Course: Product Design II
School: Carnegie Mellon University
Role: Ideation, Sketching, Physical Prototypes
Year: 2012
How do you capture a brand?
Just show a logo, easy enough. But how do you capture a brand without the logo? That's the challenge I faced in designing this electric shaver in the style of a BMW Five Series. Our task was to create a companion product or accessory for a specific car brand by utilizing the brand's visual form language to make the product feel connected to the brand.
Research first
This project began by researching our assigned car company in a small group. After hours of research and observation, we compiled a style guide to visually explain the BMW Fives Series. Cars are such complex visual systems that the details can easily be overlooked, and this guide helped us understand the details while designing our product. In this guide we describe the brand's rich history, milestones, and features in order to explain the brand's overarching visual language. After breaking down the details of the series, we chose to use the E39 M5 as inspiration for our individual designs. Along with the style guide, we created personas of people who would own the car. These personas informed us of what products would be appropriate companion products for the car.
Thinking through the details
It was a major challenge to sift through all the information we had collected, prioritize and decide on which aspects of the visual language to include in our design. For my design,I looked at the parallel lines of the form, the curvature of the bumpers, and the grill for inspiration. I focused on capturing the overall stance of the car.
I worked back and forth between hand sketching and sketch modeling with blue foam. These rough blue foam models guided my final form model, which I constructed out of high density foam and coated with gray primer.
