About the project
Dixon is a drinking fountain designed by Mirrl and clad in their beautiful, distinctive and robust surface material. Mirrl collaborated with Make Works Scotland listed, Ibrox-based Neptune Fabrications on the internal workings and metal fabrication, with the aim of ensuring hygiene standards, ease of installation and maintenance, and an effective means of high-level production with technical efficiency and proficiency.
Wanting to develop brilliantly designed, eye catching drinking fountains that celebrate free and clean water, Design Exhibition Scotland (DES) commissioned Mirrl to realise a prototype with support from Scottish Enterprise.
‘The real joy for us was having the freedom of time to properly explore and interrogate the subject and its development until we have reached a point we are really satisfied with and an object we are really proud of. We really hope that it can be adopted by councils, institutions, festivals, clubs and individuals alike and really help make a significant impact on reducing further plastic waste.’
Simon Harlow, Mirrl
Once a common sight across the UK, with non-functioning historic monuments present in public parks and squares, DES’s Founder Susanna Beaumont recognises drinking fountains were a generous and civic celebration of free and clean drinking water. She feels the time is right to revive and update the drinking fountain for the 21st century; to make clean drinking water more freely available when we are out and about, and challenge the norm of purchasing bottled water likely to be drunk in minutes with the plastic in which it is wrapped surviving for centuries.
Mirrl and DES are working closely together to produce the drinking fountain and realise opportunities for Dixon to appear in the civic realm to provide free drinking water and reduce single use plastics.