The rebirth of Ockelbo

This project is a redesign of a snowmobile for Ockelbo we made during January as part of the Introduction to Industrial Design course in Umeå. This project was planned to be the main project for our clay workhsop.

Ockelbo was a pioneer Swedish company that used to work in the field of polymer injection. It was producer of snowmobiles and other injected plastic parts for other companies. The goal of this project was redesigning a snowmobile maintaining the form language of the original brand.

Defining the problem to solve

This project could have been just a styling exercise, but I wanted to work with a different perspective and try to bring new functionalities for rescue operations in the snow. For that reason I focused my work in dog rescue patrols. Actually when an avalanche occurs, the common way to work is start searching from the top of the mountain. For this, most of the times, rescue patrols use helicopters and the teams start looking for the accidented people from the top of the mountain.

Dogs have a relevant role in that search in case the accidented don’t have a GPS location system. In this case, the skills of those trained dogs and the mobility of a snowmobile are a great combination to start the rescue operation.

	First sketches After visiting a snowmobile dealer in Umeå, I decided to work on a one-seat snowmobile that could transport the dog in the back of the snowmobile.
	Working with clay After having defined the form, I started working with foam and clay to define the transition surfaces and the rest of the details. On the left you can watch a video of the process in the clay workshop.
	Final model in clay

Final sketches

Exhibition at Umeå Institute of Design

After finishing this project all the class prepared an exhibition with all the projects done. Here you have the board I made for the exhibition and some pictures of the event.

January 2007