General information
Company general information
TOYOTA is one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers and a leading global corporation. Founded in 1937. Toyota now sells vehicles in 170 countries and employs over 300.000 people.
Based in Brussels, Belgium, and staffed by 2.700 people and more than 60 nationalities, Toyota Motor Europe (TME) handles the wholesale marketing of Toyota and Lexus vehicles, parts & accessories, and manages Toyota’s European R&D, manufacturing and engineering operations.
Team/division description
The team’s focus is improving the experience (subjective perception, emotions, engagement) that users have with future products. It is doing so through research projects involving activities related to “understanding” (e.g. user research, desk research), “proposing” (e.g. interaction, service design) and “testing” (e.g. quantitative and qualitative assessment).
Your project
You will explore sensory cues to improve riding comfort as part of a cross divisional activity involving members from powertrain, artificial intelligence, evaluation and user experience groups.
Your role will be to lead the ideation and prototyping of sensory cues (e.g. visual, light, haptics, sound) aiming at improving acceleration/braking comfort for passengers. These iterations will have you consider all early different stages of user centred design process (initial user research, concept design, programming/prototyping and user testing) leading to a set of functional prototypes.
Towards the end of your internship, you will also contribute to a wider final evaluation involving a wide panel, philosophical measures and the use of our test track.
Your profile
You are:
• in your final year of study in the field of interaction design
• passionate about user-centred design
• able to visualise ideas with storyboard and other representations (using tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, XD)
• experienced in creating and programming interactive prototyping (e.g. Arduino, Rasberry Pi…)
• fluent in English
• excellent communicator and good organisation skills
You have a Toyota DNA, this means you:
• wish to develop and are ready to persevere in order to reach challenging targets
• seek facts before making recommendations or decisions
• have strong planning and organizing skills
• enjoy working in a team, respecting others
• have excellent communication skills
• customer mindset
Place of employment: Toyota Motor Europe R&D Center, Zaventem (Brussels area), Belgium
On site at least for prototyping and evaluation phases and full time if pandemic situation permits it
Starting date: June or July 2020
Duration: 6 months
Confidentiality: Due to business requirement, not all performed projects can be reflected in the internship report. This issue needs to be discussed with candidate/school in advance.
It is mandatory that applicants are students for the entire period of the internship
We can only accept students with an EEA or Swiss citizenship (not requiring a work permit or visa to be eligible to perform an internship in Belgium)
