Hello there! We are
, two Industrial Design Engineering students and we were asked to write a blog post about our design proces during our MINI computer mouse project.
Graphic Language of Products is an Industrial Design Engineering master course. The assignment of the course was to develop a computer mouse for a given brand. Obvious explicit graphic elements like the logo are not allowed in the design. The students had to analyse the brand values and the design language of the brand and had to translate it into the design of the mouse.
The chosen brand for this assignment is MINI, the British automotive marque owned by BMW which specialises in small cars.
Of course the brand was analysed in detail, but that part is skipped in this post, because that will make this post very long and maybe a bit boring to read.
After the analysis it was time for sketching and conceptualizing! A lot of sketches were made and led to a 2D, 2,5D and a 3D MINI mouse concept. Typical MINI elements were used to turn the mouse into a MINI mouse.
With some dimension drawings of the concepts. Two sight models were crafted by hand, out of the hard orange foam, in the DesignLab mWorkshop. The models were being used as a form study. One model that stayed true to the drawings and one model that was more experimental.
After a lot of sawing, shaving, scraping and sanding the models’ basic shape was there. The models were slightly different, but both models have that MINI feel.
At that moment a choice had to be made and the smoother, more symetrical shape was chosen for further detailling.
In the further detailling it was key to make the surface of the model as smooth as possible, so a high gloss could be obtained after the spray painting and varnishing.
We finalized our design by incorporating ‘fun’ user features in the MINI mouse. This entails the design of the interface, use, control, customization and packaging of the MINI mouse.
