Corona Award given to design students from Universidad Nacional de Colombia

The eighth semester Industrial design students Jorge Iván Farinango, Andrés Suárez y Anderson Arévalo were the winners of the contest which is performed every year by the Corona Organization S.A. This organization gives prizes and socializes the best projects made by students for social houses, furniture and research studies in engineering systems applied to popular habitat in Colombia.

This prize is promoted through public announcements to support investigations and projects aimed at improving the quality of life of the poorest in the country. For this version, the topic for the Industrial design category was "furniture for areas and bedrooms in social housing."

The awarded project APAY was a furniture design for social housing, which was part of an existing project practice for level 1, 2, 3 social houses. "It was the lack of space in these houses, what gave us the idea for this innovative proposal," said Anderson Arévalo, one of the producers of this project.

He also said that "in the considerations for this design, it was necessary to include a big environmental awareness, a technical influence, but above all, it had to be environmental and social, since they were the two most important aspects for the project."

APAY means furniture and transportation, two aspects that were essential for the project, as well as the possibility of making a module or some pieces to put together depending on the people"s needs. For this reason, the group of students visited social houses in Suba"s surroundings and there, according to Andrés Suarez "we realized that the people"s need was to keep their old furniture, but at the same time they wanted new, functional and decent furniture."

As a result, explained Arévalo "at first, we listed all the common activities these people performed in a reduced space that in the majority of the cases was not bigger than 32 built square meters. The idea was mixing activities such as eating, sleeping and doing homework in the same space and using the same furniture."

"As students from Universidad Nacional de Colombia we have a big responsibility. That is why the project is not just a piece of furniture, it is consider a service; for that reason, we decided to create a model which covered all the specifications and, above all, designed for everyone," Said Arévalo.

This project is not only a habitable cubicle it also tries to make these spaces the most habitable to live in, it tries to take advantage of all empty spaces and create the possibility to grow, to raise a family and to establish a household in them.

With this proposal, the students from Universidad Nacional de Colombia are not only giving these people the possibility to enjoy innovative furniture, but also the possibility to learn, since " we wanted the people who were part of the project to participate in the creation, modification and the growth of the furniture project," Said Arévalo.

The idea is not to stop the project here, but make it applicable and not to send it to a museum. For a designer, the objective is that a creation reaches all people he/she was thinking about when developing the idea and that it carries out it function, said Suárez.