Alexander Dallman-Porter

Alex is a scientist turned designer with experience ranging from lab work to videography to rapid prototyping. Alongside studying the Innovation Design Engineering double Master's at Imperial College and RCA, he held a part time position as Operations Manager at another ex-IDE medtech startup, Charco Neurotech, which he will take up full time on graduating. Having previously studied Biomedical Science and Neuroscience, Alex's strengths are rooted in experimentation and an empirical understanding of the world. He balances this with deep consideration of the user, and applies this ethos to functional, human-centred projects aimed at improving quality of life and environment.

For his Solo project, Alex created Padl. a novel wellbeing tool inspired by rowing that uses movement responsive audio to deliver gentle exercise, mindfulness and nature therapy. He researched and designed the experience itself as well as the hardware-software system to deliver it. For his group project earlier this year, Alex was part of a team that developed a completely new approach to clothes washing. Their process is completely waterless, significantly reducing the impact that washing can have both on clothes and the environment. They plan to take the Waterless Washing Company forward through a number of design awards and competitions.

For all its technological advancement, luxury, and convenience, the modern urban living environment presents its inhabitants with one major drawback; stress. 

The majority of people in our modern world spend their life in high stress environments. Whether the source of this stress is work, private life events or one’s surroundings, it greatly increases the risk of mental and physical illness while reducing productivity and quality of life. It’s estimated that those affected by stress at their job will lose the equivalent of 22 work days each year due to this loss of productivity. Even something as simple as noise can have profound affects on our health. The WHO estimates that in Western Europe alone, a million years of healthy life are lost annually as a result of incessant traffic noise. 

The prevalence of stress is particularly pronounced in urban environments, where roughly 4.2 billion people currently live5. The human body has adapted to initiate a cascade of neural and hormonal reactions to potentially harmful stimuli called the fight or flight response. During the era in which this ancient response evolved, many of the “potentially harmful stimuli” were indeed extremely dangerous and so it was essential that it be triggered in order to allow humans to escape. However, in today’s world, the response is easily set off by everyday elements of the urban environment, such as social situations, loud vehicles, or simply the threat of close proximity to others. This chronic stress on the body results in ‘allostatic overload,’ a maladaptive response to chronic stress by the brain that exacerbates pathological physiology and psychology, such as raised blood pressure and depression. Furthermore, there’s even evidence to show people who have grown up in an urban environment are more susceptible to stress in the first place, and indeed, being raised in a city nearly doubles an individual’s chance of developing schizophrenia. 

With the number of urban dwellers set to increase, we need to find novel ways to cope with stress that are accessible to everyone, especially those who live in cramped, dense urban environments.