An award for the Space4InspirAction course

Focus Raymond Zreick Award for Technology and Innovation

The Space4InspirAction course, held by Professors Annalisa Dominoni and Benedetto Quaquaro – Department of Design of the Politecnico di Milano - was awarded the first edition of the Focus Raymond Zreick Prize for Technology and Innovation, instituted in memory of Raymond Zreick, the famous science journalist who recently passed away.

The award was presented by Focus Director Raffaele Leone to Annalisa Dominoni and Benedetto Quaquaro together with the students of the course "for their demonstrated ability to give concreteness and form to the imagination, through visionary projects in which design acts as a bridge between science, technology and beauty, and generates innovation".

The prize-giving ceremony took place during the Focus Live 2022 event, organised by Focus magazine at the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, Milano, which hosted the exhibition, curated and set up by the students themselves, of the models/prototypes of the projects developed in the Space4InspirAction 2022 edition of the course.

Space4InspirAction is in fact the first course in the world of space architecture and design supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) with experts and scientists suggesting the most strategic themes in line with international programmes of interplanetary exploration with human beings.

The projects exhibited during the Focus Live event concern two macro-themes: disability in Space, in response to the European Space Agency's (ESA) call for entries, which for the first time includes "parastronauts", whose prostheses are considered as "extensions" of motor skills in microgravity conditions, and the process of producing and transforming microalgae on the Moon, the sustainable food of the future, with the aim of achieving a "symbiosis" between human beings and nature on other planets.