Customizing the Exterior of a Toyota Through Digital Design and Technical Work

Luckily, my father had an untouched car that needed to be designed and assembled further. I realized that this little dream of customizing a car could come true. Therefore, I grasped the opportunity. My goal for my personal project is to learn first hand about a race car bodywork and research about car livery. Then, to digitally design a customized livery and assemble the exterior of a Toyota Corolla. This is a highly challenging goal because the process of assembling the car exterior’s parts is complex, requires numerous steps, knowledge, and precision. Creating an attractive customized design for the livery (requires a great amount of creativity, digital art skills, and precision. This project requires in-depth first-hand learning and primary research about the race car body to screw particles together and in-depth primary and secondary research about designing the car livery. Time and commitment are required to produce the final outcome of the customized car.

Global Context

My personal project engages with the global context of Personal and Cultural Expression greatly. The global context focuses on expressing oneself and/or one’s cultural background through various forms. My PP requires the expression of oneself; one’s creativity, personality, feelings, or ideas through a medium. By digitally designing its exterior based on my own likings aesthetically, I’m able to personify this car through artistic endeavor. There is also a Wayang illustration that expresses a sense of cultural essence from my homeland, Indonesia. The mechanical process and digital design highlight personal expression, and the cultural illustration highlights cultural expression. This is the relevance of the Global Context of my Personal Project.

Product

The final product is a fabulous purple car exterior showcasing fire illustrations that is very well assembled. I created those illustrations because it is very fitting for a race car due to the vibrant colors, and the fire illustration gives a great illusion of a fast car. I decided to put a Wayang illustration to bring out an essence of culture, and to appear with the Indonesian flag illustration later on in races. When racing, racers do represent their country therefore I wanted to put the essence of Indonesia’s culture to it.

Reflection

This project has allowed me to simultaneously work on personal and cultural expression. At first, I thought it was near impossible to incorporate a cultural essence to cars, or car racing. However, working with the global context taught me that I can reflect on my personal interest, and at the same time, incorporating the essence of my culture in this interest. I learned how to successfully combine these two types of expression in my product. Anything is achievable with proper planning and action.

Digital designing was a skill that I developed immensely. I had to create sketches, drafts, and constantly went over them to improve them. At first, I know of digital designing as simply drawing lines on a screen. But with the process, I realized that the beauty of the art is very present, it is more than just lines on a screen. I transformed artistic “mistakes” into delicate illustrations, going through the experimentation process, being able to express a long-lived dream, and feeling delighted with the final design. Additionally, I was able to improve my technical competence by being able to use various hand tools and assemble things with them, which is an important life skill.

IB Learner Reflection

This project has allowed me to grow further with the IB learner profiles, as an IB student. Throughout this long process, it is evident that all of the IB learner profiles were used in order to finish my personal project. Although, there were a few profiles that I used more than the other, and these profiles are the most notable; risk-taker, thinkers, and balanced.

The trait of being a risk-taker could be seen the minute I made the decision to customize the exterior of a Toyota for my Personal Project. Firstly, the process needed to finish this project was something that I was not experienced in, or familiar with. In the beginning, I was not a risk-taker but this project improved my risk-taking skills as I had to step out of my comfort zone and create a final product that was very unfamiliar and challenging for me.

There were various ways that I needed to use my thinking skills, and this promotes the profile thinkers. I used my creative thinking skills to create a flattering livery design and my critical thinking skills were used to conceptualize the whole project and my research. This project has required me to work on my problem-solving skills, brainstorming, decision making, and learning skills on a daily basis. By doing these activities, I have enhanced my thinking skills drastically.

Being a balanced student is ideal when working on a personal project. I had to be able to put a great amount of effort into my academic work, but also still being able to enjoy the social and personal aspects of being a student. At first, I was not a balanced student, but this project has improved this issue because it was crucial for me to be able to create timelines, checklists, and become an organized student. I was able to balance my time wisely to reduce stress and get a lot of things done. Overall, I was able to balance my time, work, and leisure due to the positive habits I picked up while working on my Personal Project.