ANT: Ant-Inspired Vehicle for Disaster Relief
In another nod to biomimicry as a frontier of design innovation, industrial design student Brian Lee has just won Australia’s Target 2020 competition for envisioning the car of the future with his Aid Necessities Transporter (ANT) – an ant-inspired vehicle designed to transport supplies and aid shipments to areas struck by natural disasters, and even transforms into temporary housing.
ANT is designed to reach disaster victims as quickly and efficiently as possible, delivering food, water and medical supplies, returning to the base and repeating all over again, much like ant colonies behave as they gather food.
Target 2020 is run by the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce and invites high school and university students to design the car of the future. Lee was a freshman at Monash University when he entered the competition and now works full-time for Ford Australia. He was inspired to create ANT as a response mechanism addressing the inevitable apocalyptic effects of climate change and empowering humanitarian aid organizations to deal with these problems more efficiently.
Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, Design Observer and Huffington Post, and spends a shameful amount of time on Twitter.
