swiss design association

The Swiss Design Association congratulates Fabien Roy, winner of the 2021 James Dyson Award in Switzerland, and runners-up Maxwell Ashford and Julia Bächi.

Fabien Roy, a student at the Design University ECAL in Lausanne, is the national winner of the James Dyson Award 2021 in Switzerland with Robust Nest.

Developed by Fabien Roy, a student at the Design University ECAL in Lausanne, in collaboration with the EssentialTech Center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL, Robust Nest is an incubator for newborns in sub-Saharan Africa. Using a heat-storing battery, it can withstand frequent power outages and is robust enough to allow patients to be transported in remote areas by road vehicles.

Jury spokesman Dominic Sturm, President of the Swiss Design Association, on the winning project: "Product designer Fabien Roy addresses a relevant topic with his Robust Nest project, which was created as a master's thesis at the ECAL/University of art and design Lausanne. The project, realised as a cooperation between ECAL and the Essential Tech Center EPFL, is convincing both on a technical and on a design-specific level. The jury appreciated how comprehensively the designer considered the needs of the target group and integrated them into the design."

The six-member jury selected the master's thesis RUEI-01 by Maxwell Ashford, also created at the ECAL Design University in Lausanne, and the S'WERVE project by Julia Bächi, created as a bachelor's thesis at the Institute of Industrial Design at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), as the second-placed projects for the James Dyson Award 2021 in Switzerland.

In a long-standing partnership with Dyson, the Swiss Design Association supports the James Dyson Award. In addition to the prize money of CHF 2300, the winners of the national edition will receive a 3-year junior membership at SDA.