April Fool's joke: MORIS design will supply stands for a space station
Did this news surprise you too? Then we managed to fool you with our April Fool's joke. We hope you're not mad at us. However, we'll leave the news on the website for fun...
The in-store design company MORIS design has achieved a unique success for the Czech Republic – it has surprisingly won a tender announced by the European Space Agency (ESA) and has thus become the exclusive supplier of stands for the International Space Station (ISS). The cooperation, worth more than CZK 400 million, should last until 2019.
The European Space Agency (ESA), of which the Czech Republic is a member along with 21 other European countries, requested new designer stands for the International Space Station (ISS) back in 2014. After the necessary processing of the requirements and finalization of the assignment, the ESRIN (European Space Research Institute) research center, which belongs to the ESA, announced an open tender. More than 250 entities from 17 European countries participated in the tender. As Johan-Dietrich Woerner, Director of the ESRIN research center, says: "The aim of the tender was to replace the existing, outdated Russian-made stands from the 1990s, which no longer met the requirements of modern design and emotional impact. It may sound like something out of the movie Armageddon, but we found it easier to launch an open tender and familiarize designers with the demands of space travel. Previous attempts to develop our own stands were great from a functional point of view, but they did not meet aesthetic and psychological requirements. Every minute of space travel is extremely demanding for the crew, and any mistake can be fatal, so we wanted to create something that evokes positive emotions. That's why we were attracted to in-store design companies that place a strong emphasis on working with emotions.
The offer to participate in the ESRIN tender was initially taken as a joke: "I got the information from a friend who works at the European Union Satellite Center. I thought he was joking. I thought to myself, 'We design stores, not space rockets.' But I like challenges. And at MORIS design, we are masters of in-store design; we can handle high-quality stands, whether they are on the ground or 55 kilometers above it," says company founder and owner Radomír Klofáč.
The task was clear: to create stands on which ISS astronauts could store their belongings and which would also evoke positive emotions in terms of color and design. The specificity of the order was compounded by a number of problems associated with staying in space—for example, weightlessness, which required a structural solution for securely anchoring stored items, extremely cramped space conditions, and very precise technical requirements for material durability. Several months of effort by the MORIS design development department finally bore fruit in the form of the Faex stand, which narrowly won out over the fierce competition. "Only we, one Lithuanian and one Spanish aircraft design company made it to the final selection round. We won mainly thanks to the high quality of our design, low price, and the 100% commitment of our team," concludes Radomír Klofáč, describing this extraordinary success for the Czech Republic.
