Student Super Wheel
The Brief
“We are launching a new superannuation fund specifically for students and young professionals in January next year. We are currently booking stalls at 18 campuses for O-week. At each O-week we will employ a small team of local students to run the stall.”
The stall activity is modelled on CommBanks O-week campaign, which we also run. Students can win prizes at the stall by spinning a wheel. The wheel works well because its easy to do, it makes a noise, the first year students get a "high-five" when they win - and everyone wins. The wheel also sits above head hight, so other students can see it from a distance.
The Challenge: we need a better "wheel"
Seriously! We'd prefer not to copy the CBA campaign exactly. So either we need to give the wheel a new twist, or create a different randomising, easy-to-use, fun, quirky device that adds to the buzz of O-week.
Prototyping
In order to discover the best levels of engagement and interactivity, a few designers from different backgrounds (myself Visual Communications, the other Integrated Product Design) put together little models and had them tests with the most favourable ones voted by staff. We wanted to try something that was irregular and uncommon at O-weeks so we were thinking of large scale wooden revolvers the would spin on a vertical axis with different coloured panels to reveal prizes.
Prototyping Life Size Models while pivoting our initial design concept.
Using cogs were voted the favourite and most efficient design, so we had to quickly pivot our thinking. We were inspired by a toy bubble gun that we had purchased from Kmart to add a sense of playfulness to the environment. When we were having road blocks with ideation we often found ourself fidgeting and playing with it. The more we played with it the more we started to pay close attention to the cogs and how the trigger launched a cog to disengage to cause one of the larger cogs to spin longer than the others.
In an attempt to dissect the bubble gun, we cut up the plastic so we could have a clearer view and mocked up what we thought was the closest we could get to using an online cog generator.
Using Adobe Illustrator, the cogs were input into the program and sent to get laser cut on acrylic. The physical production of the wheel was overlooked by my partner Sami, who had experience putting together physical products, while I focused on the aesthetics. Using clear acrylic, coloured vinyl was layered on top with cut outs to give the added engagement of watching the cogs turn under one another,
