The Future of Personal Moving

Moving made easy for everyone.

Packing and moving can be stressful. Technology is advancing and opens possibilities to create better ways of relocating your goodies.

Storyboarding & Research Artifacts

Onsite Research: a journey with the user.

We performed an ethnographic research study via a Tesla test drive.
Interviews from onsite moving companies offered many insights into how our users understood moving, trailer rental, and overall trailer usage.

Futures Thinking: concepts & direction

We built a mind map with Futures Thinking. This allowed us to look at possibilities that may shape the future through multiple lenses. This kind of thinking gave us various concepts and directions for ideation that we may not have had before.

The Iterative Cycle: designing with users in mind.

With users and their needs at the forefront, the design iterations began.
These ideations were talked over, scrapped, and built upon for new iterations as research and concepts were introduced and reintroduced.

Sensor Mapping: perceiving user needs.

Six different sensor types were used throughout the system to create the physiology of the autonomous trailer allowing it to see, hear, and even feel the user and their needs.
Primary research gave way to first iterations of sensor mapping, while the final sensor map includes a GPS and Bluetooth (and eventually updated to 5G where needed) link between system components.

Final Sensor Map

An autonomous trailer design that satisfies the user's needs while introducing advanced safety technology.
Paired autonomous dollies allow every user the ability to move their belongings with ease.
Application and rear window interfaces allow users to interact with autonomous system.

Exploring the Final Design:

Final Thoughts

As with any project, there were some noteworthy things and some things that simply did not work out.

Working within our strengths and maintaining proper communication was paramount to this fast-paced project.
Revisiting and synthesizing our research to better understand our user and their needs was an ongoing process.
Dividing the workload by our foreseeable strengths does not always play out how we want. Getting out of the comfort zones of our usual work and deliverables can push us as individuals to come up with interesting and unexpected concepts.