Time needed: 60 minutes
Materials needed:
Setup:
A vehicle is a machine, like a car, truck, or motorcycle, that moves people or things from place to place. The kinds of vehicles people need are different depending on what the people do, where they live, and what they need to transport. Automotive design is imagining and creating new cars and other vehicles.
Creative designers are the people who create new vehicles. They choose everything from the color of the vehicle to the shape of the headlights. It’s a big job to design a vehicle, so there are many people on the design team who focus on designing different parts of the vehicle.
Activity:
For this activity, you’re going to design a brand-new vehicle that can help other people. You’ll brainstorm what your customer, the person who will be buying the vehicle, wants and needs before you sketch and sculpt a vehicle model.
Part 1: Meet your customer.
Market research is when designers use interviews, surveys, and product tests to learn what kind of vehicle their customers would like. For example, a designer might find out that people want a car that uses less gasoline or would love a purple truck. Whatever it is their customers want, designers want to know!
You have three options for your automotive design challenge. You can choose to design:
For the first part of the activity:
Part 2: Create your design criteria checklist.
Now that you’ve brainstormed what your customer wants and needs, you’ve gathered a lot of data! Data is just another word for information. When you think about data and use it to make decisions, that’s called data analysis. This is something creative designers do: they find out what their customer wants and needs and use it to create the criteria for their vehicle.
Criteria are the things a product, such as a car, needs to have. All vehicles need some of the same parts—like an engine and wheels—to make them move. Automotive design teams also add other parts, or design features, that make the vehicle even more useful or fun, or different from other vehicles. For example, heated seats are great to have if you live in a cold place. Cupholders and places to charge cell phones are helpful for people on the move.
It takes an entire team of creative designers to create a vehicle. For example:
For the next part of the activity:
Want More of a Challenge? Try This!
Automotive designers make sure their cars are safe—that's important for drivers, designers, and everyone involved. For example, they might choose materials to strengthen the body, look for ways to make the seats and dashboard better at protecting people, or design windows that won’t shatter.
They also want their vehicles to be sustainable. Sustainable products are usually better for the environment. For example, automotive designers might think of ways to reduce pollution, make the vehicle go farther with less fuel, or use renewable materials in their design. Vehicles may be made in a way that creates less pollution by using cleaner forms of energy and more eco-friendly materials.
If you want more of a challenge, add criteria for parts or special features that make your vehicle safer or more environmentally friendly.
Or, add other criteria to your checklist. For example:
Part 3: Sketch your vehicle.
After creative designers have an idea for a new vehicle, they sketch many different pictures of it. They’ll draw the exterior of the vehicle and the interior. If there’s a special feature or part they want to showcase, they might sketch a picture of that, too. This helps creative designers to think about every part of their design.
Once designers have their ideas drawn on paper, they can share their sketches with their teammates. The team can work together to look over the sketches, ask questions, identify any problems, and exchange ideas to make the design even better.
For the next part of the activity, use your imagination and criteria in the Vehicle Design Guide to:
If you need ideas, check out the tips for sketching on page 4 of the Vehicle Design Guide.
Part 4: Sculpt your vehicle.
What’s even better than a picture to help people understand your design? A model! Automotive design teams have many ways of creating models of their vehicles. Each model helps others to understand the design in a different way. For example, the model might be of the entire car, the interior, the exterior, or even a particular part or feature.
The team might create models digitally on a computer, with the help of technology like a 3D printer, or use a material like clay or wood. For example, a digital sculptor uses computer programs to model digital versions of their designs.
Next, you’re going to be a clay sculptor! That’s a person on the design team who sculpts models of the vehicle out of clay.
For the next part of the activity, pretend to be a clay sculptor and:
If you need ideas, check out the tips for sculpting on page 6 of the Vehicle Design Guide.
And that’s it! When you imagine what the customer wants or needs, you're doing what a creative designer does. You used what you learned about your customer to create a list of the design criteria, including all the important parts and special features for your vehicle. Then you used your criteria to sketch and sculpt your vehicle.
If you had fun doing this, you might want to continue designing vehicles with the Brownie Automotive Engineering three-badge series.
Troop Leaders: The instructions for all badge steps are available free of charge in the Girl Scout Volunteer Toolkit.
Girl Scout Activity Zone activities have been adapted from existing Girl Scout programming.
Interested in creating the future of vehicles? Check out the videos below to find out what it's like to have a job in automotive design, engineering, and manufacturing.