Life-Saving Design

Awards gave its People's Choice prize to a Danish designed device for disposing of used needles.

"When I was nine, I was rescued," says industrial designer Hân Pham. She's not speaking metaphorically. Fleeing the communist Vietnamese regime in the 1980s, Pham, her older brother, and her father—a political dissident—were plucked from the China sea by West German humanitarians after spending 36 hours crammed with 100 others in a fishing barge the size of a raft. They were taken to a U.N. refugee camp in Singapore, where a dirty vaccination needle caused a weeks-long battle with bacterial infection, which left her permanently scarred. "The terrible irony," she points out, "is the thing that was supposed to cure me made me worse."

Antivirus, the simple design she came up with as a result of her childhood ordeal, just scooped the People's Choice prize at the prestigious Index: Awards, touted by organizers as the world's largest design prize. Pham, who now runs her own design firm in Aarhus, Denmark—the country she emigrated to shortly after her Singaporean trauma—designed the concept as part of a graduate school project at Designskolen Kolding in 2005.