Background

A food truck is a light commercial vehicle or medium commercial vehicle or motorised home with the cargo or living area converted into a kitchen for preparing, selling, and serving food. Food trucks will normally have all the cooking equipment necessary to prepare the food. Food truck operators will tend to specialise on a limited menu or cuisine, also known as ‘street food.’ They may serve sandwiches, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, tacos, pizza, French fries, and other typical fast food and finger food staples. Food trucks may specialise in drinks, coffees, and snacks, and some, like ice cream trucks, serve frozen food, cold drinks, and desserts. In recent years, food trucks that specialise in gourmet, speciality, regional, and fusion cuisines have increased in popularity. Food trucks are popular in many places in the world, they can be found operating in city centres, in industrial areas, at events, at the beach, in your neighbourhood, and so forth.
 

The design brief

Design a fully-electric motorised food truck. (A truck means: a van, a light goods vehicle, or an ordinary goods vehicle with two axles.) Your food truck may serve any meal or cuisine of your choosing, for example, it may be an ice cream food truck, or it may serve snacks, or meals, and so forth. Your food truck may be located in your neighbourhood, town, or any location of your choice. Use only electricity in your food truck as a power source, for cooking, food preparation and storage, and so forth. Burning coal, gas, or other biomass is not permitted. Give priority to hygiene, safety, and convenience for all concerned. Begin with an existing electric van or truck and design the entire food truck canteen area. You need not design the vehicle cabin, nor the rolling chassis. Build a small-scale model of your food truck to demonstrate your design concept to your fellow students and teachers. Alternatively, you may build a computer-aided design (CAD) model of your design concept, if you prefer. Show a typical menu that you chose for your food truck too. Work on this project in a small team with a group of your classmates.
 

The design thinking process

​​​​​​​Follow the six stages of the design thinking process to ensure that you are thorough and do everything necessary to succeed in your design project. First, you endeavour to understand the design topic and EMPATHISE with the needs of the users. With that understanding, you can DEFINE what is essential to the product or system that you are designing. Then you IDEATE, that is, you creatively come up with ideas and develop them. The next step is to PROTOTYPE your chosen design solution in a physical form and improve it through trial-and-error. Then you TEST your design idea to elicit the opinions of users. And finally, at the end of the process, you REFLECT upon your project to benefit from the experience. Use the appropriate methods from the Design Thinking for Schools website as you proceed along the design thinking process.
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Note for teachers

Read the guide for teachers on Safety for the PROTOTYPE Stage for Level IV to safely supervise this design project.