Umea Olme Spyder project

While Swedish automaker Saab was going through tumultuous times and Geely was in the process of buying Volvo from Ford, first year MA students in Transportation Design at Sweden's Umea Institute of Design were busy creating a one-off roadster for an independent car maker: the Olme Spyder. Created in collaboration with Ove Bengtsson, an engineer with a personal passion for building his own vehicles, the students were asked to design their own interpretation of a progressive and innovative roadster, developing the concept from a sketch into a full-scale model.

Based on an Opel Agila donor car, the concept's 650kg steel monocoque chassis was created by Bengtsson himself to accommodate a mid-mounted engine. It was approved by the Swedish road authority in June 2009. Bengtsson then contacted Umea's Transportation Design program director Demian Horst, and the students began work on creating the interior and exterior designs for the two-seat open vehicle over the course term, all while considering Bengtsson's basic needs for the roadster.

The project was divided into research, ideation, concept selection, form development, design refinement, reverse engineering, full-scale check and presentation phases and took the nine students on the first year of the Transportation Design program approximately 10 weeks to complete. They began with a general background research on existing two-seaters - and the basic attributes found in these vehicles - and were encouraged to focus on the strongest and the weakest aspects of these conceptual and production models.

After the short research phase, each student prepared an individual brief including the attributes of the car they planned to develop. In the individual ideation phase each student tried to create as many alternatives as they could to provide different options of what they believed a modern speedster should be. During in the ideation phase the technical specifications of the vehicle were presented to the students and they were challenged to translate important features from their design ideas into feasible solutions that retained most of the concept's originally intended character.

Bengtsson provided the university with a full-scale wooden mock-up of the chassis and reviews and tests were conducted based on this mock-up. The technical package was also available in digital form and was used as underlay for the tape drawing phase as well as the solid core for the clay scale models, challenging the students during the whole process to respect hard points and basic legal requirements.

The tutors on the course included main tutor Lars Falk, chief strategic designer for Volvo Cars; Tony Catignani, former Saab designer; Anders Gunnarson, chief exterior designer for Volvo Cars; and clay modeling tutor Simon Thompson. Sigun Bergstedt (Dacat AB) provided support for Color & Trim. The tutors stressed attention to user experience, progressive design solutions, feasibility aspects, ergonomics and vehicle design workflow practice as the main goals in this project.

The resulting, one-off street legal car will be shown at the Custom Motor Show in Jönköping in April, the largest car and motorbike fair in Scandinavia.

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Umea Institute of Design degree show 2009

By Eric Gallina