Dan Cuffaro: The work on the walls... we partner with Daimler and GM, so this is a lot of the automotive work that goes on.
Dan Cuffaro, the head of the industrial design department at the Cleveland Institute of Art, points to a series of drawings. They cover the halls like wall paper, similar to what you'd see outside of a kindergarten classroom - only these pictures are 3-D.
Dan Cuffaro: Because of the nature of our program, there's a lot of problem solving that tends to happen on the interior of the vehicles.
It's the CIA's automotive component that's made it a prime candidate to partner with the military in the humvee project. It all started about a year and a half ago, when the school was approached by the Columbus-based contractor Battelle. The task: to develop ways to make the humvee safer. The school has entered into a one-year, $800,000 contract to develop ways to make the humvee safer, developing prototypes that may one day end up in the vehicle. Cuffaro says the students will be playing a consulting role.
Dan Cuffaro: Our job is to generate a lot of diverse concepts of how one might address the safety. We're not going to take things to full production.
There's a large room in the basement of the school where the students develop their initial prototypes. Each student has a work space - a place to draw, a place to sketch, a place to conduct their initial research. One component will involve interviewing soldiers and monitoring their blogs.
Dan Cuffaro: If soldiers are just piling things into the back of the vehicle and they get into an accident, what happens to that cargo? So how might they manage it better? They look at existing resources. How does UPS do it, how does an airline do it?
Byron Loible: How is this being used in the field? What are some things that are great about it, what are some things that are bad about it?
Byron Loible is a senior industrial design student.
Byron Loible: How can we take what is happening and improve on that for driver safety or for those who are in it.
It seems to me that you're not working on some theoretical problem that's for the sake of your class. You're working on something that some day may save someone's life.
Byron Loible: It's very rewarding to know that if you've done what you're supposed to do. And you can have one person look at it and say I feel safer in this now. If you can do that, that's what we're here for.
Once the students have completed the research phase, they'll move into producing prototypes.
Dan Cuffaro: This is the 3-D modeling lab. We have 23 work stations here.
The students use a program called Alias to create three-dimensional images. Those images are then passed off to engineers to develop an actual prototype the student can hold and use.
Byron Loible: What happens from there - we would see how the body would interact with it. Is it the right size for my hands. Is it going to fit where I'm designing it for... find out if it would be something I could actually utilize in the way I'm thinking about it in my head.
When the students are designing car accessories for GM or Chrysler, safety is one concern, but there are also a lot of other things to consider like aesthetics and comfort. But Cuffaro says this humvee project is different in that safety is the overriding concern.
Dan Cuffaro: Different problems we work on may be designing a product to work better or sell better. And those are important things. But when we were actually doing our review of preliminary research, you could really sense the gravity of the situation. This is a life and death subject matter here. We talk about sales and getting things to sell better, and it's normally not so immediately life sustaining or creating that scenario that what we do can save somebody's life.
Byron Loible: Before this, it's been a lot of conceptual stuff. You're making a product out of thin air. With this one it feels a lot closer to home. Like you're working on an actual product that's already out there and the results seem a little more immediate than what we've done before.
Within the next year, the Cleveland Institute of Art hopes to bring a few prototypes to a high level of development. Cuffaro says if they are incorporated into the humvee design, it'll happen several years down the road. The school has a rich history of turning out top notch auto designers. In fact the person who originally designed the humvee is a graduate. But Cuffaro says whether or not his students decide to pursue a career in auto design, it's hands on projects like this that prepares them for what's ahead.
Dan Cuffaro: What they choose to do with it is where they want to go. We're just trying to position them so they have choices.