How to reduce tear on roads during winter season
The project is about to reduce the damage on the roads that occur from vehicles that use studded tires during the winter season. The drivers use the studded tires for about 4 months on dry, wet, and icy roads. The time that the vehicles drive on the roads on dry days damages the roads substantially. This increases the need to repair roads and is expensive for the municipality. The roads start to deform and this is also a risk for water to gather and make it more dangerous for the drivers. When the roads are being damaged, small particles are released and affect us and nature. The salt that is used can also be a problem for nature, when the snow melts from the salt, the salt and water mixture go through the asphalt and down to the earth and are also problematic for nature. Salt on the roads can also lure animals to the roads, the animals like to lick the salts on the roads, this raises the risk for people to occur in accidents, especially when it's already slippery on the roads.
Work process
For the process we follow the MACROS method. The MACROS method is a double diamond process that helps developers to define a problem, gather information, generate ideas and prototype the solution in order to show it.
The process starts with Mapping the problem, what the problem is and why it’s a problem for us to solve. Further on we started to Add information, with research and interviews in order to get more familiar with the topics and find needs, and potential solutions for inspiration for instans biomimicry. After this stage we started to narrow down the problem and Concrete the challenge to know what field and what the specific parts we are going to focus on. Next step we started to generate ideas, we had our brainstorming session in order to Re-design the different solutions and ideas we had. We used the six thinking hats in order to discuss and choose a solution to work on. When we chose a solution we started to Optimize and prototype the solution and see how it would work.
Work process gallery
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Prototyping
After doing the rapid prototype, we started to work and plan our final prototype. This plan for the final prototype was to visualize the mechanism and function behind the solution more clearly. We divided the work between the group members in order to work more efficiently. The result was successful and the other groups and supervisor really liked it. The complete working process can be seen in the process video. There is also a concept video, that you can find below.
