howdy guys - thought i’d share my latest university project with you - it was the 5th term for me.
to make it short:
Honda R&D Europe asked our school to come up with concepts to attract Generation Z to the ever aging motorcycle market.
The briefing was very open - basically: young, european, urban market - 2- or 3-wheeled - package and drive within a realisable scope.
We were 15 guys, our prof, and honda heads of design +styling europe, which visited us in munich for kick-off+briefing, mid-term presentation and brought the japanese Honda Europe boss for final presentation. it was a great project, pity it lasted only 4 months- with results varying from café-racer-inspired e-bikes, unconventional 3-wheelers, abstract/sculptural dynamic approaches, ultrasmall mobility devices - pretty much everything. participants were from 3rd, 5th and 7th term - everybody made his indiviual design, but sketching and conceptwork was usually done together.
looking back, i’d say my design was one of the rather conevntional approaches. as usual, i know now what to improve - but anyway - what you see here, is the status of my final presentation. i’ll try to keep it concise and in the same structure- so here we go:
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- Concept
So since i am not a motorcyclist myself and don’t have a licence (the mother, you know ^^) i thought i should keep it simple and basic, when designing the story behind my bike. So split my concept and research work up into …
… where i focused on young, urban europeans close to finishing their studies, or just entering their first employment. I had a look at current trends, like the revival of analog photography, the hobby of restoring/customizing old racing bikes/fixies and of course the success of apple products in my target group. And what i thought was most interesting in these specific product profiles was the limited set of features of these things. people would pay more for products, that, on the data sheet, seemed inferior to other state-of-the-art competitors. For me this exemplifies the “DO-WANT”-factor - i believe people have a much closer emotional binding to these more purist products than to, in this specific case, dumbed-down point-and-shoot cameras, overly hightech bicycles with 200 gears or non-apple devices with a similar amount of card-reader and usb-ports. So i thought if i wanted to attract young people to motorcycling i’d have to keep it simple and cut all the integrated twitterservices, iphone charging - the stuff you see implemented in the ford fiestas these days - and try to focus on the essential feature - so my goal was to design a driving machine, for an urban market which wants to commute to work or uni.