New coffee harvesters a collaboration between IED, CNH and Lavazza

An exhibition was held in Turin, from 16 January to 13 February, in the atrium of the Lavazza Cloud, featuring advanced design renderings by students from the IED in Turin on semi-industrial coffee harvesting, as part of a collaboration between the Lavazza Group and CNH Industrial.

Eighteen Master's in Transportation Design students from 7 countries, divided into 6 working groups led by David Wilkie and Guido Bianco of CNH Industrial Design and Florian Seidl Design Manager Lavazza Group, analysed the various processing stages in coffee cultivation in small land parcels characterised by altitude and a strong slope, to assess the possibilities of mechanised harvesting.

It was not just an exercise in style on existing machinery, but research that led to new layouts and innovative technical solutions, including engines and materials with low environmental impact.

Six proposals were made, presented as renderings, based on the deconstruction of large technical machinery adapted to smaller plantations, from which the project Tazzina, by Siddhant Sanjeev Aggarwal, Yung-Chun Hsu and Antonio Mazza, was chosen as the winner.

It is a cup-shaped, small and compact coffee berry picker that can easily move between plants, with a seat at the top that allows it to reach the highest branches. Thanks to a hand-held instrument that features vibration, the berries fall directly into a built-in container - removable and transportable even by drones - where the selection takes place between red berries to be processed and green berries to be recycled as compost.

For Michele Albera, Coordinator of the Transportation Design Area at IED Turin, with this initiative "established entities such as CNH Industrial and Lavazza had the opportunity to meet, in a mutual exchange of knowledge and needs, in a creative environment such as IED, and to have a free opening of minds, to embrace the technical/stylistic and formal research of new objects that look to the future, without forgetting their origins and tradition".