NPP of the future contest

A team of friends and I took part in a competition to design a police post of the future recently, and here's just to share some of the work my team did behind the scenes.

From left to right: Robin Tan, Me, Guest of Honour Mr S Iswaran - Second Minister for Home Affairs and Trade & Industry, Chia Yan An and Darell Mak

The competition brief was to design a police station 5-10 years into the future, and see how certain services could be improved or automated. This required us not only to think of how to make such a police station aesthetically appealing, but also to consider how we could make it user-friendly all the while fulfilling the core functions of different police services.

Overview of our design:

My main involvement was with the design aspects.

First of all, I had to make a tough decision between using maya or Google sketchup for this particular project. The grill turnstile on the left was the only thing done in maya for the entire project.

Of course, Maya has much more capabilities than a freeware like Sketchup, but the trade-off is that it is difficult and time-consuming to make changes in Maya, and we had less than 2 months for the project, all the while having to deal with schoolwork.

The infographics and graphic design was mostly done in Illustrator, before being put into Sketchup for renders. One issue that cropped up however, was that the software would crash if we tried to render the entire room with all objects inside. (Still have no solution for this, if you know a way around it, give me a shout in the comments below.)

The layout and specifics of the room was also changed many many times, after receiving feedback from various members of the police.

Below is the "controversial" safe room concept. This drew a lot of flak from netizens, who criticised the safety aspects of it, based on the solutions proposed by various teams. After much thinking and revision, we decided on a press triggered turnstile mechanism. This features a L shaped door that closes behind the user. See design specifics below.

The infographic for the abandoned lost and found locker system. By integrating the 4 main languages of Singapore, we hoped to make the system more user-friendly, and a infographic feel was adopted for rest of the designs. The locker deposit system a la hongkong / korean / japanese locker systems was replaced with a dropbox system in the end.

I would like to thank my amazing teammates who worked hard together for the proposal and presentation, and also my boss and colleagues at First Sight International for giving me the opportunity to acquire proficiency in Illustrator and Sketchup during my time in the company, without which this project would not have been possible.

Hope you enjoyed this post, do leave a comment or drop me an email if you have any questions or feedback :)