Designing the bus driver's working environmentDecember 15th, 2010 ED-Design designed the driver's working environment for the Scania OmniExpress bus, for Lahden Autokori Oy. The Finnish AKT magazine reported on the design process in its 14/2010 issue.
 Bus drivers played an important part in the design process. Their feedback was first collected and used as a starting point for design work, and later they took part in testing physical prototypes.
"Different people have different ways of doing things. The best way to come up with the right solution was to observe the drivers' actions in various situations. Prototypes were used for testing different setups until all pieces found their right places", say Harri Alanen and Matti Makkonen of ED-Design.
According to Matti Makkonen, a good industrial designer has two sides to one's working persona: an engineer and an artist. The most important trait of all is creativity. This is emphasized when a functional solution needs to be found with lots of constraints in place.
"Good placements for the driver's controls are actually limited to a very small area around the driver's hands", says Makkonen.
Read the whole article in the AKT magazine (p.6, Finnish only). | 
