Hi Sarah,
Good luck with your DT project. As someone who did a highly complicated project back in my school days, I can't say 'keep it simple' often enough. You are better solving one problem very well, than trying to solve several problems with only a slight level of success.
Looks like a feasible plan and if you have to make it, remember your 'mock up' does not have to totally represent the finished product - which you may acknowledge could benefit from procedures such as vacuum moulding without actually doing it.
In general what I'm looking for from boot based storage:
- Doesn't need to be too fancy in design, I won't be seeing it often - it's in the boot.
- Do you want to consider some carry handled which can be easily used to move a full product rather than grabbing it and potentially holding a weak point?
- Remember gear may be wet, muddy or sharp - so ideally a material like MDF will need some kind of coating, maybe a light rubber sheet you could stick to the material with glue which could take the majority of knocks.
- Not too big, realistically I wouldn't want to keep taking it out, it can live in a corner of a boot.
I'd absolutely would use this kind of thing - I climb, ski, hike and have mountain rescue equipment in my vehicle 100% of the time. Currently it is sorted into rucksacks, but being able to pick equipment more easily from a modular storage system seems great (for climbing in particular).
Like fernman posted above, I currently use a rubber moulded insert which came with the vehicle and a general purpose tarp which goes on top of that which lives in the boot 100% of the time.
An idea might be to pivot the product away from purely hiking gear to car safety container for 4-seasons. Often you want a place to store wiper fluid, ice scraper, spare water, warm spare jumper, jump leads, torch etc. Having this in a 'gear bin' would do a lot of good for many people, especially if it is low cost and doesn't take up a huge amount of space.