that the bath door problem still remains, meaning you have to wait for the bath to fill up around you – has anyone found a way to solve that yet? This is an Austrian design so UK fans may have to wait for something similar to arrive.
Some assistive designs awarded by iF aren’t mobility based but help with other forms of impairment. These attractive Moxi Kiss hearing aids were designed to reduce the barriers preventing people from wanting to get instruments to help with their hearing loss. The biggest of these barriers seems to be how most hearing aids look, so they’ve designed something sleek and discrete.
It’s a tiny little gadget so it’s almost unnoticeable but it looks good too, with a curved surface and no broken lines. On top of that they are comfortable and easy to use with the designers saying that “you wear it in the morning, you forget it”. Unitron, the designers behind Moxi Kiss, are based in Canada but the devices are widely available in the UK and USA. Sounds like a good new hearing aid!
The 2014 iF Awards have highlighted a handful of excellent new designs in the world of disability aids. In the past the awards have helped to boost the profile of some of the best mobility aids out there so this could just be the beginning for the designs recognised in 2014. Let’s hope they go from strength to strength and we see more like this next year!