As CDN readers know, the Royal College of Art's Vehicle Design course has produced an alumni matched by few others. As such it's a useful barometer for the current state of design education, an area that many increasingly believe requires a rethink in order to respond to new challenges.
We are living through an era of different needs and new alignments. No longer will it be sufficient for the next generation of car designers to simply create beautiful sculptures with clean lines and taut, muscular surfaces. Designing tomorrow's mobility will require substance and openness to critical thinking. Or put simply a much more complex understanding of transport design in the wider social and geopolitical context.
Original thinking should be at the core of this postgraduate course, so it's interesting to look at these Vehicle Design Work-in-Progress Show highlights in this context.
The projects presented here are very much in their embryonic stage. Come June we will be presented with the students' complete visions. However it's interesting to note the focus on the car in its sculptural sense, on individual ownership and on personalization still dominates. There should of course be the desire to create beautiful surfaces, but there's the danger that some of these arguments feel a little tired and macho. There were, however, some projects with clearly original thinking with a more considered approach to vehicle design.
Two Chinese students had some interesting ideas about the role of the vehicle in our rapidly urbanizing world. Yuan Fang comes from Shenzhen, a megacity north of Hong Kong that was a village until 1979. It now has 15 million inhabitants and such a high population density that it is the most crowded city in China.
Here buildings grow quickly and vertically, and people adapt to the high-density living conditions. Fang's ‘A Vertical Movement' looks at the possible role of the vehicle in a city like Shenzhen. "These tall buildings shape the city into different layers," she explains. People spend most of their time indoors thus losing their connection with the ground, she notes.
Fang believes that in much the same evolutionary way we humans changed our form to fit our environment, vehicles will also need to adapt to this vertical world. "I think it is time to change both form and function," she says.
Her project is still in its infancy. "I use various techniques to discover a new image for the vehicle like calligraphy, computer and acrylic sculpture. And I try to learn from architecture to enhance the impression of space in the vehicle." It will be interesting to see how Fang evolves her project for June's end of year show.
Zishi Han has also looked at the role of the vehicle in the urban environment - in this case the shantytown. Inspired by growing up in Beijing where rapid economic growth has created a vast urban village, ‘Vehicle with a Slum Postcode' focuses on chéng zhōng cún, the Chinese slum, or "the neglected side of china's booming urbanization," explains Han.
These mostly former rural villages have been swallowed up by expanding cities and house the poor and transient. "They tend to keep their original texture," he says. "I'm amazed by how efficient and vibrant the urban village actually is, despite all its social problems."
Han's response has been to design an open-source system based around vehicles that improve the living conditions of shantytown dwellers, and take advantage of what the area can offer. He explains: "The system will bring urban villagers, car manufactures and the government together using low-tech production methods and locally-sourced material to produce a vehicle and dwelling in the urban village by locals for locals."
His final project will see an instruction for design and manufacturing, plus a prototype made in the urban village alongside an accompanying video to document the process.
Also noteworthy was ‘How to Last Forever/Bentley Sterling', a project that opposes the disposable car culture. Here Jannis Carius sets out to prove that the car can become "something like an heirloom," he says.
"No one inherits the digital watch from his grandfather," he continues. "This lead me to the idea I should move away from the common black box design of today and show the mechanics in a mystical, luxurious and interesting way. The perfect combination of simplicity and mechanical fascination makes a design valuable though time."
First he looked at energy. For the car to last as long as possible, the energy source should be able to evolve. Jannis has inherited a small sterling motor from his grandfather that gave him the idea to utilize this as it can run with most energy sources as long as it can produce heat. "The motor can run without creating pollution as long as the energy source doesn‘t produce any," he says.
Carius then looked into resistant and durable materials. His projects features a lot of glass, which covers large parts of the exterior and the interior. "Glass also allows you to have big transparent surfaces to avoid a black box design and expose parts of the engine and mechanics," he notes.
Stephen Russell's project - of which we unfortunately have no images - is another that critiques our disposable car culture. He moves away from the digital to create physical objects, playing with geometry and surfaces to find solutions for the end-of-life of the vehicle.
It will be interesting to see the end results when we attend the end-of-year show, including those projects not featured here.
Meanwhile the role of education in the car design industry is something we will be further investigating over the coming months.
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