jumpthegap®: investigating global issues through the bathroom space

Tackling the crucial challenges of our time and promoting the talent of students and young designers from all over the planet: the jumpthegap® competition, organised by Roca in collaboration with BcD Barcelona Design Centre, is now in its tenth edition. The event aims to gather projects and ideas about the bathroom space in order to advance the goals set by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In the previous nine editions, more than 26,000 participants from 150 countries took part, demonstrating the competition's capacity to be a moment of international relevance for the world of sustainable design.

The new four categories of the competition therefore reflect the most urgent challenges of contemporary life: Wellness & Health is dedicated to projects investigating comfort, harmony, wellbeing and new relationships between body and space; [Un]neutral design addresses the issue of the diversity of bodies and abilities, with products that creatively interpret the question of personal help; Water & Energy brings together experiments on reducing water and energy consumption; Crisis & Emergency finally tackles the issue of the environmental crisis with investigations into new materials and technologies.

Among the jurors of the jumpthegap® competition are some of the leading international players in the design world, as well as professionals from different industries and disciplines: Japanese architect and 2014 Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban (Jury President); Somi Kim, Senior Director, Healthcare Solutions at Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Design; Paul Priestman, Designer, Chairman of PriestmanGoode; Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, Founders of Formafantasma design studio; Deborah Seward, Director of United Nations Regional Information Centre in Belgium; Mariana Amatullo, President of Cumulus International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media; Isabel Roig, Executive Director of BcD Barcelona Design centre and President of World Design Weeks; and Marc Viardot, Roca Group’s Corporate Marketing and Design Director.  You have until 3 June 2021 to participate. The winners of the jumpthegap® competition will be revealed on 6 July in a virtual ceremony at which a total of 13 prizes will be awarded. This event will not be the last act of the event, which will continue until 2022 with a series of debates and round tables where finalists and winners will discuss their projects with experts and professionals.