Golden A' Design Award Winner 2024
Saes's Project Nebula Miniaturized Map Technology Device emerges from contemporary conceptual design practice as a meditation upon the intersection of advanced technological capability and intimate human scale, presenting an object that suggests profound functional innovation while maintaining aesthetic harmony with domestic environments. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of material semiotics, deploying a carefully calibrated palette of matte charcoal surfaces that absorb light alongside transparent chambers that reveal interior complexity, creating visual dialogue between opacity and transparency, concealment and revelation. The spiral-ribbed base component, with its rhythmic concentric grooves catching raking light, establishes formal connection to natural phenomena—seashell growth patterns, planetary rings, sedimentary striations—while simultaneously evoking precision manufacturing and computational generation. Technical achievement manifests through the levitation presentation strategy, which removes the device from mundane contact with surfaces and positions it within a liminal space of pure potentiality, suggesting both the object's lightness and its transcendence of ordinary physical constraints. The hexagonal interior lattice visible through the transparent midsection invokes both biological efficiency—honeycomb structures representing nature's optimized space-filling solution—and human technological advancement in materials science and miniaturization. Compositional choices reveal deliberate calibration: the diagonal orientation generates dynamic energy while organic accessories establish grounding domestic context, negotiating between futuristic aspiration and present-moment accessibility. The warm amber tones glimpsed within the transparent chamber provide chromatic relief against the dominant cool neutrals, suggesting interior warmth, contained energy, or precious material carefully housed within protective architecture. One might consider how this work invites contemplation of humanity's ongoing project to compress vast capabilities into increasingly intimate scales, to make the powerful portable, the complex comprehensible through elegant formal resolution.
Nebula Project is a device that incorporates a miniaturized Modified Atmosphere Packaging MAP technology system for food preservation. It represents Saes's first Industrial Design project, aimed at implementing design driven innovation methodologies within the company and exploring their applicability in laboratory workflows. It is estimated that approximately 930 million tons of food were wasted in 2019, with around 60% of it being discarded by consumers at home. Nebula aims to address these challenges by leveraging cutting edge technology to empower individuals to reduce food waste.