MDes Students and Alumni Win Design Awards at Core77 and SF Design Week Competitions

Susanne Pierce Maddux’s Berkeley MDes project “Aer” has been recognized as an award winner in the 2023 CORE 77 Design Awards’ sustainability category.  

Aer is a material-driven design concept for a novel consumer home air filter that uses compostable bioplastic materials and an innovative design to create an affordable, accessible, and sustainable solution to clean the air in your home.

Unlike traditional home air filters, Aer’s cosmetic housing is composed of the filters themselves; charcoal bioplastic and charcoal-based fabric and paper eliminating the need for traditional exterior housing such as plastic or metal from the consumer ecosystem as well as the dependence on mixed material filters that end up in a landfill.

Team Table Safari—Yanyi Mai, Shikha Shah, Siming Jin, Shirley Zhang, and Ashwan Kadam—was recognized in the SF Design Week Awards in the student work category. Their project, developed during the Spring ‘23 MDes Technology Design Foundation class, introduces a physical-digital game to strengthen children’s spatial visualization skills. By using game-based learning, Table Safari aims to enhance spatial visualization abilities at a young age, improving retention rates in STEAM fields.

Congratulations to Team Table Safari for their recognition at SF Design Week, and to Susanne Pierce Maddux for hers in the Core77 Design Awards!