This week on Dezeen, blinkers to help office workers focus and personal urinals for vulnerable refugee women were just a couple of solutions proposed by designers for global issues.
Panasonic unveiled a prototype device called Wear Space for distracted office workers to wear in order to create a bubble of quiet space in a noisy open plan office.
A collaboration between the tech company's design studio Future Life Factory and Japanese fashion designer Kunihiko Morinaga, the blinkers restrict the wearer's field of vision to 60 percent, and muffles their hearing with noise cancelling headphones.
Night Loo is a safe portable toilet for women in refugee camps
American designer Anna Meddaugh devised a portable toilet for women in refugee camps to use at night, rather than run the risk of sexual assault when using communal latrines after dark. The reusable Night Loo folds open at the top like a takeaway box for the user to relieve themselves into, before pouring in a sachet of super-absorbent polymer that soaks up the liquid and eliminates odours.
Five geoengineering solutions proposed to fight climate change
After last week's dispiriting news about impending climate crisis, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs asked whether humans have the ingenuity to design our way out of the anthropocene era. "Humans are clever. They can solve problems. There is hope," he was told by an optimistic Thomas Heatherwick.
Geoengineering, where humans intervene on a mass scale in the plane...