PROJECT 1: What Can a Starship Do?
Starships robots are automated, autonomous bots that deliver food and other goods to students living on college campuses.
Project Overview
Starship robots are a very popular at Purdue University, but across many other college campuses. In this project, my team explored ways in Starship robots could be utilized for another purpose other than food delivery at Purdue. Our design process involved:
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Background research of the Starship robots (to understand limitations)
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Brainstorming and design creation/ideation (sketching)
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Conducting interviews with Starship users
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Creating scenarios with our alternate Starship design
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Storyboarding our scenarios for the parking spot reserver design
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Collecting user feedback on our idea after our presentation and reassessing our idea
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Making final changes on our final design, storyboard, and journey map with our ideas.
Through this process, my team was able to develop our alternate (parking reservation) idea for the Starships.
Initial Designs, Research, and Ideation
Our first step was to brainstorm ideas for our Starship. My group began by sharing personal experiences and grievances with the Starship. This was a good starting point since we came up with some various possible designs, including a snow plow starship, a parking spot reservation starship, a pharmaceutical starship, and a guide starship.
We then thought out the pros and cons of out these idea and sketched the ones we were most confident in. After that, we narrowed our idea down to the parking spot reservation starship through team discussion. After deciding on our final design, my group presented our concept during our interviews with previous Starship users.
Initial concept sketch for our final idea
Analyzing Data and Affinity Diagraming
My interviewee helped give my group some ideas of features we could implement in our new design. My team took his suggestions, as well as the feedback from all of the other interviewees. This allowed us to go forward using the perspectives of each interviewee and where they overlapped, to help us in choosing our design space and furthered our understanding of which features were most desired.
Storyboarding
In addition to interviews, my team also began our first storyboarding, which started a discussion about other possible features of the Starship. After this, my team did some more research using Google Scholar and Purdue Libraries. The findings from our search reinforced the core ideas about how our starship would work and made us think about issues we needed to address.
Problems Addressed
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The Starships would have bigger, taller flags, reflective tape on the body, as well as a flashing red light on top
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You still need a Purdue parking pass to park. The app would show you which spots are open for free, then there would be a fee to reserve a spot. One does not need to reserve a spot to park, it simply guarantees you a spot during busy times.
Different Passes
People Picking Up Starships
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There are many things that dissuade people from picking up Starships. First of all they are heavy and large, making them difficult to pick up, and they make a loud alarm if you do manage to pick them up. Secondarily we will have a system where if there is a car parked in a reserved spot that doesn’t match the license plate that is supposed to be there, Purdue parking will be contacted, a ticket will be issued, and the person who reserved that spot will be assigned a new spot. If the parking lot is full, the person will be given two free parking reservations as well as a new spot in another lot.
Starship-Car Collisions
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Starships will follow a predetermined path around the lot. They will use their already built in collision avoidance system to dart out of the way if a car starts to back out or a car veers into its path. Their goal would be to stay out of the way of traffic. Additionally, having Starships roaming parking lots could encourage drivers to drive in a safer manner, as many drivers create dangerous driving conditions in parking lots.
Final Steps/ Storyboard
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Our final step was to present to the class the storyboards and journey map as well as the new ideas we gained from activities and secondary research.
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The final design for our Parking Spot Reservation Starship took into account all of the feedback we had received from peers and interviewees. We believe that the Parking Spot Reservation Starship would be an effective use for the Starships and could help to address the parking issues on campus.
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If my group was to move forward with this idea, our next step would be to contact Purdue parking as well as the owners of the Starship on campus and pitch our idea to them.
