Dorsol: Autonomous Vehicle for Accessibility
Overview
MakerUSA is a 501c3 Nonprofit whose goal is to unlock the potential of students living in marginalized communities in order to fundamentally change their direction, across everything from social mobility and racial equity to economic competitiveness, the environment, and national security. The organization aims to do this by leveraging making, skills, and project-based learning as the vehicle to drive success.
Goal
Help shape MakerUSA’s mission and vision through storytelling, UX, and visual design.
Outcome
The concept video, website, and 2022-23 Prospectus helped support M
akerUSA’s rapidly growing community and served as valuable assets for continued funding from trusted investors like NACCE, Arconic Foundation, and Genentech.
ROLE
METHODS
TOOLS
TIMELINE
Art and Design Consultant
METHODS
UX, interviewing, video editing, presentation design, layout design
TOOLS
Squarespace, XD, Premiere, Zoom
TIMELINE
Jan. 2022 - Jan. 2023 (12 months)
PROJECT DETAILS
Timeline
Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
(4 months)
Tools
- Google Drive
- Keynote
- Adobe XD
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- Procreate
Role
- Naming and Visual Identity
- Ethnography
- Presentation Design
- Website Mockup
- Video Produc
tion
Team
PROJECT MANAGER
Michelle Zamora
BUSINESS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT Spring Fang
ILLUSTRATOR
Changyu Li
About Dorsol
Dorsol is an imagined autonomous vehicle designed and built for personal use that specializes in accessibility.
My Why
I was excited to get my feet wet in an exciting, new, and unfamiliar industry.
Outputs
THE GOAL
Envisioning the future.
Focussing heavily on ethnographaphic research and empathizing with customer needs.
CHALLENGE
Self-driving is controversial.
This project provided ample opportunities for brainstorming, collaboration, futuring, and world building. We considered questions like:
-
As a mother, would you let your 7 year old child go to school in your personal av?
- Will it be legal for a blind individual to own a personal av?
- How might city roads and infastructure adapt to more av’s on the road than human-operated?
Based on our research, we aimed to design a personal av rather than a public car service like Uber and Lyft. We were encouraged to dream big, thinking about what the world of transportation might look like in fifty years.
APPROACH
Trust is king.
Our guiding question: Would you trust it to take your grandmother to the grocery store and back safely? We developed a persona and crafted interview and survey questions. A small sample of twenty-five 22-35 year olds presented insights which we folded into the final car design.
For naming and branding we hosted a naming workshop. Dorsol was our final choice and was derrived from a list of names of marine life. Dorsol characterizes the dorsal fin of a dolphin, whose shape is used in the brandmark. We imagined Dorsols navigating city streets safely and with tremendous agility and balance, like a school of fish.
SOLUTION
Accessible, personal, electric, autonomous.
The ad represents a grandmother going to pick up her grand daughter in potentially dangerous driving conditions (at night and in the rain). It says to our biggest customer base (35-45 year olds), “Trust us to take care of your mother and your kid.” We designed a mockup of the website to better tell the Dorsol story. Sketches represent different iterations of our design.
