Heart 4.(Summer 2021)
The project was led by me in the role of a lead designer also working together with me was another designer, production manager for HUST's racing car, and the event & logistics manager. The project took place during the summer of 2021 with close collaboration with the company Dekorcenter in Laholm, Dekorcenter oversaw the foiling of the car and trailer. This project was one of the most complex projects I ever worked on because I had to coordinate three different deadlines (the deadline for the design team, the deadline for the production of the car, and the Dekorcenters deadline). For this reason, we chose to work very flexible with shorter designs sprints in a modified version of Scrum.
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The process started with a meeting with the affected parts of the team, under this meeting we made a brief covering the goal of the project, what guidelines to follow, and some core design decisions. In short, the decisions that were made were that the foiling should follow the team’s visual profile, the placements of the logos of the companies that are sponsoring the team. Usually, the car is not allowed to be in black due to the high temperatures in Australia can cause the car to overheat and put the driver at severe health risk. But due to the pandemic, the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge was canceled so we decided to incorporate the carbon fiber in the design and keep it visible.
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Mockups for foiling the race car
Mockups for foiling the trailer
Together with Dekorcenter, we set up deadlines for when the design team had to be done with the overall design. This meant that we also had to give the production team a deadline so that the car would be finished for foiling. We then worked in short sprints that lasted around one week, where each week focused on a new idea/concept, In three sprints we had six different koncept.
The six concepts were iterated in shorter sprints with feedback from the different teams. The first sprint was focused on feedback from the production team, under this sprint we realized there had been some constructional changes that would affect the design. The second sprint was focused on the placement of the sponsoring logos to make sure that no agreements were broken. The last sprint was with feedback from Dekorcenter to validate the designs before foiling.
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Mockups for foiling the race car
Mockups for foiling the race car
During the entire process, we worked with different digital tools like Figma, Adobe Suite, and Affinity suite to create the visual concepts. We also worked with some 3D rendering tools under shorter periods to produce a scaled model/sketch that was used as a basis for the design.
As earlier mentioned, the project was very complex because of the three different deadlines, during the project both the design team and the production team had delays. Were the production team missed the original deadline by five weeks. Due to the delay in production Dekorcenter was forced to halt the foiling due to vacations. Because I was in charge of the project, I had to continuously adapt both the deadlines and the planning of the project. Due to the delay, we had to change the designs to fit the narrow time frame.
Design concepts for the race car
The project was completed within the original time frame but the original design had to be changed because it would have taken too long to foliate. Even though I’m am pleased with the result I do still feel slight disappointment because the we couldn’t use the original design due to the lack of time left after the delayed production.
Despite all the delays, the project was a success and it was very fun to work with the foiling of the car and the trailer. I gain a lot of experience in project management as I had to create a brief as well as plan the entire process with regard to three different deadlines, two of which were external. It also gave me practice in working with 3D modeling programs and how to create a visual design that would work on physical objects like the car and trailer.
The trailer at Swedish Solar Race
The race car at eCar Expo 2021