WIND FARM AESTHETICS

I discovered that discussion of the aesthetic side of wind farms is nothing new. Yuriko Saito wrote about aesthetic considerations as far back as 2004. Back then there were talks being held about the installation of a large wind farm near to Nantucket in the USA.

Saito covers the difficulty faced in convincing Nantucket locals to accept the wind farm. The key points I took from Saito’s paper is that both ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ considerations need to be given to wind farm installation. The thin considerations are surface level, including color, size, synchronisation of blades, while the thick considerations extend to perceived value (a kind of cost-benefit analysis) among the community.

The expert I spoke to (Dave Quirk) thought that wind energy was the future energy of the Isle of Man. The lessons from aesthetic studies and philosophies surrounding wind farms, especially when considered alongside case studies, will help shape my final implementation of a design that has a wind farm component.

BUS INTERIORS

Now that I was thinking of an educational bus, I needed to look at interior design aspects to communicate the right message to potential participants. I recalled work done by Morag Myerscough in Sheffield Children's Hospital, and used that as a starting point for investigating interior design for children's spaces.

Scouting around the internet for existing educational buses proved quite fruitful. I'll list my most noteworthy findings here.

Videos

Collected imagery of bus interiors/exteriors

Explorer Lab

A special mention goes to the Explorer Lab, "an immersive stem experience". The bus has a cool technical interior using lighting to great effect to create an almost sci-fi feel. Particularly, for my own purposes, this bus shares the scientific focus and uses tech to deliver education.

ELECTRIC BUSES

I was interested in varifying the available of electric buses in Britain and finding specifications so I could start to explore broad designs for the exterior and interior.

I discovered that Alexander Dennis BYD were suppliers of electric buses in the UK. This meant that the acquisition of EV buses was possible in the Isle of Man.

BUS SPECS

To start blocking out bus designs I found a number of spec guides for electric buses and coaches.

I also looked up technical drawings so that I can directly transfer spec details to my graphics programmes.

FINDING 3D MODELS

To save some time prior to beginning design work I looked for prefabricated models of the Enviro buses on cgtrader and turbosquid.

Double or single decker?

Space-wise, I had to decide whether it would be better to use a double or single decked bus. I turned to the Space for Learning to answer this, using the bus specs to determine how close each one came to the recommended minimum room for an education space. The guide suggests 98m² per educational space. Using the spec documents, I calculated that the Enviro200 (single decker) has roughly 30m² at its upper limit, while the Enviro400 (double decker) has around 55m².

For this reason, I went with the cgtrader double decker model, also choosing this model due to its low cost and high fidelity to the real life bus.

PREVISUALISATIONS

Getting the look and feel of the bus right was a core focus for me at this stage. I started to block out shapes on the 3D model. Using the model gave me a sense of the space and how it could be partitioned to maximum effect. I was aiming for open, well-lit, and comfortable. This design pattern follows the guidance given in the Space for Learning handbook.

COLOUR SCHEME

I wanted to choose a colour scheme appealing to kids, slanted more towards a young (primary school) age. My aim was to use a restricted palette of up to five colours.

A few on colourhunt.co caught my eye as being bright but not overpowering, and gender neutral. Gender neutrality is important as kids can be very sensitive to gendered colours, and an overall sense of “for boys” or “for girls” could alienate either gender. I’d created a basic bus-sized room mockup in Blender and used it to test the palettes (see above images).

The palettes looked fine, but not striking. I remembered that I had extracted a palette from an old Isle of Man tourism poster that was bright and appealing and thought that particular palette could be a good fit here. I liked the way the colours looked in my mockup, and decided to work with them for now, although left this open for change as the design evolved.