Week 6

Ideating forms for vehicle seats - to have further direction for CAD. This will help develop a basis for the 3D Model in Fusion360/Solidworks which can resolved and iterated in the coming weeks.

Visualising the interior space via sketching and digital sketching overlays shows a set objective for what I would like to achieve with my CAD model and overall design. The thought behind and importance of this sketch was to convert words/idea to an image which can receive feedback. This showcases the vision I had for the vehicle interior and forms I would like to achieve when modelling. Although, the design and sketch at this point gives an overview of the interior, it does not resolve or explain how the panels will function and what mechanism will the seats work on to facilitate the desired features.

Due to having freedom of scale and minimum constraint on the size of the vehicle, more focus was put on how these forms will work together with each other while the mechanism is important but was assumed it can be resolved later when working in scale within a CAD software. This gave me a good amount of freedom to focus more on the visual language of the interior. Further, while the concept relies on the idea of rotating panels/seats to facilitate a private and social environment it is important to consider where does this interior visual "feeling" for this transport option come from - will it be inclined more towards public transport or will it provide your personal pod?

As the project revolves around merging the two - Public and Private transport option. I aim to take in account the characteristics of both with further development of the concept and detailing. For instance, both interior and architecture of a car differs from a public bus yet access to this vehicle leans towards a bus while interior leans more towards a private car. Hence, a need of handrail for assistance while accessing the vehicle comes to mind whereas individual seating drives a need for a cup holder.

Ideating Public Transport Inspired Seating - While ideating these the main objective was to play around with current seat design which exist in buses and trains and apply the ideas to facilitate privacy and access for the vehicle. Here the design aims to integrate panels and rotating mechanism to achieve the desired seat design for the AV. The seat here was considered to be broken down into two major parts as any other seat - Back rest and Base Support. Possible mechanism were considered which can allow folding, rotating or flipping the two elements to provide customisation within the vehicle interior space. These 4 forms were mostly influenced by public transport seats but aspects such as cup holder, interface, feature control, cup holder, storage etc. were still taken into consideration.

Exterior 01 Sketches - with side door access to the vehicle.