1 - Thumbs Up
Contents |
Team Members
- Ondrej Valka
- Mark Skinner —> twitter
- Jonathan Melhuish —> twitter, blog, photos
- Ollie Brunnell
- Ben Argo —> twitter
Additional copies the photos of our design process are on Flickr
link:Youtube video of presentations
Context
Our idea is based on the two concepts of car sharing and hitchiking. Both these ideas have proven relatively popular and common in other cultures, but not in the UK. In the UK, many major cities have implemented schemes to try and encourage commuters to car share, very few of them have taken off, and cities continue to be conjested. Our project aims to try and recognise the problems with the car sharing schemes and provide a credible solution.
In countries such as Germany, sticking out your thumb can get you a lift within 4-5 cars going past, and the Germans seem much more open to hitchhikers than the British public.
Brainstorming
We decided to focus on improving the environmental aspect of commuting, by trying to reduce the number of cars on the road. To this end we set ourselves the challenge of creating "a carsharing service so good that car drivers would use it".
We then broke down the challenge into key sub-challenges:
Comparing ThumbsUp to other options to distill the Unique Selling Points:
Study of the daily routine of one potential user (Ollie) to identify how ThumbsUp would fit in:
Final Presentation Slides
Our final presentation slides can be found as a PDF here.
Working Material
Presentation (video)
Watch the interim and final presentation of Team 1 Thumbs Up:
- postscript - I've since come across a commercial product that solves this problem in a very similar idea (which provides some validation of our design process, yay): http://www.avego.com/
