Forming a brief

Hello! New to the forum.
I'm a designer, and find myself with some spare time, an aging portfolio and no plans.
Something I have dabbled with is designing a boat for myself, but I find it hard to keep on track. Without a brief, I design, reseach, see a new idea, chase it into an entirely different design and nothing ever progresses.
Designing is so much easier with a client, and more importantly, a brief! So I'm starting this thread to pin down a brief, so I can show progress and give people the ability to critisize me if I start to drift!

My experience with boat design, was an effort to design a workboat/research vessel for a university. It didn't go well, (for me or the university, if you ask me). For boating experience, I sailed when younger, I;ve driven a couple of heavy work boats, as well as an RNLI Atlantic 75 and briefly the 85 too.

Brief:
What I want is a simple boat, powered, to make the most traveling when holidays are available and be less reliant on weather to do it.
able to take 4 on family holidays for a week. Acommodation need not be much more thatn what we are used to for camping.
The operational area will be mainly inland waterways in the UK, but able to make costal passages and cross the channel in years to come.

Now that I have that down, I will look into each of those...

 

Welcome to the forum, you want to trailer it, it sounds like you may, and how fast do you want to travel?
It should have built in positive buoyancy you can trust if you want to go offshore I think. It is a bit strange you haven't developed more of a brief considering the level of hardheadedness and conviction one needs to complete a boat, it seems like you're not serious, a whim. I heard that 95% of home built boats weren't completed by the original owner, they changed hands at least once before completion. That and that most partly completed boats' owners think they have far more done than reality dictates. So maybe design a 22to 30ft craft[how big is the car?] cross between a ships pilot boat with a suitable really nice diesel, and a scow bow/barge depending on your need for speed. You could just build the model and forget it. If it sounds like a thrill to get up and chip away each day and you're undeterred working on what is often a cocktail of stinking chemical smorgasbord , you're all set. If you have good funding you can simply tender out the work with your favourite boatbuilder of course, who you would be a main influence on design/build practicalities/ efficiencies.
Sorry for the negativity but at least you had a response.