It really is a demonstration of what happens when you think outside the box. Two Spanish industrial designers have brought innovations from packaging to design a better, cheaper and faster solution for beds to be used in disaster relief or humanitarian aid. It’s made of cardboard, is twice as strong as the beds NGOs most commonly use, and can save up to 80-90% of the purchase price of beds. Not to mention that it is much cheaper to ship by air.

Barcelona-based Juan Sanz and J. Alberto Paniagua founded Humanitaria with the aim of using their 20+ years of industrial design experience to improve the response capacity of NGOs in humanitarian situations. The bed is their first product, and the first few hundred units are being readied for testing during rescue operations planned by the Spanish Red Cross the (Northern Hemisphere) autumn of 2023.