Awarded

Gerhard Gerber

Safety belt 'zwischen himmel und erde' (diploma work)

Product and Industrial Design

Jury report

Working safely between heaven and earth
How is it pos­si­ble to work safely at a con­sid­er­able height with a set of tools weigh­ing up to thirty kilos? The prod­uct de­signer Ger­hard Ger­ber has de­vel­oped a tool belt for just this pur­pose. Sim­i­lar prod­ucts did al­ready exist, but the prod­uct de­signer from Thun de­voted him­self to the quiet work of op­ti­miz­ing. Here er­gonom­ics – the the­ory of adapt­ing ma­te­ri­als to the qual­i­ties and abil­i­ties of the work­ing man to the great­est ex­tent pos­si­ble – does not just mean being able to sit more com­fort­ably, as in the case of an of­fice chair, but in ex­treme cases can make a dif­fer­ence be­tween life and death. The fact is that this tool safety belt in hard-wear­ing and yet breath­ing ar­ti­fi­cial fi­bres is used in steel and mast erec­tion, when as­sem­bling ca­ble-car equip­ment, out­door ca­bles and façades, and by the fire brigade or for in­dus­trial climb­ing. In other words, any­where where quick ac­cess to tools has to be guar­an­teed and the work­flow must not be in­ter­rupted what­ever hap­pens. So the belt with its mod­u­lar struc­ture also of­fers the pos­si­bil­ity of being sus­pended from a sup­port belt with­out any fuss. The tools are po­si­tioned on the body in such a way that the weight is dis­trib­uted across the shoul­der and hip straps as well as pos­si­ble. Snap hooks for hang­ing tools on can be placed in pre-sewn loops at pre­cisely the points that best suit the par­tic­u­lar fit­ter's body. Ger­hard Ger­ber re­fines the de­tails. The snap hooks, for ex­am­ple, are in­jec­tion-moulded so that they can­not twist side­ways. This is a cru­cial ad­van­tage, as only this con­struc­tion method makes it pos­si­ble to take tools out and put them back with one hand. Over­all, the de­sign of the tool belt meets the most rigid func­tional re­quire­ments, but also ful­fils high aes­thetic de­mands. This is an ex­am­ple of in­de­pen­dent, in­no­v­a­tive prod­uct de­sign, even if it is un­likely that lay­men will scarcely be able to rec­og­nize it as such.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Gerhard Gerber
Born in
1967
Education
Industrial Designer FH