Our group used three different approaches trying to solve the issues of shared bicycles in Shanghai. Our project includes a video on road safety, a proposal submitted to Mobike bike sharing company and a model turn signal light designed for bicycles.
The ideas
Our project consists of three components which tightly relate to the road safety problems of sharing bikes in Shanghai.
In our first meeting, we brainstormed the road safety issues we wanted to tackle. We came up with several aspects. The first aspect was making a video for drunk driving, but subsequently we found government had produced similar videos, so it would be hard for us to demonstrate our originality and we tried to focus on the road safety problems around us. Then, sharing bikes really drew our attention, as the thriving of sharing bikes brought countless problems. Moreover, in crowded city like Shanghai, cycling is the most common and convenient way for people to travel. So as a team we decided to concentrate our campaign on bicycles. The absence of awareness on bike regulations leads to the occurrence of accidents. Thus, we planned to make a hand-painted video to popularize the importance of obeying bike regulations. What’s more, we meant to innovate the agreement and tips of sharing bikes to cultivate the sense of road safety when users use them. At last, we wanted to design turning lights for bikes to prevent accidents of collision between the bikes. Although these tasks were all challenging for us, we could accomplish them within our capacity. Therefore, we chose the sharing bikes as our project topic.
The first thing for us to do before we can start is to understand how much our audiences are aware of the basic regulations of riding a bicycle on the road. In order to know that, we have decided to make a questionnaire that asks people how would they solve the accidents on road when riding a bicycle, and some basic knowledge of riding a bicycle. This result is that actually very few people know what they should and cannot do when riding a bicycle on road especially some kids tho are actually too small to understand complicate laws and rules or make the right decisions based on their experience of life. We also did a research of the basic bicycle rules and laws in China. So we finally chose to make a video about basic regulations about cycling.
The second component is about innovative agreement and tips. In this case, our group started speculating the issue from daily life and focused on prevalent shared bike as a starting point. After a long brainstorm, a series of potential risks has been determined, then screened and investigated by questionnaire. Among them, 16 to 30 years old people accounted for almost half of the respondents. The data shows that there are 73% of 415 valid subscribers who selectively neglected the safety agreement, which may indirectly lead to unsafe behaviour. And over 90% of 520 valid subscribers approved improvement in tips. At the same time, we also investigated 105 non-use reasons for respondents and found that the problem was mainly due to the complicated operation process of Mobike which frustrates some respondents, especially the people aged 45 to 60 years old and unable to use software properly. Finally, innovative agreement and tips are confirmed as outcomes in our proposal which have already submitted to Mobike to achieve the greatest effect in improving road safety.
The third component of our project is turn signal lights. The inspiration for us is that every day when we leave the school, we notice that a majority of cyclists always collide with others because of their sudden turnings. A small collision probably leads to severe accidents because as we mentioned before, the traffic condition is terrible. Consequently, we started to consider how to solve this road safety problem. As a result, we decided to invent a turn signal light for bikes. Our turn signal lights can warn the opposite cyclists and the cyclists behind usabout which directions we wanted to turn to, so we will not collide with each other.
The initiatives
Our project consists of three components which tightly relate to the road safety problem of sharing bikes in Shanghai.
The first component of our project is a cartoon animation video, which goal is to promote the safety rules related to bicycles. We planned from the very beginning. We decided what we were going to do and the date we should finish that. Firstly, we had a discussion to decide the basic style and the characters of the video. We realized the time was so limited for us to finish this project. Thus, we made up our mind to finish only one of the videos but made that one as delicate as possible instead of two videos. Secondly, we started to write the characters’ lines and draw the draft of each scene. Thirdly, we recorded our videos and edited it. Also, we put the voice and subtitle in the video to make it clearer and more vivid. The target audiences are kids and teenagers who are more than 12 years old and capable of riding a bicycle. We modified our content according to “Regulation on the Implementation of the Road Traffic Safety Law of the People's Republic of China” to make our video more persuasive and professional. Then we shared our video on Weibo (Weibo is one of the biggest social networks in China, which have about 400 million active users.) We had received more than 30 thousand visualizations and 136 shares after just 2 days. We believe our audiences will know the fundamental bike regulations, the limitations and permissions of riding a bicycle in our country through road safety problems shown in the video and the solutions to those problems.
The second component is to remind users of Mobike of cycling safety and regulations in order to reduce accidents. Users should’ve been acquainted with the Legal Agreements while signing up the Mobile APP, but this is not always the case. Therefore, we decided to change the written format of Legal Agreements into animations, in the form of GIF, so that more attention would be drawn from the users. We also redesigned the warning signs on the Mobike. The population we targeted is Mobike users (from 12 years old to 60 years old). We are also in active contact with Mobike. By making both the Legal Agreements and the Warning sign more interactive, we aimed to raise the safety awareness among the users. We implemented our actions through field investigation, designing, analyzing samples and executing final products. From our perspective, our innovative agreements and tips will hopefully reduce the accident rate of sharing bikes.
The third component is to invent a turn signal light for bicyclse to avoid the accidents involving bikes. Our target audience is all users of sharing bikes and all cyclists. In our design, our turn signal lights can warn the opposite cyclists and the cyclists behind us about which directions we wanted to turn to, so they will not collide with each other. We exerted the knowledge of physic we learned and the information on the internet to make an electrical devise. We used lasers to be our light sources because the lasers are noticeable for the cyclists beside. But for safety concerns, we later reduced the number of lasers from 12 to 3. After finishing our product, we made a little video for briefly teaching audiences how to use our turning light. We demonstrated our video in the classes of our school while explaining the working principles to our school mates. Moreover, we uploaded our video onto Youtube to make more people see our project. Our goal is to solve the bikes safety problem around us, the community we live in and even the world. We have been confronted with countless problems which sometimes made us feel dispirited. For example, we needed to adjust the angle of lasers continually to form the pattern we wanted. However, setbacks sparked progress. From this project, our communication skills and thinking skills have substantially advanced. What’s more, according to the advice from the users of our product, we have learnt that we needed to think comprehensively. One of our users said we needed to make a shell to protect our turn signal light. It was a small point, but it really helped for making a better turn signal light.
