WHO ARE YOU ?

We are the Ento team: four postgraduate students, currently in our final year studying Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College. Our team members: Aran Dasan, Jacky Chung, Jonathan Fraser, and Julene Aguirre, have a mix of engineering and design backgrounds. As individuals we have experience working in blue chip companies, design consultancies, engineering firms, and creative start-ups. We came together through a shared interest in sustainability, and a belief in the power of innovation to produce positive change.

WHAT IS YOUR VISION ?
Our vision is to make a positive difference to society. As a team our efforts have specifically focused on food security and the impact of the food industry on the environment. We hope to make this a focal point for our design activities in the future. With demand for food outpacing agricultural productivity, and current farming practices having a huge environmental impact, it is an area which is badly in need new of thinking. This is what we hope to deliver.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT?ʉ۬
The response our project has received from people all over the globe has been fantastic. Ento is an unusual proposition, advocating the introduction of edible insect-foods into the western market. We were unsure how it would be received but we have had an overwhelmingly positive response. We receive several emails daily from individuals who want to try our products; unfortunately we have to disappoint them by telling them we are not at the production stage yet!

WHAT CHALLENGES DOES THE DESIGNWORLD FACE? 
Biodiversity faces a whole host of challenges. With increasing growth and demand for resources, humankind’s impact on the environment has never been greater. Unfortunately awareness of the issues and motivation to reduce consumption can only go so far – we need innovative solutions if we are to preserve biodiversity. From our perspective, demand for food is one of the biggest issues. Agricultural activity utilises one third of the earths land surface and this percentage continues to grow. Our team’s goal was to address this problem, by investigating solutions that were much more space and resource efficient than current practices.

WHAT WILL YOU DO IF YOU WIN THE GREEN DESIGN COMPETITION? 
Winning the Green Design Competition would provide an excellent platform from which to develop Ento. It would enable us to progress it from a design project to a fully functioning business. The financial and technical support we would receive would be invaluable and help us develop the idea into a comprehensive market proposition. From this starting point we would be able to seek investment, build new relationships, and begin to realise our concepts.