Index Award 2021 took place at Volume in Copenhagen on September 30th, 2021 and was streamed to a global audience. Senior Copywriter from AKQA Jean-Robert Saintil was the host and the show featured a keynote by Co-Founder of Airbnb Joe Gebbia – his first public talk in Denmark.
From 2,134 nominees, 46 were selected as finalists and six of these won an Index Award. The five primary category winners each won a prize package worth more than over €250,000, including business development sessions with top-tier global consulting agency Boston Consulting Group, creative branding sparring from award-winning AKQA, a feature on the Google Arts and Culture platform, and bespoke design thinking and leadership workshops with The Index Project.
Body category: OUI
OUI is being awarded for their innovative non-hormonal contraceptive. Based on a completely novel approach to birth control, the OUI capsule reinforces the natural mucus barrier that exists in the cervical canal thereby making ovulatory cervical mucus impenetrable for sperm cells. OUI encourages women to take ownership of their bodies by utilising the female body's own defenses to aid birth control.
Home category: Flash Forest
Flash Forest is an elegant and well-executed way of applying technology in a meaningful way to heal our shared home. The reforestation company uses aerial mapping software, drone technology, pneumatics, automation and ecological science to accelerate reforestation worldwide and secure the future of our home and planet. Flash Forest is dedicated to developing a community around their work, including NGOs, governments and corporations in order to successfully reforest.
Work category: BIOHM
BIOHM produces environmentally regenerative and natural insulation grown from mycelium: the root network of mushrooms. The building industry is one of the industries with the largest environmental footprints in the world, with limited recycling and often harmful side effects for workers. Sustainable insulation is drastically needed, both in cool and warm climates to lower operational energy consumption, to reduce our energy consumption. BIOHM is opening the door for a tremendous amount of opportunities for other areas to use mycelium.
Play & Learning category: Truepic
Truepic uses groundbreaking technology to authenticate images and videos as they’re captured to ensure what goes online is real. Truepic addresses a huge global challenge and will help in democratising technology. The online world can be a misleading place but Truepic is using universal technology to bring clarity to what's really real out there and what's not. Truepic offers a compelling solution paving a path towards truth and trust.
Community category: Algorithmic Justice League
Algorithmic Justice League is a movement uncovering racial and gender bias in AI systems to shift the wider AI ecosystem towards an accountable, transparent and equitable future. As well as being an awareness movement, Algorithmic Justice League offers a range of practical solutions to tackle AI bias. They offer ways to report AI biases, datasets available for AI research, workshops to help educate people about AI bias and harms, and services to audit company AI systems to see how they stack up in terms of ethics.
People’s Choice: LUNARK
In collaboration with engineers, programmers, industrial designers and even psychologists the LUNARK moon habitat is built for discovering the unknown while feeling at home. Inspired by origami, this livable hub by SAGA Space Architects in its folded state is the size of a cargo bike and increases in volume by 750 per cent, when fully expanded. The habitat is completely self-reliant too, as it generates its energy through solar panels.
