When Greg Bannard started her master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Calgary, Canada, she didn’t have an arsenal of tools available to her, so it became incredibly frustrating when equipment went missing. And, being the sort of scientist who’s picky about the kind of spatula that she uses, it could be extremely annoying when her favourite ones disappeared. After several instances of vanishing kit, she could no longer endure running around trying to find tools that had been misplaced.

This inspired her to create a portable pouch that fitted into her pocket of her laboratory coat. “It’s mostly things that I ended up finding myself reaching for,” says Bannard, who now works as an industrial designer, but still keeps the pouch as a keepsake of her time in research.

At the time, Bannard worked in a dye lab, studying the functionality of perylene diimide dyes for the active layers of solar cells.…