Winners of Bompas & Parr’s Fountain of Hygiene hand sanitiser design competition announced

The winners have been announced for the global hand sanitiser design competition Fountain of Hygiene. Launched by experiential design studio Bompas & Parr in conjunction with London’s Design Museum and the British Red Cross, the initiative aimed to find new and innovative solutions for dispensing hand sanitiser and encourage hygiene as a way to combat the pandemic. Since its launch in late March the competition has seen entries from around the world; a curated shortlist of designs can be viewed on the competition’s dedicated website, and will be displayed in a physical exhibition at the Design Museum when it reopens.

There are eight category winners, listed below:

• Awareness and Communication: Buggy, a mobile app that displays the build-up of germs on your phone using animated bacteria – by Zoe Lester, Beth Thomas, Emma Chih, Erin Giles and Kris Murphy.
• Industrial Design: Steve Jarvis’ The Bubble Party, a sanitising bubble machine.
• Luxury Design: Sally Reynolds’ Step One, a pedal-activated sanitiser dispenser.
• Sustainable Design: Terry Hearnshaw’s Seaweed capsule, a dispensing system that offers hand sanitiser in single-use capsule form.
• Gesture and Ritual: Line Johnsen’s Hygiene Friendly Visits sanitising doorbell.
• Child-directed design: Paint Your Hands Clean, a colour changing hand sanitiser brush by Kate Strudwick, Amos Oyedeji, Alexander Facey and Nicole Stjernswärd.
• Cadet designer (designed by under 18s): Bo Willis’ Handle Sanitiser, a door handle that’s also a hand gel dispenser.
• Hygiene Innovation Beyond the Sanitiser: Centrepeace by Conrad Haddaway, Twomuch Studio and Inga Ziemele, a table centrepiece for mealtimes where diners place their phones on.

The winners were selected by a panel including Design Museum director Tim Marlow and Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist and head of Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Lab.

Bompas & Parr says the competition sought to explore the “aesthetic, functional, social, gestural and experiential possibilities of enhanced hygiene,” and hopes the results will “accelerate the establishment of new behavioural norms which benefit the ongoing health of global society. Ultimately, the aim is to explore how people can safely re-enter the public realm”. Organisations looking to develop any of the prototypes further should contact Bompas & Parr, who will connect them with the designers.