Gold Idea and Conceptual Design · 2024
Project Nebula Miniaturized Map Technology Device
by Filippo Batavia and Ginevra Della Porta
- A' Design Award 2024 Gold Winner in Idea and Conceptual Design
- Awarded April 15, 2024
- CLIENT: Saes
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 342,676
- Verification code 3C35EA358D · Verify this award
About Project Nebula Miniaturized Map Technology Device
Nebula Project is a device that incorporates a miniaturized Modified Atmosphere Packaging MAP technology system for food preservation. It represents Saes's first Industrial Design project, aimed at implementing design driven innovation methodologies within the company and exploring their applicability in laboratory workflows. It is estimated that approximately 930 million tons of food were wasted in 2019, with around 60% of it being discarded by consumers at home. Nebula aims to address these challenges by leveraging cutting edge technology to empower individuals to reduce food waste.
Saes's Project Nebula Miniaturized Map Technology Device emerges from contemporary conceptual design practice as a meditation upon the intersection of advanced technological capability and intimate human scale, presenting an object that suggests profound functional innovation while maintaining aesthetic harmony with domestic environments. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of material semiotics, deploying a carefully calibrated palette of matte charcoal surfaces that absorb light alongside transparent chambers that reveal interior complexity, creating visual dialogue between opacity and transparency, concealment and revelation. The spiral-ribbed base component, with its rhythmic concentric grooves catching raking light, establishes formal connection to natural phenomena—seashell growth patterns, planetary rings, sedimentary striations—while simultaneously evoking precision manufacturing and computational generation. Technical achievement manifests through the levitation presentation strategy, which removes the device from mundane contact with surfaces and positions it within a liminal space of pure potentiality, suggesting both the object's lightness and its transcendence of ordinary physical constraints. The hexagonal interior lattice visible through the transparent midsection invokes both biological efficiency—honeycomb structures representing nature's optimized space-filling solution—and human technological advancement in materials science and miniaturization. Compositional choices reveal deliberate calibration: the diagonal orientation generates dynamic energy while organic accessories establish grounding domestic context, negotiating between futuristic aspiration and present-moment accessibility. The warm amber tones glimpsed within the transparent chamber provide chromatic relief against the dominant cool neutrals, suggesting interior warmth, contained energy, or precious material carefully housed within protective architecture. One might consider how this work invites contemplation of humanity's ongoing project to compress vast capabilities into increasingly intimate scales, to make the powerful portable, the complex comprehensible through elegant formal resolution.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Nebula Project is a device that incorporates a miniaturized Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) technology system for food preservation. It represents SAES's first Industrial Design project, aimed at implementing design-driven innovation methodologies within the company and exploring their applicability in laboratory workflows. Nebula utilizes pre-mixed capsules containing compressed gas, which can extract the existing internal atmosphere from a container and inject a specific gas composition.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- 210 mm x 45 mm x 52 m
- Tags
- Nebula, MAP, FoodWaste, ScientificDesign, SAES
- Production Technology
- SAES specializes in advanced technologies and materials for niche sectors, including getter technologies for high and ultra-high vacuum, gas management, and advanced materials for functional compostable packaging. Nebula was developed by combining these three areas of expertise.
With MAP, the final pressure is slightly below atmospheric pressure, which offers significantly more design flexibility compared to high vacuum technology. This flexibility allows for the use of lightweight solutions without the need for reinforcement structures. Adopting these lightweight solutions brings numerous benefits, including reduced energy consumption and improved recyclability. Nebula's containers employ an innovative microcellular polypropylene (PP) molding technique, allowing for weight reductions of up to 20% while increasing tensile and impact properties by 30% compared to standard PP materials. - Design Challenge
- Miniaturising MAP technology requires a paradigm shift and a major technological shift. As it was not possible to scale up the components, it was necessary to find alternative options that would achieve the same result with different kinematics. Initially, the team identified a solution based on a graphite carboniser capable of transforming oxygen into CO2 by separating argon using a membrane. The results were poor: the separation of the argon was more complex than expected and the injection of the gas into the container was too slow to be integrated into a common object. Inspired by the simplicity of compressed gas cylinders for inflating bicycle tyres, the idea arose to develop compressed gas capsules and study a business model for refilling, similar to that of some brands in the coffee pod world. The internal structure also being circular was structured on the idea of a helix design, in this context the fixing of the electronics and the development of a lithium-polymer battery capable of supporting the energy absorption of the pump in its peaks was an extremely complex development. The entire design was handled procedurally through the grasshopper software in order to be able to process and modify the system automatically during its design, in this context many of the elements were difficult to manage and required the development of custom tool set using script and complex logics.
- Project Duration
- The project started in Milan in May 2019 and was presented at Cibus 2020 in Parma.
- Operation Flow
- Nebula can be operated by a rotational selector switch and is equipped with a display showing real-time operations. the device is loaded with a compressed gas capsule containing a specific mixture and can be attached to it's rigid container. Nebula replace the internal atmosphere with another one able to increase drastically the shelf life of food at home level.
- Research
- Nebula is a project developed within an experimental, multidisciplinary team at SAES, combining the expertise of several professionals including designers, engineers, chemists, physicists and strategists. The objective was to integrate some of the company's scientific clusters to develop the first consumer product, and produce a solution to one of the great modern social and technological problems: food waste, on which the company is already engaged on the technological front in the B2B sphere. The R&D process was carried out on several levels simultaneously: from laboratory tests to validate the technology, to external tests to assess the extent to which gases including CO2 impact bacterial proliferation, to qualitative and quantitative market research carried out on a sample of 10,000 people. Nebula was designed from the inside out, the design revolving around the study of layout and product architecture, with the dual objective of integrating the exchange pump and all the electrical and electronic elements without any gaps. The exchange pump enables two processes to be carried out in sequence: creating a low vacuum and transferring the compressed gas from the capsules inside the container, exploiting the pressure difference.
The technical-scientific research was supported from the early stages of development by the strategy team, cross-referencing the user journey and user experience with the possibilities offered by laboratory technologies, always pushing the project's purpose in a direction of real effectiveness. The project also served to validate a design pipeline that later became the standard for SAES's consumer innovation division called Design House. - Inspiration
- The design of Nebula represents the synthesis of SAES's technical and scientific aesthetics. The cage-like structure draws inspiration from the architecture of the NextTorr pumps designed for extreme applications such as particle accelerators. The use of glass material accentuates the device's core, while the rest is concealed beneath a deep black. Nebula is a product inspired by scientific instruments, its design reflects a rational and analytical language commonly found in laboratories.
- Patents
- Patented. 008154751. Saes Getters S.p.A. 01/09/2020.
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