Toronto Parking Meters
2016
This program is one of the projects in Think Tank courses. Teacher provided seven principles that were consistent with the universal design, requiring the designer to observe the field in the Toronto area, list the design that did not meet these seven principles and select one of them for redesign. Me and my team members had a field trip in Toronto area, we decided to re-improve the Toronto public parking-meter system.
Design Research
Compared to other places, Toronto's parking-meter system has been relatively perfect and also has its own application software with the physical system. But the system itself includes applications still have some elements need to be improved. We found that the appearance of parking-meter need to be consider more, the payment system itself does not make users feel convenient and practical; instructions do not have a good way to express the use of payment; people with poor vision is not convenient to put the coin into the traditional coin mouth; It should not only has visual description but also should contain more expression; ticket office is not perfect because the ticket may fall; parking ticket itself is hard to understand; application software should give users more convenient information. After finishing these questions, we started to make improvements.
Design Process
The graphic design students in our team are responsible for redesigning the parking ticket, instructions and application software. As an industrial design student, I am concerned about the redesign of the appearance and payment system of the parking-meter. Through a series of sketches and group discussions. I decided the final design concept.
The final design concept has several main aspects:
1. Because Toronto parking-meters has a solar panel as a source of energy. I take advantage of the convenience of a solar panel, taking into account the changing weather in Toronto such as rainy snow days so that the user will not be exposed to the cloudy weather, I increased the area of he solar panel to become a shelter for users.
2. Remove the language instructions from previous payment system and replace it with simple symbols. So that even if users do not understand English, they still know how to use it.
3. For the ticket gate, I get inspired by the mouth of vending machine so I follow this structure into my design and covered with transparent plastic cover. Users can open the transparent plastic plate and take out of the ticket from the mouth. They don’t have to worry about the ticket may easily fell to the ground.
4. I also add an extra button as voice service
