Chapter 4: Participatory Design Experiments – Gaining Context-Sensitive Insights
4.2 Stage 0: Design of PD Toolkit - Design and Development of 3D Generative Toolkit as an Aid for
4.2.4 Design and Fabrication of Concrete Toolkit
This section will explain design considerations in developing the 3Dimensional
‘concrete’ toolkit and fabricating it.
4.2.4.1 Design Considerations
Carefully designed ‘concrete’ toolkit needed to have elements that are identifiable and offered less abstraction.
Passengers: Passenger components must look like human beings rather than ‘abstract’
boxes. When user participant picks up this element, he/she becomes conscious of human being’s limits, strengths, experiences (both physical and psychological needs).
However, as designer practitioner himself, the researcher is aware of the fact that both seating postures in two-wheeler and four-wheeler are different. Same toolkit must allow participants to come out with variations in configuration. It is a design challenge.
Luggage: More realistic luggage boxes should be planned with different volumes and sizes. A participant must be able to pick and choose from different volumes of luggage boxes, which in turn gives us their clear requirement. It was also more important to allow users to have flexibility of placing it anywhere as per their requirement.
Wheel: After first prototype and with the researcher’s own experience, wheels are the most important aspect of the participatory toolkit. The way wheels are placed in the side-view and front-view decides wheelbase and wheel track. Flexibility must be offered for options between choice of two-wheeler, three-wheeler, four-wheeler or more. After careful thought, wheels assumed the starting point of the participatory activity. So, the challenge was to arrive at a model that first allows placing specific number of wheels and some rough wheelbase. However it being a flexible system, the participant is free to change numbers and arrangements freely.
Frame/Body: The participatory toolkit must allow a good body or frame for the basic configuration of vehicle to be identified. When designing, care has to be taken to avoid any biases for/against any vehicle configuration. The designed configurations could be scooters, motorcycles, cars, three-wheeler vehicles etc. Once these considerations were
articulated, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that there is an inherent sequence in such toolkits starting always with wheel and then following it with corresponding elements.
4.2.4.2 Design of Concrete Toolkit
A new refined version of the ‘concrete toolkit’ was built keeping the same basic grid used in the ‘abstract toolkit’ built earlier. This would help participants to see continuity and inter connectedness of the experiment they are to undertake.
STAGE 1 – DEFINING THE GRID
Like the abstract toolkit, the design of the concrete toolkit also started with superimposition of entry-level two-wheeler over entry-level car (Figure 4.4) in Adobe Illustrator software. For easy manipulation, a CAD model was made using Rhino software by scaling it down to 1:10 proportion. The vehicle frame was suitably segmented as shown in Figure 4.9.
Figure 4.9: Breaking the vehicle architecture to various sub-segments
The Vehicle segments depicted following elements:
1) Passenger 2) Seat
3) Bottom Platform 4) Top Platform 5) Luggage 6) Wheels
Basic elements, having been identified, the drawings were ready to be taken forward for modeling.
STAGE 2 – 3D MODELING AND SLICING
The 2D drafting was transferred to a 3D model. The model was sliced (Figure 4.10) in relation to various segments of its architecture.
Figure 4.10: 3D Modelling and 3D Slicing, Splitting 3D model, Segmentation of Model
4.2.4.3 Components of the Concrete Toolkit
BASEPLATE
After slicing, the model was segregated into various segments as shown above and a base plate was initiated to stabilize the wheels, which could help the participants to focus on building up from the wheelbase.
Figure 4.11: Baseplate design, Placement of the wheels
Having done on CAD, the base plate (Figure 4.11 A, B) was chosen to be transparent in
would deliver promising possibilities. A base platform was designed with multiple possibilities to place wheels over them.
WHEELS
Wheels (Figure 4.12) were made to look more realistic, with black ring on the white disc. Passengers, Luggage and frames were in white.
Figure 4.12: Wheels fabricated in dual colour in acrylic
PASSENGERS
The passenger models were aligned into the main model to get better proportion towards the concrete idea of the passenger. A modular version of the seating posture was encompassed with seats for the same. Multiple permutations and combinations were tried using the software to understand concrete concept identity. Human figures were made in such a way that they could easily be placed on two-wheeler concepts as well as on four-wheeler concepts (Figure 4.13, Figure 4.14).
Figure 4.13: Passenger Mannequins fabricated in acrylic
Figure 4.14: Passenger placed in vehicle architecture.
LUGGAGE
Luggage boxes (Figure 4.15), seating spaces were actually made with one side open boxes in order to relate with a real vehicle.
Figure 4.15: Luggage box configurations
BOTTOM AND TOP PLATFORM
Bottom and top platform as shown in Figure 4.16, Figure 4.17 were made in different configurations to allow participants to make different vehicle forms with different roof options like covered and open.
Figure 4.16: Bottom and Top platform
Figure 4.17: Top platform
4.2.4.4 3D Layout and Simulation
Simulation (Figure 4.18) was done on computer to try different configurations (Figure 4.19). Results seemed more practical and doable. Later the development drawing of the model was released and a prototype was built in for various experiments with the participants. Detailed drawings are in Appendix 4B.
Figure 4.18: Modelling the various segments in the vehicle Architecture
A development drawing developed for abstract toolkit was taken as reference for digital fabrication of the concrete toolkit. This was then taken to a laser cutting machine for cutting and subsequently joining each plate with hand using gluing agent- chloroform.
Acrylic sheet with thickness of 3mm was used. The model had generated a playful
architecture incorporating new material sense, identity and texture with tool. This resulted in a better interaction of ideas amongst participants.
Figure 4.19: Simulated model of one of the Permutation and Combination