Saturday, September 6, 2008

Concept

My project is about measuring the environmental impact a car has on the environment.
 
My first concept is for a small portable calculator that can be purchased by prospective car buyers.
4 easily found fields are put into the system's interface - the car's manufacturer, fuel type, as well as its combined cycle fuel consumption and emissions, which can be found on the sticker of the windscreen of all new cars.  
 
The calculator then processes this data, and illuminates a light in a colour between red and green - red being an exceptionally uneconomical car and green being an exceptionally economical one.


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3 comments:

Student Contributor said...

It's a very great and innovative idea - it'll help consumers or even better, us designers help identify economic cars within an instant. You might want to steer away from the whole 'electrical' punching in info stuff though...maybe use a knob to twist to the desired year or model or whatever? just a thought! good luck with the rest of your concepts.
-Annie

Student Contributor said...

Hi, you've picked an excellent quantity/quality to measure here as prospective buyers, these day s definitely have fuel consumption and emissions as high priorities. As our brief says our 'idea must be simple, economical and clever to compete with the traditional idea of measuring’. I don't really see how your product differs from a normal calculator used to work out comparative fuel and emission information when deciding upon a car purchase. Maybe you could simplify the product and reduce cost by creating a wheel type chart (sometimes consulting engineers have these for unit conversions etc.) that you twist certain rings to match the cars information, which will ultimately give you a qualitative/quantitative rating or colour as you’ve shown. I like how you’ve used green and red to indicate the environmental friendliness, a great idea which simplifies information communication. It’s just a calculator specifically designed for something i can already do on my own calc doesn’t seem that useful......to me, that’s my point of view. But good job so far mate!

Daniel Dob.

Robbie said...

I agree with Daniel - it's hard to see how this measures in a new way - maybe work on the inputs to give the user some new kind of info? As you said this is your first, so explore this with the other concepts.

-Robbie