222
A student concept exploring how rideshare drivers could sanitise a car with less manual work between trips. Our team designed two ultraviolet-light devices and a companion app.
Drivers we interviewed described cleaning between fares as unpaid time and raised concerns about repeated chemical wiping on an interior they own. 222 explored whether part of that work could happen during the operating day through two Far-UVC device concepts and a companion app.
- 222nm
- Wavelength studiedModelled against published ACGIH limits
- 99.9%
- Deep Clean targetBoth modules, modelled ~25 min
- Less
- Manual wipingDesign objective, not measured
- Role
- Hardware design · App UX · Research
- Team
- Ultimanium — SCAD IACT 330
- Year
- Concept project
- Recognition
- 5 × Indigo Design Awards
Drivers were paying for cleanliness with their own time.
We interviewed rideshare drivers at SCAD, and the complaint that kept arriving was not about riders being dirty. It was about the arithmetic: cleaning happens between fares, every minute spent cleaning is a minute not earning, and the wipes that do the job attack the interior the driver owns and will eventually sell.
One of those drivers was Willie, and he became the person the whole ecosystem was designed against — not a composite persona assembled from a spreadsheet, but someone we could go back to when an argument inside the team needed settling. The film in section 08 follows his shift.
Willie was the reason the brief came out the way it did: make sanitisation something that happens while the car is working — including while someone is sitting in it. Any system that requires him to stop the car is a system that costs him the thing he came to work for, and he will stop using it in a week.
222 was built by Team Ultimanium. My work on it was:
- Industrial design of both modules — form, ergonomics, the cupholder envelope and the VHB ceiling mount
- RIDR app UX and UI across both the driver and rider flows
- The Far-UVC research and safety case, including the exposure-limit envelope the design had to sit inside
Three goals that shaped the concept.
Reduce manual work
The concept explores using ultraviolet light during and between rides to reduce the time a driver spends wiping the cabin.
Design within exposure limits
The team researched published Far-UVC exposure limits and modelled the concept around them. The devices themselves were not built or independently safety-tested.
Visible to the rider
Sanitisation the passenger can't see is sanitisation they won't trust. The app surfaces it in real time.
The same event, told twice.
One sanitisation cycle is running below, and it does not stop when you switch sides. The driver gets a control surface and a number that climbs. The rider gets no number at all — because a percentage a passenger cannot verify is a claim, and the thing that actually reassures them is the reason behind it.
Watch the status bar at the top of the page
Operating the system between fares, and paid by the minute.
Modelled at 60× — 25 cabin-minutes in 25 real seconds. The curve is first-order inactivation, 1 − e^(−kt), with k fixed so a Deep Clean lands on 99.9% at 25 min. These are design targets. 222 was never deployed, so nothing here is a measurement.
Your Devices
Both modules · modelled 25 min to 99.9%
- ABUVActive: just now0% clean76%
Fixed to the headliner. Passive, and always the one already running.
Device info - NODEActive: idle0% clean52%
Lives in the cupholder. Directable, and oscillates through its arc.
Device info
The status bar at the top of this page is RIDR's, and it disappears on the rider side because it is absent from every rider screen in the shipped set. The gradient is the product's, darkened — as shipped, white on its cyan end measures 1.87:1, which is a bug in the app rather than a decision. Section 06 shows the measurements.
Both sides in full, as the live Figma prototypes — every screen, the real transitions, and the flow branching. You can walk either one yourself.
- The badge sits on the tier
- Far-UV appears at the moment of choosing a ride, not in a settings page. Trust has to be present at the decision.
- “Sanitised en route”
- The sentence the whole ecosystem exists to write. Dead time the driver used to absorb, shown as the rider's benefit.
- Citations, in a consumer app
- Further reading lists Columbia, Kobe and Nature Scientific Reports. Unusual — and right for a claim this counter-intuitive.
Two devices that aren't trying to be each other.
ABUV is fixed, overhead and passive. NODE is portable, directable and oscillates. A Deep Clean runs both together until the cabin reads 99.9% sanitised — which is the toggle you just watched flip on the console above.
Fixed, overhead, passive.
A ceiling-mounted far-UVC bar. The high vantage point is the whole argument — light reaches the footwells and seat backs that a device sitting on the console never sees.
Nobody presses anything.
This simulation shows the operating sequence proposed by the concept. ABUV is modelled as running during a fare; when the cabin is empty, Deep Clean adds the portable NODE device. The timing and sanitisation percentages are design targets, not measurements from working hardware.
Phase 01, Fare in progress. 0 percent clean.
Targets, not measurements — 222 was never deployed. The 25-minute Deep Clean and the 11-minute fare are the project's own published figures; the four minutes between fares is an assumption, and the decay curve is the same first-order model the status bar at the top of this page is running.
The whole product rests on one number.
The team explored Far-UVC at 222nm because published research and exposure guidance distinguish it from conventional 254nm UVC. The diagrams below explain the research and dose model used for the concept. They do not establish the safety or performance of these unbuilt devices in a real vehicle.
- Stratum corneumdead cells
- Epidermis
- Basal layerliving, dividing
- Dermis
Published research indicates shallow penetration at this wavelength. The concept was modelled within the cited exposure limit; the proposed fixture was not safety-tested in a vehicle.
The published research is stated as dose, not time — a D₉₀ of roughly 1 mJ/cm² for aerosolised virus. Time-to-kill is a property of our fixture output and cabin volume, so this curve is our own model, not a lab result. The original app concept also notes that time to the target varies with distance from the surfaces.
In 2022 the ACGIH raised the 222nm threshold limit from 23 to 161 mJ/cm² for eyes and 479 mJ/cm² for skin — the values shown here are the published limits used by the team. They informed the concept model, but they do not replace testing of a specific fixture, installation and exposure pattern.
Lethal to a virus. Nowhere near a person.
In the concept model, the target dose for 99.9% inactivation sits at roughly 2% of the exposure limit for human eyes. That margin is why the team chose to explore 222nm. It does not by itself establish the safety or effectiveness of an unbuilt fixture in a real cabin.
Kill doses vary by pathogen and conditions; limits are the 2022 ACGIH threshold values. Both are dose figures — the time to reach them depends on fixture output and cabin geometry.
This page is wearing the product, and the product has four bugs.
Every colour on this page was sampled off the shipped RIDR screens rather than chosen. That is the only reason the next part is interesting: once real values go through a contrast gate, four of them fail — including the label on the status bar the driver reads in sunlight.
White on the cyan end: 1.87:1. Below every WCAG threshold there is.
Same hue, same direction, lightness moved until white clears 4.78:1.
| Token | Change | Why |
|---|---|---|
| signalFrom | #47CCF7 → #0F7BA4 | white on the shipped cyan scores 1.87; the status bar's own label is unreadable |
| signalTo | #1190F6 → #0B57C4 | white on the shipped blue scores 3.31; passes as large type, fails as a 13px label |
| accent | #0791FE → #0A6ECE | scores 3.24 on the white sheet; fine for the $8.50 figure, short for a link |
| nominalOnSheet | #34C759 → #12793C | “Active: just now” is 12px green on the white device sheet, and scores 2.22 |
These are findings about RIDR, not decisions about the case study. The page darkens four values so it can be read, prints the deviations at the bottom of every audit run so they stay visible rather than becoming folklore, and leaves the originals in the swatches above. The fix belongs in the app.
A day in the life of Willie.
The driver from section 01, on a shift with 222 installed. The film shows the ecosystem being used rather than explaining it — which is the only honest test of a product whose entire claim is that it disappears into the work.
Research, teardowns, sketches and the safety case — in full.
The complete document behind the ten weeks of IACT 330, including the interviews with Willie and the dose modelling.
222 was a six-person project. Naming everyone is the only honest way to present team work, and it costs nothing to be accurate about which parts were mine.
- Quint Bailey
- Charlie Bowles
- Guy Cassieri
- Sathvik Kotha
- Wyatt Michel
- Nico Zafarana
222 was a concept. Farm OS is the same instinct, shipped.
Sensors in an enclosure, telemetry on a phone, and a system that has to keep working when nobody is watching it — running on a real farm.
Farm OS