The concept of Wheel Wagon arose from the ‘Reimagining Mobility’ course at the IDE faculty of TU Delft. We, five 3rd-year Industrial Design Engineering students were asked to think about future concepts to tackle today's problems society faces in mobility. This broad description of the assignment allowed us to frame the assignment to our liking. We started off by going out onto the streets and identifying problems we encountered. At this stage we found that there are a lot of shared vehicles in the Netherlands that are being trashed and not handled with care, which results in a bad streetscape (figure 1). 

 

Next, we interviewed people on the streets of Delft and the Airport of Rotterdam about how they experience mobility. We asked them why they were traveling the way they did in order to find out their motivations and needs regarding mobility. During this stage, six different persona’s were identified from which we chose one to design for after mapping them out. This persona is called, 'The Budgeting Cyclist’. Next to the identified personas we also found that a lot of people - especially at Rotterdam Airport - were willing to use more public transportation if it was more accessible than it is right now. 

 

After identifying the persona we wanted to design for, we explored the current technological field and the expected technological advancements and inventions regarding mobility. We linked the interesting concepts we could find to the NASA technology readiness levels (TRL) and the technology acceptance levels (TAL). By being aware of the TRL and the TAL of certain technologies, the feasibility within a certain time frame of concepts could be determined. Linking the user needs of our persona with these concepts and keeping the TRL and TAL in mind, we found that a lot of different mobility platforms exist, that the traveler’s mindset is relatively egocentric (self-focused behavior) and that it’s hard to find better alternatives for traveling to e.g. work or school. The problems we identified were not necessarily tech-based. 

 

Then, we took a deep dive in human fundamental needs since we were to create an incentive for people - especially for our persona - to actually use our concept. We did this by first looking at ourselves and reflecting on personal experiences that were enabled by ‘being mobile’. By linking these personal experiences to human fundamental needs and sub-needs we could think about what deeper meaning our concept could have. We came to the conclusion that the sub-needs of ‘convenience’, ‘meaningful activities’ and ’self-reliance’ are important to us and that we wanted to enable the user of our concept to achieve the same.

 

All the conclusions and findings of these stages were combined into a vision statement which was iterated on after presenting the described process and the statement to peers.

 

'Making multimodal travel more efficient and accessible for as many individuals as possible through improving current public transportation in the time frame of 3 to 8 years.' 

 

 After rephrasing we were asked to think about how our solution would be meaningful for our to-be users. Then we started iterating on the concept of a ‘fietscoupe’ or ‘bicycle compartment’ because this concept met our demands. By starting off with a sketch we performed the blossom method to elaborate the concept. By first dividing the concept into 8 parts/problems and thinking of 8 ideas per part, approximately 64 ideas and sub-ideas about the fietscoupe were created. After that, we discussed which sub-ideas we liked the most and decided to continue with a temporary concept. Comparing the options we had within the concept to the persona’s needs, our desired meaningfulness and the time frame (or TRL) we wanted to design for gave us the final concept of ‘Wheel Wagon’.