A charming bracelet can translate between sign and spoken language
Samuel Nagel and Paul Feiler’s winning design for the 2026 RIMOWA Design Prize refuses to treat disability as a problem to be hidden, merging design and accessibility.
In May 2026, Samuel Nagel and Paul Feiler, two students from the University of Design in Schwäbisch Gmünd, were awarded the fourth edition of the RIMOWA Design Prize. Their project, NURA, is a wearable bracelet that translates sign language into audible speech in real time, using electromyography to read muscle signals in the forearm. It also works in reverse: spoken words are transcribed and surfaced as visible text for the deaf user.
Assistive technology has a long history of treating good design as a rarity; devices are often socially uncomfortable, announcing the user’s difference before they do anything else. When accessibility tools are clunky, the implicit message is that the people who need them are an afterthought, that their dignity is secondary to their function. Good design in this space is the difference between a tool that gets used and one that doesn’t, between a person who moves through the world freely and one who can’t.
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NURA by Samuel Nagel and Paul Feiler:
The RIMOWA Design Prize
The RIMOWA Design Prize was founded in 2023 and operates as an annual student competition in partnership with leading German design schools. The brief centres on mobility, a word that, in the hands of a luggage brand, might seem to invite a narrow set of answers. Yet, the prize has consistently produced a broader interpretation, treating mobility as a social and political condition as much as a logistical one.
Previous winning projects include Hottie, a wearable addressing menstrual pain, and Artificial Body Positivity, a set of redesigned luxury prosthetics that challenged the stigma attached to amputees and mobility aids.
About relating NURA to the brief, the designers say, “mobility isn’t just about moving from A to B, it’s also closely tied to communication. A lot of the freedom to act spontaneously, to make your own decisions, or to feel at ease in everyday situations comes from being able to communicate directly with the people around you.”
NURA’s design choices
Deaf and hearing-impaired people navigate a world whose default infrastructure is not built for them. Communication aids have existed for decades, but they have generally prioritised function over form. The invisibility of recent hearing aids was not a proper design choice, but a response to stigma, a tacit agreement that disability was something to be concealed.
NURA proposes something different. Its silhouette recalls the fluid geometry of a manta ray, organic, ergonomic, and in line with the aesthetics of many wearable devices that people enjoy wearing today, disabled or not.
The project’s impact
Whether NURA can reach production is a separate question; EMG accuracy across diverse signing styles, body types, and sign languages remains an open and complex engineering challenge. Still, prizes like this one are not only about products that will ship. They are also about imagination, about expanding the range of what designers believe they are permitted to work on, what problems they consider worth solving, what users are interesting to design for.
The communication barrier between deaf and hearing people is not a niche problem; it is a structural feature that shapes the mobility, as in spontaneity and ease of moving through social space, of millions of people every day. Nagel and Feiler chose to look at that problem directly, to take it seriously as a design issue, not just a technical one, and to answer it with an object that refuses the low expectations that assistive technology has historically set for itself.
