Design solutions for life on the highway

Three students of the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, separately travelled more than 3,000km by truck with truck drivers to learn something about their life on the road.

They wanted to find out how truck drivers' life - which, for the most part, is miserable - could be improved through design.

The three youths - Abhilash Sudhindran, Gopal Krishna Pai and Namit Bisht - are post-graduate students of Transportation and Automobile Design at NID. They did the travelling for their academic project called 'Horn OK Please'.

The essence of a good design lies in its being truly functional even as it abides by aesthetic principles. And to be truly functional, the designs for an object - in this case, the truck and some of its parts - must make truck driving even more user-friendly. The NID students travelled in the trucks as they needed the experience to find good design solutions for truckers who spend most of their working life on the road.

Sudhindran, Pai and Bisht believe that the experience of life on the road to help them come up with the best designs for trucks has paid rich dividends. They have produced rich design solutions which, if adopted, could improve the otherwise tough life of truck drivers.

The students said they had focused on truck drivers' problems where good design could make a difference. Bad cabin ergonomics, for instance, makes driving more strenuous than it need be as it does not allow drivers adequate rest. Theft of diesel from trucks' tanks is another worry among truck drivers. The three NID designers have also come up with ideas about how to change the popular perception of a trucker's life.

Some of the solutions offered by the NID students are: an alarm system that goes off when someone tries to steal diesel from a truck, a device to measure and indicate weight of the load, a single, wide tyre instead of two tyres in the rear on each side of the truck, and making use of reflective stickers mandatory.

"I used to think of truck drivers as tough people who take no nonsense from others," said Gopal, who travelled with truckers from Mumbai to Bangalore, and back. "But after sharing their life on the road, I found that theirs is a tough existence. They are harassed by the police and exploited by the truck owners and transport companies which employ them."

The students have also made several suggestions in their project to change society's attitude towards truck drivers. For instance, they have suggested promotion of computer games centred on truck racing with graphics of Indian roads. Namit had travelled from Ahmedabad to Mumbai and back. "Such games, if properly designed, can give the younger generation a better idea of the hardships a truck driver has to endure on a daily basis," he said.
The students have also suggested holding real-life competitions for truck drivers. In such competitions, the participants would be continuously monitored for around six months for compliance with traffic rules and other norms, and awarded for penalties he has managed to avoid.