Design-driven innovation: Mothership concepts for accessing the far shore wind farms

Industrial Design is the fusion of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, human factors, functionality and usability of a product or system. The objective of Industrial Design is to study both function and form, and the connection between product, the user and the operational environment. The role of an Industrial Designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, usability and human factors. Although the design process may be considered 'creative', it has a structured workflow involving many analytical processes, and is generally executed by an interdisciplinary team. Many industrial designers use various design methodologies in their creative process such as User Centred Design, Emotional Design and Design-Driven Innovation. Recent research has indicated that current wind farm support vessels will not be appropriate for accessing far shore wind farms. In order to improve operability of WFSV accessing the far shore wind farms, mothership vessels will be required. Extrapolating the European Wind Energy Association's (EWEA) growth scenario for the period up till 2030 employment in the installation, operation and maintenance, of offshore wind farms is expected to produce skilled employment of 851,400. To meet this demand it will be necessary to recruit land based technicians. Therefore, next generation motherships will need to address the user needs and aspirations of a new generation of technicians, who may not have previous marine experience. This paper presents several mothership concept design proposals, that challenge perceptions of the working and living environment on commercial vessels by using Design-Driven Innovation to create next generation vessels.