Product designer Massoud Hassani has come up with a rather ingenious method of clearing up mines from minefields. The Mine Kafon is Massoud’s graduate project, and it looks set to be featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where it will be fettered as a cheap (and some might even consider it to be beautiful) way of clearing mine fields. Massoud Hassani’s story is not that of being born with a silver spoon, but rather, being raised in Afghanistan, a country which has plenty of land mines, proved to inspire him to create the Mine Kafon that was inspired by the different toys that he crafted during his youth, including light, tumbleweed-like objects which he and other neighborhood kids would race against each other.
The toys would sometimes roll into the mine fields, rendering them useless (or rather, foolhardy to be retrieved). Upon his father’s death, Hassani and family immigrated to the Netherlands. The Mine Kafon is built on an entirely larger scale compared to his childhood toys, being nearly as tall as an adult male. Made out of plastic and bamboo, it will cost 40 Euros a pop, which is a whole lot more affordable than other solutions. Each bamboo spine comes with a suction cup which amplifies the weight of the Kafon as the wind blows it around, and individual Kafons are strong enough to withstand up to four mine blasts before losing too many spines to roll about. There will be GPS chips within each Kafon, paving the way to enable remote tracking of where mines have yet to be cleared, as well as the areas where they’ve been cleared.
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