No matter how well developed a form may be, or how robust the electronics, a product always boils down to the user interaction with the hardware. After a lot of form development (see part one), the piece was constructed in CAD using Solidworks. This was then rapid prototyped.

The best part of working on a project for such a long time is when you finally get the material object in your hand. You have a relationship with it that no-one else does and probably ever will – you created it, after all. For me, the pleasure came with the size of the RP pieces. It was so much smaller when I actually grabbed it that I had expected. This was mainly due to having spent such a long time on the detail in the CAD, with it being large on screen, that I had forgotten how small the dimensions actually were.

Then came the fun part – the finishing. This is something that is overlooked by a lot of university courses it seems. To that extent, at the New Designers show in London, there were a large number of student’s concept models which weren’t made by the students at all – they were all outsourced. Where is the fun in that?

First and foremost, the RP pieces needed to be smoothed down. This involved using grey primer and yellow filler primer, along with various levels of sandpaper, to smooth it all out. Top tip: Using two colours means you can see how much you have sanded away when doing alternate layers.

This was then repeated for the end caps and the buttons, which needed to be especially smooth for the next process.

Both the end caps and buttons were made of rubber. This meant that the product had a greater resilience to being dropped (the end caps stuck out further than all other points), as well as helping with grip. To do this, a mould of the pieces was taken. Top tip: The silver balls (removed when casting the second piece)help to align the two bits of the mould when done.

Finally, once the end pieces had been cast, all that was left was to paint the main casing. This was done in a bright yellow, to aid the visibility of the product if dropped.

The end result?  Not too bad if I do say so myself.  Not only did the prototype work, but I saw it through every step of the way.  I worked on the sketches, on the form, on the electronics, on the CAD, and on the manufacture and finishing of the final piece.  Never underestimate how much you learn from doing a project end to end.  It’s something that in my opinion, every designer should do at least once.

I believe in products that work. You only have to go on a lot of design websites to see some beautiful concepts and renderings of products, that have no proof that they work, and indeed are often implausible or impossible.

When it came to this project I didn’t just want to create a concept. I wanted to create a working product. Something that could, possibly, be taken forward into production.  With the evolution of the research and the development leading more towards an electronics process, I decided to go all the way and start to prototype a GPS unit.

Just to add to the challenge of this, I had never done any electronics of this sort before, with the exception of spending two days coding a robotic arm to move a ping pong ball.  This was in an entirely different league.  Nonetheless, I went and bought myself an Arduino Uno and began to play around.

Tutorials on sites like Ladyada and Libelium were all really helpful, but very few people appear to have released code on creating data loggers using the Libelium GPS module (which I preferred due to its size).   After connecting up the GPS, the Uno and an LCD screen though, I started getting GPS data through.

This could then be combined with coding for the buttons and a menu system. Again, there is little in combining menus with GPS, especially for someone with NO knowledge of coding.  One incredibly useful site though was Coagula, who gives a really good analysis of a menu system (as well as the best code I found for one).

Once I was happy with the way the system worked, I moved down to a smaller board. The Nano is amazing for its size. It allowed me to fit all of the components inside a 39mm diameter tube – not bad for off the shelf components.  If you wish to see how it all fitted together; the schematic is below..

This was probably the biggest challenge I faced through my final year. I have to say, it is a great learning process, but if you aren’t into coding, stay away from an electronics based project.  If you are up for experimenting though, Arduino is the way to go. Some of the things you can do with it are unbelievable.

Background:

The numbers surrounding tree planting are scary.  Really scary.  With the introduction of Glastir in Wales in 2012, the Welsh Government is looking to plant 100,000 hectares of trees over 20 years.  If you plant one tree every 2m², that means a tree has to be planted every 2.5 seconds.

One of the biggest disincentives though comes with the recording of all the data that is needed to apply for woodland grants; farmers need to record compartment boundaries, as well as itineraries of the trees they are planting.

To make this process easier, the woodland plotter combines GPS technology and user entered meta-data about what is being recorded; all connecting to the MyForest system.  This allows users to record all of the information needed, in situ, then upload it straight into a woodland management system.  No tape measures, no graph paper, no fuss.

Below:

Shown here is a sample of some of the form development work that went into the woodland plotter.  This came from the angle of ergonomics and aesthetics, as well as the practical side of fitting in all of the components.  The product had to feel rugged and dependable, whilst also giving a positive emotive response when data was recorded, encouraging new planting.

Working in cooperation with Dremel UK, the product was developed by myself and four others as part of a wider design competition.  The project was based around the premise of creating a completely new product for the Dremel Hobby range, looking to new opportunities whilst still staying faithful to the brand and relationship that Dremel has developed with consumers and users.

The development was based entirely upon self-initiated user research, leading to a final presentation of concept including research, ergonomic testing, CAD, renderings and prototype models.

Named as the Winner of the Competition, below are some of the product renderings that I produced, with a little information about the product’s features taken from the promotional booklet that was produced. Enjoy!

DREMEL AIR COMPRESSOR
The compressor has more functions than just pumping air. Being an integral part of the product, it acts as a base. Easily transportable and featuring storage for all of the extremities, it allows for an ethos of ‘plug and paint’ – set up, plug it in and unleash your creative side.

DREMEL AIR STYLUS
Why have a set of brushes when you can have one tool that does it all?
A wide range of nibs provides different effects for whatever the hobby. Nibs can range from precise for detailed model painting, variable wide sprays for priming and even shaped for calligraphy and scrapbooking.

COMPACT STORAGE
Keeping track of your accessories can be a challenge, especially when your work surface is covered in craft materials. With nib storage inside of the compressor shell, loosing components is not an issue. Everything is kept safe and secure in one place, away from dust and stray specks of paint.

PAINT POD
The last thing you want to be doing when feeling creative is spending your time cleaning. The stylus’ paint pod makes this process simple and quick. Just unplug the pod you have been painting with, insert a pod filled with water and spray into the holster. In seconds the stylus is ready for use again.

WALL MOUNTED
Not everyone has a work surface dedicated to their hobby. When space is an issue, the compressor can easily be hung from a nearby surface, freeing up the area for un-cramped creativity.

DRIP TRAY
When placing the Air stylus back in its holster, any drips or spills are caught and drained into the drip tray. This can then be removed to empty and wash. Simple!

DESIGNED FOR MANUFACTURE
The forms of both the stylus and the compressor allow for easy tactile grips and an ergonomic feel, whilst still comfortably fitting all of the internal components. The shells of both are designed for injection moulding and rapid assembly, keeping production and assembly costs to a minimum without reducing the value to the consumer.

Special thanks must go to the rest of the team for all of their work. Keep an eye out for Dan Lee, Dan Blackford, Ben Healy and Luke Broderick in future! In the meantime, also keep an eye on the blog here, as I shall try and post some of the ideation sketches soon.

Before we get as far as a moulded steering wheel though, we need to develop a rig.  There are lots of questions to ask when constructing the interface for a supersonic vehicle; and all of them need a definitive answer.  What is it we need to know though?  Is it not just a wheel that attaches to a shaft?

With the exception of the shape of the grips themselves, we need to know how wide we will space them.  We need to know where we will have switches, where we will have triggers, and of course the obvious one – how many do we need.  We need to know what angle the wheel will be at, and what angle the grips will be at on the wheel (be assured, they are not the same thing!).

So, we need to construct a rig.  Something that can gather all of this data in one sitting (Andy Green is a very busy man!) and can be retained for reference afterwards.  Bring on the designer’s forever faithful friend – MDF.

The rig, although being small and slightly – how do I say it – blocky – may be simple, but when used and marked it provides all of the data needed to construct a steering wheel.  It is fully adjustable, pivots in all axis and is a cost effective and accurate way of doing what we need.

Next comes the fun bit.  Moulding it to Andy’s hands.  We coat the grips with clay and get Mr 1000mph to sit down and shape it to something he feels comfortable with.

Now you may think that this is not a particularly high tech method of working.  Surely the team designing the world’s fastest car would use something more fancy than modelling clay and some MDF?  Something with lasers perhaps?  Well the truth is we do, but we will come to that.  First though I must tell you that this is not as antiquated a method as you may think.

A few weeks after I had gotten Andy’s hands to mould the steering grips, I had the pleasure of visiting Kennedy Space Centre in Orlando, Florida.  What did I see on display there? Clay moulds in the shaped of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins’ hands.  It is a simple and effective way of understanding the ergonomics of a person.  Granted at NASA they had moulded the hands rather than the handles, but the principle is the same.  In primary school you draw around your hands to understand the size – we just do the same in three dimensions.

If it works for the first man on the moon, then the likelihood is it will work for the fastest man on earth (and we all know what these men talk about).

After a meeting with Andy, we set up the rig.  One a half packs of air drying clay were layered on the MDF spine, Wing Commander Green positioned at a desk in a similar position to that of the car, and thick racing gloves applied to give a more accurate representation of Andy’s hands in the vehicle.  Then we moulded the grips.  We shaped each grip around his hands, marking on the positions of buttons and triggers, pinches and grasps.  And that was it.  Once completed, we left the clay to dry.

So we ended up with a clay moulding of some steering wheel grips.  What happens next?  As simple as it would be to drill some holes in the clay and attach the switches, I have my doubts as to whether clay can handle the stern grip of Andy Green travelling at Mach 1.4.  What we need to do is create a CAD model of the steering wheel.  This can then be altered, stress tested and eventually manufactured out of something a little bit more sturdy.

But now comes the difficult task – converting a model from the physical to the electronic.  It could be done manually.  It would take quite a while, but it could be done.  There is however a much more efficient and accurate way of getting the data.

Men with lasers.

David Huson and Peter Walters from the Centre of Fine Print at UWE are masters in their field.  Experts in the application of digital technology in art, they were just the people we needed.  A friendly phone call to them and a quick explanation of what we were after and they clearly understood the problem and offered their services (UWE being a founder sponsor of the project has been invaluable).  A short walk later and I found myself in an office crammed full of electronic equipment that I expect I shall never fully understand.

Using lasers, David scanned the profile of each of the grips.  This was meshed with other scans to create a three dimensional model of each handhold.  Wonderful!  No long hours carefully measuring each cross section of the clay model. No problems trying to get the level of accuracy right.  One process, one highly accurate CAD model.

At this point you may think that the job is done.  We have a CAD model, we know how far apart the grips will go, at what angle they will sit and where the buttons will be.  Well, not quite.  In fact, we haven’t even begun the hard part yet.  Now we need to change this electronic copy of some clay moulded to Andy Green’s hands into a working model…

…But that is another story.

unted. This is a pivotal moment in the life of many young people, and events in these first few weeks, planned or unplanned, will leave a lasting mark.
One such event is the fresher’s fair, that time when hundreds if not thousands of students pile into a large marquee to get their hands on discounts, memberships and general booty. How can this massive event though, filled with various stalls and promoters, be so bad in terms of design?

Attending one such event, I was exceptionally selective with what I left with, being wary of signing away my personal information and at least attempting to take only the bits and pieces that interested me. I left with six bags.
Scrutinising later, I reduced this number to two – most bags were fairly empty. The first contained items I believed would be useful and that I would use. The second I threw away. That means that even with being selective, I still ended up with 50% rubbish. Not even beginning to talk about the environmental cost of this, that is an enormous amount of wasted money.

So, what was in the bags?

The first bag was full of exceptionally glossy fliers and leaflets.  This seems to have increased recently. Promoters are under the impression that the glossier the paper, the more attention will be paid to them. Wrong. Most had gone seriously over the top on the graphic illustration side, making them busy, indecipherable and eventually a wasted effort as they joined their friends in the bottom of my waste paper basket. Keep it simple and clean. I will receive a hundred of these. If I cannot understand it in three seconds you go in the bag.

Bag number two, the good bag, the bag I was to keep, was mainly full of things that I will not actually keep at all; consumables.  Chocolate, sweets, bananas, cookies; all will be gone in a matter of days with no memory of who gave them to me. Apart from that there were the inevitable discount cards for bars and restaurants (and dominos pizza aplenty) and what I call the ’stationary element’. This consists of anything that has a practical application; pens, mouse mats, bottle openers and even the occasional rubber duck.

So how does this all relate to user centred design?

For a starter, students love freebies. Whether it is because of an underlying rebellious nature or something to do with student economy, if anyone is going to try and get something for nothing it is most likely going to be a student. If you are going to design a stand that will get yourself noticed, you have to appeal to your demographic. The most successful and popular stands were giving stuff away. You give me a nice glossy flier? That will go into a bag. Something I can use though? That I may keep.
But then there is the question of what you give away, and this is where design is key. Consumables are great, but as mentioned earlier they are used and forgotten. A better choice is something practical. If you give a student something that they think they may be able to use in future, then the likelihood is they will do just that.

To begin with, it has to be aesthetically pleasing. Granted the product may be given away in a bag, but it may not. Make it stand out. Glossy products can look expensive (a good way of luring the poor or soon to be poor student) but bright colours also work well.
Then it has to be cheap to manufacture. You may give away hundreds or even thousands of these branded products, so make sure you are not going to regret the financial implications. Some stands make students pay for their products or memberships; a risky strategy, but if the consumer thinks that it will save them money in the long run it may pay off.
But finally, make sure it is practical. Stress balls are a popular choice, but will probably end up in a box on a shelf. You want to design something that will be used regularly, that will be seen often and promote your business.

So what is the general conclusion to draw from this?

If you want to promote yourself at a fresher’s fair then follow several key rules:
Endless flyering will get you nowhere
Entice with something that will make them think they are getting a great deal
Give them something stylish, practical and cheap – a pen, a mouse mat, a bottle opener, or an ingenious product that they know they will need. Look at your desk. How many branded pens do you have?

[Addition]
After writing this I looked through my room to find what I still had from my first year of university; pens, a mouse mat, a keyring torch, some bottle openers, some discount cards, a ruler with a puzzle in it and finally a stress ball, in a box, under my bed.

Every piece of design has a back-story, every product has a history and every exhibition involves a great deal of preparation.  The Bristol Design Festival though has far more going on in the background than could ever be written in a single blog post.  Whilst most are out enjoying the seemingly faultless blue skies that late May has brought us, many are huddled in workshops, arched over printers or slicing their fingers with paper-cuts as they try to finish off that last piece of work.

It is simply staggering the effort that is being put into making this year’s festival better than ever.  The amount of effort that is put in by the organisers of such a large show could not every justly be summarised, but what about the exhibitors themselves?  In the University of the West of England’s Product Design Workshops today, a flurry of students were sanding, sticking and putting the finishing touches to exhibition pieces that could affect their entire career.  Here we have projects that have been researched, analysed, prototyped, analysed again and engineered to finite detail, summarised in some cases on a single 2m by 1m board.  No pressure then.

Behind them though there is a further level of preparation.  Upstairs in a small, hidden room, an exceptionally skilled and committed technician is printing the display boards.  It sounds simple enough, but as the majority of people who read this blog will know; technology never quite performs as it is meant to.  Colour issues, bleed lines and technical hiccups (the sort that you can never really explain, they just happen) all mean that a great deal of effort is put in just to get the image on paper.

There is yet another level of preparation behind that.  The designers create the work, the work has got to be printed, but then the printed work needs to be mounted.  Again a simple sounding process, this takes a great deal of time and energy.  The boards need to be cleaned and prepared, the paper aligned correctly and stuck, the board trimmed, the frame built, the board attached to the frame… the list continues.

These various levels of preparation are all happening behind closed doors, ready to spring the clean, shiny and thought provoking final product upon the waiting public during the design festival.  This is all happening so that the designers can stand there, shake your hand and say ‘this is my work, what do you think?’.  UWE though is just one of the contributors to a festival  boasting over 500 exhibitors.  You do the maths.

In one week, you will have the opportunity to come and see some simply stunning examples of design.  I hope you will appreciate how great the Bristol Design Festival is, not just because of the quality or even the quantity of the work, but because of the effort behind it.

On an additional note, today I only got 2 paper-cuts.

Finally though, after sending some links through to various blogs, some of the design magazines have started to find the story, and seem to be pretty accurate.  I am just happy that I am quoted.  Pictures aren’t too bad either.

Core 77

Promotional Photograph, courtesy of Matt Ohman

Here are a few of the articles I have found thus far from the event, will update as I find more.

Daily Mail

Bloodhound SSC

Evening Post

UWE

BBC Points West

BBC General Press Release

ITV (News before the event)

Matt Ohman’s Photos (images from the event kindly uploaded by Matt)

West Business

Press Association

RAC (We all apparently designed the entire car now)

The National Newspaper (more of a general release, not so much on the cockpit fitting)

CBBC (for those of you who need the Bloodhound project explained in easy language)

Photograph of PDT Students with Andy Green (photograph by Matt Ohman)

Yes, we are working on the Bloodhound SSC. In terms of work, design and general enthusiasm, this has to be the biggest and best project we have done to date – and I am excited! Normally projects involve some sketch work, some CAD, maybe some innovative conceptual work, but all of this tends to be for mass manufactured products. Designing the test rig for the seat for a 1000mph car is a one off. There will not be lots of the seats made, tit will not be designed for everyone, and on top of that the car will only do several runs. As Andy Green said to us, this is a continuous experiment, not a corporate build.

There has only been one slight let down with the entire Bloodhound concept as far as I can tell though. The project is based here at UWE. The models have been made at UWE, and the first full scale mock-up is being built ten minutes from… you guessed it… UWE.

When you Google Bloodhound though, it is Swansea University that comes up with all of the hits. In fact, Swansea is second on the list, whereas UWE is tenth. On Wikipedia, under the heading of Design, it is stated “The School of Engineering at Swansea University have been heavily involved in the design of the vehicle from the start.”

As far as I can tell though, Swansea has been based around the aerodynamic testing of the design, and the general forces that revolve around it. The BBC upon the announcement of the project wrongly stated that the project was ‘being run by Swansea University’.

I am not angry with this. Swansea was one of my top choices of University. My brother and my parents both went to Swansea, and fair play to them they are promoting themselves for all that they can. Perhaps though UWE should take a greater interest in the promotion of the project. It has students working on it, it has events for the project based on its campus, and so now maybe it should update Wikipedia too…