Starships robots are automated, autonomous bots that deliver food and other goods to students living on college campuses.

Project Overview

Starship robots are a very popular at Purdue University, but across many other college campuses. In this project, my team explored ways in Starship robots could be utilized for another purpose other than food delivery at Purdue. Our design process involved:

1. Background research of the Starship robots (to understand limitations)
2. Brainstorming and design creation/ideation (sketching)
3. Conducting interviews with Starship users
4. Creating scenarios with our alternate Starship design
5. Storyboarding our scenarios for the parking spot reserver design
6. Collecting user feedback on our idea after our presentation and reassessing our idea
7. Making final changes on our final design, storyboard, and journey map with our ideas.

Through this process, my team was able to develop our alternate (parking reservation) idea for the Starships.

Initial designs, research, and ideation

• Our first step was to brainstorm ideas for our Starship. My group began by sharing personal experiences and grievances with the Starship. This was a good starting point since we came up with some various possible designs, including a snow plow starship, a parking spot reservation starship, a pharmaceutical starship, and a guide starship.
• We then thought out the pros and cons of out these idea and sketched the ones we were most confident in. After that, we narrowed our idea down to the parking spot reservation starship through team discussion. After deciding on our final design, my group presented our concept during our interviews with previous Starship users.

Analyzing Data and Affinity Diagraming

My interviewee helped give my group some ideas of features we could implement in our new design. My team took his suggestions, as well as the feedback from all of the other interviewees. This allowed us to go forward using the perspectives of each interviewee and where they overlapped, to help us in choosing our design space and furthered our understanding of which features were most desired.

Initial concept sketch for our final idea

Storyboarding

In addition to interviews, my team also began our first storyboarding, which started a discussion about other possible features of the Starship. After this, my team did some more research using Google Scholar and Purdue Libraries. The findings from our search reinforced the core ideas about how our starship would work and made us think about issues we needed to address.

Problems Addressed

The problems my team decided we needed to address and our solutions are as follows:

Starship Visibility

• The Starships would have bigger, taller flags, reflective tape on the body, as well as a flashing red light on top

Cost

• You still need a Purdue parking pass to park. The app would show you which spots are open for free, then there would be a fee to reserve a spot. One does not need to reserve a spot to park, it simply guarantees you a spot during busy times.

Different Passes

• The app would show which pass is required for which parking spots. You can reserve a spot for a pass you don’t have, though, as is the case now, Purdue parking will likely ticket you.

People Picking Up Starships