Exploring on Innovative Approach to Vehicle Packaging Design Ideation Using a LEGO-Type Interactive Toolkit

This abstract explores how interactive learning tools aid automotive design students to enhance visualisation of complex systems. For this reason, a creative package building kit has been designed and developed. In vehicle Design Process, Vehicle packaging and ergonomics plays a pivotal role in setting up the boundaries for design exploration. Automotive design students face challenges in visualising and comprehending vehicle packaging requirements during initial ideation and conceptualisation phase. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of a play-oriented design tool in the initial vehicle package design ideation process. The approach involves the creation of a play-oriented design kit inspired by LEGO. This kit comprises of blocks to construct diverse vehicle packages and their corresponding subsystems, all scaled at 1:10. The creative package building kit is characterised by its customisable blocks with expandable length and width. The creative package building kit was used to conduct experiments to understand the impact of the tool in enabling the initial ideation of package development among both automotive design students and professionals. An experiment was conducted with 9 Automotive Design students to compare the role of the Creative Packaging Kit against traditional visualisation tools like Sketching and 3D modelling, whose package design ideas were evaluated on a variety of aspects including idea fluency and creativity. From the study, it has been observed that the creative package building kit allowed Automotive design students to explore design concepts related to ergonomics and packaging in a more practical and engaging manner in comparison to sketching and 3D modelling techniques. The results showed that the kit will help designers to create more creative and innovative vehicle package ideas and increase engagement in the process.