ukko: App & Car Concept

2022

Illustrator, After Effects

As part of a course project, I was prompted to create the car of the future along with an animated demonstration. I developed a concept car called "ukko", whose name comes from the Finnish god of thunder. I based ukko's market presence on what has prevented so many people from buying an electric car: the battery life. With a ~5000km range, this car is meant to be a competitor to cars in the near future and is advertised as "the roadtrip car."

See the full video:

I researched different vehicle apps and came up with a final design inspired by my favourite parts of each. Additionally, I was inspired by the feel of pressing physical buttons on musical beats pads and designed each button to look mattified and 3D.

I spent some time sketching out some different variations of what I wanted, but ultimately decided to combine multiple ideas into one. For the Home section, I combined the colours of option 1 and the layout of option 3 because it was a theme among other vehicle apps to emphasize important points with large, stand-out buttons. I also liked apps that showed a full 360º model of your car with pointers to specific areas because it was easy to see each part of the car that could be repaired. I combined the car visual feature into the Info section, where it shows the car's current settings such as tire pressure and interior temperature.

For the car's front section, I wanted to keep it understandable and move away from the Tesla one-screen look since it's so easy to get lost in a setting and not know where you are in relation to the rest of the features. The ukko front screens would customizable through the app as well as directly from the screens themselves. For my demo, I customized my front screens to what I would want to use.

The Final ukko Prototype

Overall, this project was a lot of fun to conceptualize and design, even if not all the features made it to the final video. I learned about app design, how to animate user flows in After Effects and it made me sad knowing that this kind of car probably won't exist for a while yet.