When deciding what materials and colour schemes could be used within my trolley project I looked around all components of the car. The vast majority of a standard car commonly uses a dull, grey material that is not particularly aesthetically appealing while the car boot felt lining is even more displeasing. I thought about more luxury cars with leather interiors which led me to look at an a designed element of the car that is often unnoticed: the gear stick. Specifically the one I was looking at had a leather-like material and was a pyramid shape. Since I was working on placing on the back of an angled chair, this gave me inspiration to stylise my trolley based on how the gear stick is stylised.
Today, we received feedback from both Mike and the client. I received brief but useful feedback:
Yesterday we had our second 'pin-up' session to narrow down our brief direction before next weeks table meeting with The Car People.
I had produced a great quantity of sketches drawing up concept ideas. Although I had seem to solve the issue of the mechanics of getting the trolley in and out of the car, I was having a real issue stylising a trolley concept. I couldn't seem to get away from making it look like a typical shopping trolley or stay away from the box-like design. For ones where I strayed from the trolley shape and tried to make it suited for the car, I ended up making them look too stylised so that they would be more suited for some brand of cars than the others. I voiced these problems I was having to Mike and the group and received some useful feedback. Feedback
As I want my car boot trolley concept to fold into the car, Mike suggested looking at the way stretchers fold into the ambulance. Ambulance stretchers work by two sets of wheels. One set on the legs of the wheels and one on the bottom of the stretcher. Where the legs of the stretcher hit the entrance of the boot the hinge folds them down and uses the wheels on the bottom of the stretcher to wheel it into the boot. By using this method or one similar there will be no need to add a ramp or other accessory into the car. It will illuminate the need for additional stress of getting the shopping in and out of the car. The trolley can be pushed straight in and pulled out lowing the legs and turning it back into a regular trolley.
Today's lesson was focusing on the feedback both Phillip and Jonathan gave to Mike regarding our presentations.
General Feedback (for whole class):
Observations (personal feedback):
After Mike addressed us each as a group, we had one-one-one chats discussing where we are with our project and how to develop our work further. Advice from Mike:
Next week we have a 'pin up' feedback session so I will create lots of ideation and development sketches to present as well as working on my research. I may also create a sketch model to show how the folding system will work within the car. Although I have moved on from looking at environmental factors in cars and focused more on storage especially for recreational living, I received an email back from Greenpeace, one of the most famous charities to focus on the environment. It reads:
Hi Ciara Thanks for the email, my apologies for the delay, it’s great to hear that you’re studying how to improve car designs! As I’m sure you can imagine we receive a huge number of these requests from students all over the globe and as our campaigners are incredibly busy working on our current campaigns they are very rarely able to respond to questions like these. It is quite possible that you can find all of the answers you need on our website as we have a huge wealth of resources there for you to use! Why not read through some of the posts at www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate (you may find the ‘search’ box in the top right corner helpful!) and for more in-depth questions please make use of our campaign reports here: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/ We have worked on several car manufacturers inc VW - so it is worth searching for those blogs to see what we did and how that might inspire your designs. As you may already know, Greenpeace is fiercely independent. We rely 100% on the support of individuals for everything that we do so it is of the utmost importance that we focus our energy, time and resources on our campaigns to drive positive change around the world. Thank you so much for your support and understanding. Thanks once again for your interest in Greenpeace and good luck with your studies! With best wishes, Issy Griffin Greenpeace UK, Canonbury Villas London N1 2PN 0800 269065 @GreenpeaceUK www.greenpeace.org.uk Even though I have a different subject area I thought I would make note that they took the time to reply to me and recognised my email amongst the several they get every day. One of the key pieces of feedback I received from the interim presentation was to focus on a particular point within the car rather than the general car interior or exterior.. In light of this, I decided to look at 3 major areas I feel are great options for smart storage within a family car:
The Boot/Trunk There seems to be a lot of great uses for the boot of the car, which is not surprising as it was designed for storage. I especially like the draw systems as they look neat elements to the car rather than the add-ons such as the baskets or fold-able storage. One of my favourite options is creating a 'false' bottom to the boot that elevates the true on so that the boot can still be implemented for it's normal uses but have hidden means of storage below.
The Roof
Dead Space
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