July 2, 2002 - The winners of the 2002 Nissan Vehicle Design Competition were announced by Shiro Nakamura, Head of Design at Nissan Motor Company, at a presentation at the Royal College of Art in London on 1 March 2002.

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Post-graduate students from the Vehicle Design course at the Royal College of Art worked in teams since November 2001 as part of the Nissan-sponsored project to design a Nissan compact car for the year 2010. The project was led by Dale Harrow, the Head of the Vehicle Design Department, with the support of Shuji Takano, Vice-President of Nissan Design Europe.

The theme of the project was to look at the role of the compact car in Europe in the year 2010, and to design a future C-segment Nissan, with only some package dimensions such as maximum length given. Seventeen post-graduate students, working in three teams, took part in the project. The three narrative design concepts that the teams developed were:

Mature Mobility – to create a fully developed mature compact utility vehicle.

Evolution – how a car adapts to it's users and matures with age.

Underwater – how a car can use a new inspirational approach to find a new visual language.

The teams developed the concepts by researching scenarios such as changing lifestyles, social groupings, technologies and interfaces between the car, public transport and the city that could produce new vehicle typologies. Members of the public were interviewed about their hopes and dreams for future vehicles.

The group which developed the winning design, Mature Mobility, took an interesting approach to inital idea development, enlisting the help of a fortune teller to help predict future car would be in 2010.

They made video interviews of people on the street, asking them broad questions about their dreams, fantasies and desires... "If you had 26 hours in the day, what would you do with the extra time?"

"Before making any decisions on possible themes or scenarios, we went out onto the streets and talked to people." said one member of the team, "To avoid their preconceptions about cars we asked them abstract questions. We discussed their answers and proposed a timeline of their life for the next 10 years, leading to a scenario for each personality in the year 2010."

"Together with the Nissan designers, we discussed the different scenarios and decided to develop 'mature mobility' as our chosen direction."

"Companies have a tendency to use mood boards and keywords to influence their research too early. We took a 'hands-on' approach to package research. Taking to the streets once more, we investigated existing products. We evaluated the merits and minuses of everything from a Lamborghini to a garbage skip and much in between."

"We came to the conclusion that being mature was not a question of age or status, but a state of mind. By applying the concept of mature mobility to our Nissan Compact, we hoped to design a car for people of any age, race or sex that would serve them as an adaptable platform on which they could live out their own unique lifestyle with a minimum of effort and with absolute convenience. We adopted the Japanese concept of tatami as an interior theme and chose to develop the car from the inside out."

Unlike products which offer a rigid layout by which the owner is expected to adhere, the team proposed that the car be designed entirely around the one constant that will always be in the car while it is in use: the driver. Thus the concept was christened '1+'. "We don't want to sell a particular lifestyle, we're selling a space for an individuals lifestyle, to use the way they want."

An optional number of expanding seats could be arranged as required around an adaptable grid on the floor of the car. Based on the scenarios for the year 2010, the team developed a number of interior solutions made possible by the 'tatami' grid. These included storage systems and possible third party accessories such as a food cooler that is not only secured by the grid system, but uses it to tie into the electric supply of the vehicle.

"The chosen exterior theme came about as a result of the interior. having explored various more traditionally automotive themes we decided that a truly 'mature' approach would be to discard current trends in favour of simplicity, functionality and space-efficiency."

"We tried to expel the notion of a pre-moulded, 2 parents, 2 children compact car. The 1+ is an adaptable, open platform on which you can live out your own unique way of life."

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