Home ANTHILL TV Australian’s buoyancy bazooka wins international Dyson design contest

Australian’s buoyancy bazooka wins international Dyson design contest

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We love our Beer O’Clock Fridays. We love our BOF videos. We go catatonic with joy when a BOF-worthy video suddenly becomes Newsworthy.

Exhibit A: A video of the finalists for the international 2010 James Dyson Awards, an annual competition aimed at coaxing crazy-like-a-fox ideas from the next generation of design engineers.

We’ve all heard of James Dyson, yes? He’s the knighted Brit who invented expensive vacuum cleaners that harness cyclonic separation — basically an extraordinary form of suckage. Seriously, the man is brilliant. Not satisfied with the cyclonic-ness of his vacuums, he introduced a cleaner that rolls around on a basketball. Most recently, he blew our minds with room fan that generates air without blades.

But back to our video, which presents the 15 finalists for 2010. We stumbled across it last week, and noticed the winner would be announced Tuesday. Huzzah, a news peg! And announce they did, and the winner was (wait for it) Australian.

Yep. Longreach — a portable water-rescue device that can fire an expandable buoyancy device up to 150 metres — is the brainstorm of SketchPAD Design, a creative consultancy based in the Sydney suburb of Randwick.

Hold us up. We’re having an attack of the vapors.

According to the Dyson and SketchPAD websites, Longreach (let’s just call it a buoyancy bazooka) is specifically the creation of Samuel Adeloju. The Dyson award earned him 10,000 pounds ($16,300) and another 10,000 pounds for the engineering department of his alma mater, the University of New South Wales. The Dyson site says the device is in the prototyping and testing phase, and due to start field trials soon with Surf Life Saving NSW.

Though Adeloju and Longreach are the stars of this video, take time to view some of the other entries, like the Minotaur fire nozzle system from New Zealand and hybrid electric bicycle from the United States. Inspirational stuff.

2010 James Dyson Award finalists

The Longreach buoyancy bazooka