The New Show

20 weeks later... we did it!

Today was the final presentation for the Transportation Design class! The prototypes look amazing and drew quite a crowd. Once the foot traffic died down each student in the group took turns demonstrating their vehicles performance. A big thanks to all the SCAD staff and resources that were made available to us!

Final Presentation of the 3 working prototypes in "The New Show" spring 2011

 

The annex, our second home... display of the 3 final working prototypes

Week 20: Testing

 

Testing of the three final prototypes.

Week 19: Painting

This is the final week before the unveiling and all three teams are working to meet the looming deadline. Final body panels are being prepped for paint and all the running systems are tested. No room for error this week!

Week 19: Assembling

Week 18: Wiring

Wiring is the name of the game today! All the energy saving features of the prototypes must be properly connected and integrated in the team’s individual vehicles. Lights, signals, interfaces, gauges, and drive-train electronics must all be tamed together to bring the bikes to life.

Week 17: Body Panel - Fiber glass

The positive molds for the body panels were fabricated in a variety of materials, from MDF to Ren. Once they were complete, they were cast in silicon, serving as the negative molds for which the fiberglass and resin could then be applied into. A highly labour-intensive and chemically hazardous process, for almost a week straight, we looked as if we were in quarantine from the protective suits that we wore!

Week 16: Body Panel - Mold Construction

Week 16: Body Panel - Vacuum Forming

For Team One, they designed their body panels to have zero negative draft, so that the CNC moulds could then be vacuum formed and then taken straight to paint.

Week 15: CNC

The body panels for our vehicles were built in CAD, before being sent to the CNC machine to be milled out of ren. They would serve as the moulds for which we would then make our body panels out of, whether by vacuum forming, or fiberglassing.

Week 15: Wiring / Testing

Week 13+14: Frame Construction/ Mechanism Design

Week 12: Charging system/ User Interface/ Service Design

Week 11: Final Design Refining

Week 10: Ergonomic testing

Before we began building our prototypes full-scale, we needed to make sure that ergonomically, any design changes did not affect the human factors of a user utilising the vehicle. Full-scale ergonomical mock-ups were built that had the measurements of the seat, handles and foot pedals, and were tested out by all the individuals in the class to ensure that it was still comfortable to ride.

Week 10: Jake Sclare visits Transportation Design

Towards the end of our first quarter, we were given the opportunity to present our concepts to design director Jake Sclare, who graduated from CCS and worked in the automotive industry for a good number of years. Some of the class already knew Jake prior to this transportation class - Professor Gamboa worked with him and student Jean Kee interned under him for 3 months.


We presented full-scale pink foam models of our final concepts to Jake. He gave all of us constructive feedback on how to improve on certain aspects of our design, and a good direction to move forward with. He promised to be back for the unveiling of the three vehicles at the end of our 2nd quarter, and we all looked forward to making a good impression on him with how far we would have come since then.

Week 9: 3D modeling

Week 8: Presentation to John Paul, VP of SCAD Hong Kong

 

In a mad rush to present our concepts to the Vice President of SCAD Hong Kong, John Paul, we began churning out enough sketches to wallpaper Gulfstream Annex, as well as 1/3 scale pink foam models of our strongest designs. Needless to say, we didn't sleep for days on end. 

We took John Paul through our entire design process, starting with the research we conducted of SCAD's current transportation system, our brand identity of Greenhive, and the 3 personas we created as the design criteria for each team. 

John Paul was a transportation design enthusiast, and was thoroughly impressed with the amount of work we produced in a span of 8 weeks. With constructive feedback in regards to our research and design concepts, we walked away feeling proud of how much we had accomplished. 

But first, sleep!

Week 7: Proportional Prototype

Each team was responsible for creating a full scale proportional model based on most successful design from the 1/3 pink foam models. The teams used pink foam again and a variety of other materials for the construction.

Week 7: 1/3 scale pink foam models

After our sketching phase, we took the most successful ideas and constructed 1/3 scale mock-ups out of pink foam. These mock-ups were used to judge proportions and spatial relationships of different components.

Week 6: DesignWorks BMW Senior Designer Jirawat Jeamvigite visited

Midway through the ideation phase of Transportation Design, we were informed that Jirawat Jeamvigite, Senior Designer of DesignWorks BMW, would be coming to critique our sketch concepts. More sketching and sleepless nights ensued, with plenty of coffee, energy drinks and loud music to keep us going.


Our presentation to Jirawat went well. He was impressed with our dedication and drive to the project, and it even struck a nostalgic chord within him - he missed being caught up in the intensity of studio projects like this. However, in all of our haste to churn out good sketches, we had accidentally pushed the brand identity that we had spent nights creating - Greenhive - aside, and Jirawat gently reminded us not to forget that. It was important to include the emotional qualities of our brand identity in our designs, because it is those qualities that will make our vehicles stand out that much more.


The next day, some of us sat down with Jirawat for coffee for an informal designer tête à tête. Humble and truly down-to-earth, we were grateful to have been given the opportunity to make a great network connection with him.

Week 5: Concept development - Round 1 Sketching

We kicked off our ideation phase with the first of many sketch all-nighters to come. Getting back into sketching with copic markers, we printed out posters of images that would inspire us, and stuck together throughout the night to keep each other going. Critiques after each round of sketching pushed us to draw quicker, better and more efficiently, before we were allowed to move on to digital sketching in Round 2.

Week 4: Persona development

Week 4: Research - round 2

Three individual teams have been created, with each team being assigned a specific design criteria inspired by the 3 different personas that have been established.

Team One is composed of Jean, Michael, David, and Leighton. 

Team Two (Team Cinco) is composed of Gary, Sam, Avelina, and Cesar. 

Team Three (Mountain Top) is composed of Bruce, Danny, and Andrew.

Week 3: Research Presentation

This was the presentation of our preliminary research.  Great information was gathered through the feedback of our distinguish visitors.

Brand Identity / Logo Design

 

 

“Green” is not only an idea, it is also a behavior that need to be implemented. The concept needs to be seeded in everyone’s mind, and fertilized by practicing in every day life. Our missions in this project is to utilize design and eco friendly technology to trace the difference between knowing green and being green.   As a result, the shape of capital G has been intentionally based on a circle to symbolize a wheel and the system where the vehicle will interact. The yellow green letters represents tender shoots that communicate our project aim. 

Week 2: Research-Round 1

Like any design project, we kicked off the beginning of the quarter with research. Preliminary research was done during the winter break, but we conducted more in-depth explorations, breaking it down into 3 main categories: the context with which our design would take place in, the user we would be designing, and the product we would be designing specifically. 

The next week was spent immersing ourselves in the community. Marketing research was done on existing products and how services/systems support these means of transportation. Also, contextual research was carried out to gather qualitative data and support with a deeper look our studies. Shadowing and interviews were the methods used to identify the user’s need when it comes to transportation in Savannah.  

On top of all of that, we also needed to create a brand identity for ourselves, that not only represented this project, but also the service that it would be providing, the users and the community... hence, the all-nighter. 

Need we say more?

Week 1: Overview

For the majority of the students at SCAD, the first week of this quarter was relatively uneventful, with a light workload and plenty of time to catch up with friends. 

For 11 Industrial Design students, their first week was anything but uneventful and relaxing. Their first week involved multiple research presentations, creating a unanimous brand identity (do you know how hard it is to get 11 people to agree on one thing?!), an all-nighter with 7 boxes of pizza and constantly shifting locations until our studio space was ready.

Welcome to the Transportation Design Class.

Led by Professor Jose Gamboa, assisted by William Woods, these 11 students are involved in a project that aims at redesigning the transportation network of the SCAD Savannah community. By understanding both the urban planning that is uniquely Savannah, as well as the lifestyle experience of being a student at SCAD, our goal is to create a solution that assisted the current system by providing alternate modes of transportation. The outcome of our 20-week long project would be the development of 3 full-scale working prototypes to be showcased at the School of Design Graduation Exhibition in Spring 2011.

Overwhelmed yet? Keep up, if you can!

The Annex

Welcome to the Gulfstream Annex, the building that will become our home for the next 20 weeks. We will use this space for our entire design process.