'Balisa' and 'Orwell', awarded at the Isola Design Awards

The Final Degree Projects Balisa and Orwell have won the Isola Design Awards, an initiative born within the framework of Milan Design Week to give a voice to emerging designers.

Balisa, by Bachelor in Design student Ariadna Sala and tutored by Danae Esparza, is a therapeutic tool that accompanies and supports the healing process of adult survivors of child sexual abuse. The project consists of a series of pieces that facilitate communication between the psychologist and the victim through the representation in volume of the emotions experienced during the healing process.

Each emotion is linked to a piece and these are stacked and form a totem that the person takes home in order to follow their emotional management independently and delimit a safety zone. Unlike other issues related to psychological therapy, there are currently no tools available to help manage the trauma caused by child sexual abuse. For this reason, the student has counted on the collaboration of survivors and psychologists specialised in the field during the research and experimentation process and also in the design of this tool.

This project raises a reflection on the role of design in providing resources for the improvement of this problem and, at the same time, contributes to the visibility and communication of this taboo subject for society, necessary actions for its eradication.
 

Orwell, by the Industrial Design Engineering student Sergi Garcia (Usolamente) and tutored by Oscar Tomico, Saúl Baeza and Lluis Sallés, is a system of products that offers privacy of identity in social networks. The products interact easily, the first being physical and portable and the second digital. It uses an established online platform as a virtual space to work (Instagram). At the same time, it raises users' awareness of the problems associated with the lack of decision-making power when their image appears in an online publication or when they post images of other people, with or without their knowledge.

One part of the project is the symbol or logo called Orwell, which is placed on clothing as a print. The second part is Orwell_Noise, a digital tool created with Facebook's Spark AR that recognises the symbol when it appears on camera and hides the wearer's face with a virtual mask. With this project, people will be able to communicate their desire not to appear in other people's online posts through the clothes they wear, a way to bring privacy to the online sphere.

Balisa and Orwell were two of the 10 Elisava student projects nominated for these awards, which have been publicly voted on over the last few weeks.