Client: Denso / Media Lab
Year: 2015
Product: Denso Concept Seat.
As part of the autonomous vehicle platform project, we wanted to envision alongside it a car interior of the future. Denso, a multi-billion dollar japanese company, asked us to envision what that might look like. As autonomous vehicles become a thing of the present, where driving is no longer needed, consumers will likely focus on other factors that contribute to their experience in the vehicle, such as comfort, feel, and luxury.
Together as a team, we brainstormed, designed, and prototyped a bio-inspired breathing car seat with heating and cooling elements that oozes luxury. The design focuses on a fractual like pattern similar to vestiges and water pathways that you might find on leafs. These vestiges would help keep the user warm and cool depending on the season and temperature.
My Contribution:
There was three stage of development for the project as mentioned above, brainstorming, designing, and prototyping. I helped most with the designing stage and the prototyping stage. I learned about computational design using grasshopper and rhino to mathmatically render the fractual like design of the car seat that mimics the leaf vesticles. Additionally, I 3D printed the designs to get a sense of how air might flow through the structures as well as to get a feel of the structure itself. A big part of the whole process is iteration, as we continue to iterate and iterate, testing out different concepts.