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…

It was Matt Tipping from ARNO though that really struck a chord with me. During his talk on point of sale design he highlighted a particular project that, although not relieving any of the stress, did make me feel a little better about the continuous deadlines we have had as of late. This project involved him receiving a brief, concepting a design, refining it, building it on cad and producing full working engineering drawings suitable for manufacture – all in 2 days.

Suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad. Lack of sleep, continuous concepting, stress and sore hands from drawing – and I am not alone! Perhaps this course is intended to not only push us, but to train us to the added pressure of the modern design industry?

Continuous pressure can never be a good thing, but the occasional trial and push for tangible results – as with the Peg RP Project – can be an invigorating process…

On the other hand though, it means I may not actually sleep until retirement…