Design case: Tata’s Nano

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Nora González Dwyer

Tata Motors has launched the cheapest car in the world with the purpose of providing a car with the minimum standards and affordable for many Indians.

Strategy:

It is an extreme case of design reduced to what is strictly essential; we have seen this in notebooks and other electronics already. Having a look at the features it includes, helps us picture the scene:

On the cheapest version the driver’s seat is the only seat which can be adjusted.

There is no power steering and various “luxuries”, such as air conditioning, fog lamps, front power windows or central locking are only available on pricier models. I don’t know about you, but I could do without front power windows if that would mean reducing the price of the car. For us, the ones that see the car as a big tool that helps us get from A to B, there is a big difference in the value of real functionality, such as power steering, and commodities that allow you to get lazy such as central locking.

It is a nice example of targeted design: rather than competing directly with the next cheapest car, it aims to substitute scooters and small motorbikes, with a price of Rs. 100,000 (around $2000).

Safety on the road – the Nano has a point here. Image from Joe Athialy

To meet all economical and quality requirements a good bit of innovation has been required. It is estimated that at least 35 patents associated with the vehicle have been registered.

Environmental issues:

This is one of hottest aspects of the Nano; on the one hand it is a car and it pumps out twice the CO2 as a scooter. On the other hand it has a 4-stroke engine and a crude catalytic converter which appears to reduce most pollutants by about 80 percent and which scooters lack of.

It also meets Euro-IV and Bharat Stage-III compliant, European emissions standards.

From my point of view, the problem here is not the Nano. Of course it will have a terrible effect on the already highly polluted cities in India, when the 50 million orders already placed for the car are delivered. But this is just the consequence of a barely existing public transport system in cities.

Now 50 million can… Image from Jaaziel

Indian cities are extensive and saturated with traffic, and on top of it most of the families can’t afford their own vehicle. This is cry for a well planed and far reaching public transport. If there are no measures taking in this direction, India will probably soon assume the car centred transport system, similar to the US, and then it will be really difficult to change things.

FromHere, an Application for Mobile Public Transport Information

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Alexis Brion

At Design vs Art we have been thinking for some time about how it would be to give users of public transportation the possibility of knowing in a fast way how to get from A to B in an extremly fast way. In this article I would like to give you some insights about the design of the fromhere application.

The Problem to Solve

Our agency is based in Munich, a city with a huge public transport network that takes people everywhere. The problem is that as the travelers get more options the network becomes more complex. Then, is very difficult for people to plan a journey without a computer with access to the online route planning system.

There are several services to check this information through a mobile phone but none takes advantage of the latest technology, like GPS.

The Solution

In the following video you can see a fast introduction to our design.

FromHere Application from Design vs Art on Vimeo.

We have been asking users of public transportation about the places they usually go. The answer was that most of them are regularly going to the same places, like work, gym and favorite cafeterias or bars.

So we decided to design an interface as simple as possible that makes the journey planning really fast, wherever the user is but going to those "standard" places. We decided to design our first solution for the iPhone as we realized that tapping on the destination would be the fastest way to do it.

The Interface

The fromhere interface is clean, it loads fast and eliminates any distraction other applications could have. For us, designing an interface that is fast and easy to use was our main goal.

The Technology

Thanks to GPS the telephone knows where the user is located. The application then connects to the server to translate coordinates to a real address, such as "Duesseldorfer Strasse 11, Munich".

In the next step the application requests the journey plan between departure and destination to the servers.

Contact Us

Please contact us if you need farther details about the application.

The official fromhere product information website is here: http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere

Creative Commons

You can use the contents of this article and video under Creative Commons Attributions License 3.0. Just link to http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere

Designs on Public Transportation Directions

Posted on June 9, 2008 by Alexis Brion

Google public transportation directions is a great tool. With it you can easily know how to get to an specific place using the best combination of buses, trains and other kinds of public transportation. This could be a great success in Europe, where people are used to go everywhere by public transportation.

The Power of Design

This kind of websites already exist in Europe but it is usually offered by local companies, like the city-specific Transport for London website. Unfortunately, most of these were not very successful adapting for the web great design developed previously for paper. Last weekend I stopped by the Munich central station to get a paper timetable, old style but easy to understand, even if you don’t speak German language. This is the German Trains timetable for the Berlin – Munich connection:

(click to enlarge)

The Copenhagen city transport website has a less lucky approach, as you can see in the picture below, reading is not that easy. (I use Copenhagen as an example but this is actually happening in several European cities like Munich, London and others).

(click to enlarge)

The Google Design

The Google Maps approach is by far the best I have found. It is clear, fast and has a printer friendly version. It is also highly interactive, something that others don’t have: e.g. the Munich website displays maps only in PDF format (horrible.)

If you are not familiar with the Google public transportation service, have a look at the following video for a quick introduction.