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In the field of marine rescue equipment, devices are generally designed for isolated adults or professional crews. This is the background to Kanguro, a buoyancy device designed to hold a mother and infant together in the event of a fall into the water or shipwreck.
The project was presented in Milan as part of the XXIX Compasso d'Oro, one of Italy's leading awards for industrial design.
Equipment designed for humanitarian emergencies at sea
Kanguro was developed as part of the +Vicino da Lontano social design program, in collaboration with the Ánako APS association. The project also brings together universities, designers and students to address an issue rarely addressed in the nautical industry: the survival at sea of very young children accompanied by their mothers.
The aim of the device is to keep both people in a stable position when they find themselves in the water. The system also seeks to limit the risk of separation in rough seas, a frequent phenomenon during improvised evacuations or capsizing of overloaded boats. During rescue operations in the Mediterranean, rescuers are regularly confronted with situations where conventional buoyancy equipment is not suitable for infants or very young children.
Veleria San Giorgio offers its expertise in survival equipment
To transform the initial concept into an operational device, the project teams relied on Veleria San Giorgio. The Italian company has been working in the field of marine safety equipment and rescue systems for over a century.
The manufacturer was involved in the prototyping and functional testing phases. Its role focused in particular on issues of buoyancy, stability and the device's behavior in degraded sea conditions.
The system has to meet a number of technical requirements simultaneously: keep the airways out of the water, maintain a stable position despite swell movements, and enable rapid recovery by rescue services.
Anton Francesco Albertoni, General Manager of Veleria San Giorgio and former President of Confindustria Nautica, underlines the special dimension of the project: "Today, this legacy of knowledge is applied to Kanguro, a project with a strong humanitarian vocation, designed to transform social design into a concrete solution centered on
