Having suffered a serious head and neck injury in a sporting collision last year, Vancouver-based designer Andrew McConnell began looking into ways of preventing or minimising the effect of similar impacts suffered by athletes in sports such as American football or rugby. Neck Frame is designed to absorb excessive force inflicted on the spine and attaches to the back and neck in a similar way to elastic sports tape. Layers of the strong and flexible carbon-based material, graphene, would provide rigidity that the designer claimed could enable it to "act like a structural second skin".