Life Is Weird Now
Just look at the advertisements that pop up in your social media feeds whenever you want a reminder of how different 2020 is from every other year. From sweatpants to face masks...life is definitely not ordinary. We checked out some of the ways product designers are making it easier to stay safe during the pandemic. Here's what we found.
Seis-foot Cooler
Dos Equis created a six-foot long cooler to help folks remember to socially distance when having a few brews together. The company made the coolers for a summer promotion and they went quickly. But Travel + Leisure came up with a way for everyone to have their own social-distance beer coolers, and you may want to write this down because it’s pretty complicated: “You can always stack a few coolers side-by-side.” We even did the math for you. Five foam coolers from HEB ($7.69 each) come out to roughly six feet.
Wearable Distance Keeper
At Createscape, we place social-distance decals on the floors throughout the facility to help members stay safe while in the office. If you sometimes forget to keep your distance while out and about, or you're concerned about others keeping theirs, a design student from the Netherlands has a unique solution. Anna Dienemann created a product she calls Bounding Spaces. “It’s a collection of size compressible accessories… that create inaccessible space around you and to protect you.” They come in a few different designs. Some are shaped like Frisbee, and another is more like a boomerang. They also fold and collapse when the crowds are more sparse. Sure, you'll look pretty silly in these wearables, but they’re not as silly-looking as the rattan cage a Belgian design firm came up with for the same purpose.
Time To Go
A supermarket in Ireland released an app that uses real-time customer data to inform customers when stores are crowded and when aisles are empty. It’s a great tool for anyone who wants to reduce their exposure to other people. While HEB and other local markets here in Austin don’t seem to have that sort of app, you can get store traffic data from Google maps. Just search for your desired location and on the left side of the screen, you can see a traffic bar graph. So on Tuesday at 4:20 in the afternoon, HEB on 7th St. is “a little busy.” But Wednesdays at 7am? Not so much.
Masks a Million
It’s pretty amazing how mainstream face masks have become. Unless you work in hospital, you’ve likely never even saw an ad online for a face mask before 2020, right? These days, it’s difficult to go a single day without seeing half a dozen such ads: from masks with cool designs to masks with political messages and, my favorite, masks that promise to stay on my face without causing my ears to ache or my glasses to fog up. Well, it took about eight months, but I finally found a company that designs face masks for people with tiny pinheads — like mine. Baggu’s funky face mask has a flap has adjustable ear loops, which prevents venting and leaks. There's also a snug nose flap that prevents the front of the mask from riding too far up my face and block my vision. But, IMO, here's the main selling point: the top of the mask rests low enough on my face that I don’t need an eyeglass defogger.