Programme: Mechanical Engineering

Course: MT2569,  Design Thinking

Challenge: How can the safety around roadworks for the public be increased?

Solution: The project has concluded in a final solution that tackles a real issue affecting everyday people. The solution consists of an interactive sign that displays blinking colored light when insufficient distance is being kept between road users. Switching from emitting yellow and red light gives an interpretation of an increasingly dangerous situation. 

Impact: By informing and ensuring that the drivers adjust their distance to be safe, this will implicate that the safety around road works will increase.

Prototypes: Because of the tight time frame the team restricted the prototype to mainly focus on the design of the sign. Here the challenge was how the sign should be designed so it’s easily understood by drivers. To get an understanding about which design is best informative and understood, four different signs were selected and designed to be tested by the user in the upcoming step. The idea behind the sign was that it should be easily portable by the road workers, meaning not too heavy or difficult to set up, but still be big and clear enough so it’s visible for the drivers. Another important factor to be taken into consideration is how the sign should be lit up. Here three different colors were chosen; green, yellow and red. Together with this factor it is also interesting to investigate if the light should be still or flashing and how this affects how well understood the sign is. For the user to get a better understanding about the concept as a whole, a small scaled model was built to show how the sign would be implemented in a roadwork. The model showed how the sign would interact with the driver depending on their distance to the car in front.