Good Design Awards
GOOD DESIGN, DESIGN INNOVATION AND DESIGN IMPACT
GroundProbe’s Geotech Monitoring Station (GMS) last week received the prestigious Good Design Award® Best in Class in the Product Design category. The annual Good Design Awards is Australia’s most prestigious awards for design and innovation.
The award was won by GroundProbe and their industrial design partner, Designworks. Both companies also acknowledge their product development partners Topcon, Complete Wiring Harnesses and Fusion.
All entries in the Good Design Awards are evaluated against criteria for good design, design innovation and its social, commercial and environmental impacts.
By nature, the product’s primary intent is to improve safety in dams, tunnels, mines and landslides. The technology allows its users to conduct real-time, remote monitoring to warn of collapses. It detects movement early with precision, enabling its users to correlate trends and forecast when a collapse is likely to occur.
“Each year there are several dam collapses globally, and multiple fatalities from mine wall failures,” said Lachlan Campbell, VP Marketing & Technology of GroundProbe.
“By giving early warning of an impending collapse in a dam or mine, our product enables customers to make confident decisions to avert a collapse and protect lives, workers and equipment.
“Our product delivers safer and more productive mines and dams that operate longer and more profitably.”
On the innovation front, the GMS is a first for the industry. It not only monitors prisms, but is also capable of monitoring ‘virtual’ points on the wall that reflect the laser signal directly off the rock. The system is also fully compatible with our analysis software, SSR-Viewer. Its powerful data visualisation, charting and analysis tools take the GMS well beyond the capabilities of typical Robotic Total Stations.
When Designworks embarked on designing the product’s enclosure, form and function were at the forefront, ensuring it was both appealing and unambiguous for the end user.
“The cutting edge design of the enclosure system embodies the innovative technology housed within,” said Warren Schroder, Director, Designworks.
“The faceted form and triangular shapes represent the nature of the three dimensional geophysical data which is at the core of GroundProbe.
“It is a high-quality, technology-driven design, yet functional in its approach and appropriate for mine sites, which are often located in some of the most inhospitable environments on the planet.”
The 60th Good Design Awards attracted record entries of 536 innovative designs with 269 projects receiving the coveted Good Design Award®. Of these, there were only 30 Best in Class Award Winners, across a range of industries and design professions.
The Good Design Awards Jury commented: “Everything about this product is exceptional and the design team should be extremely proud of the outcome.”