Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs introduces this round-up of our Dezeen and MINI Frontiers exhibition on the future of mobility, which took place last month during London Design Festival.
The Dezeen and MINI Frontiers exhibition presented work by six cutting-edge young creatives exploring how design and technology could transform the way we travel.
From ubiquitous augmented reality to long-haul space travel, the exhibition featured a series of radical concepts for how we might get around in years to come.
“The reaction has been really extraordinary,” Fairs says in the movie. “All of these exhibits look really good: they’re well designed, they’re beautiful. But they also all contain really provocative and intelligent ideas. They’re not just superficial objects.”
One of the most talked-about pieces on show was a stained-glass driverless car by Dominic Wilcox.
“Driverless cars are going to become super safe,” Wilcox explains. “So it’s going to free up designers to be more creative. I’ve pushed that idea to the limit.”
You can see how Wilcox made the car in the movie above, as well as behind-the-scenes looks at each project commissioned for the exhibition in the videos throughout this post.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg presented an “ecosystem” of 113 model cars, demonstrating how, in a future where vehicles are made locally from sustainable biological materials, our design processes might start to follow evolutionary patterns.
“A car company would just make the chassis of a car and the shells would be be made locally in workshops and fabrication plants around the world,” she explains. “You’d start to see people customising and adapting the size of the shells based on local driving conditions.”
Artist Lucy McRae created a speculative vacuum chamber, inspired by research by NASA, designed to prepare the human body for the rigours of zero gravity during a long-distance journey in space.
“I’m saying that we should be training to go to space right now,” she says. “I have synchronised swimmers moving around inside the chamber and a second experience where audience members can lie down inside the vacuum chamber and listen to their own heartbeat as they are consumed inside the vacuum.”
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez‘s project Unique Passengers is based on the idea that, as technology in our cars becomes more and more complex, we will need to create personalised avatars in order to communicate with them.
“Unique Passengers is a speculative service for driving companions that sit on your dashboard and assist you on your travels,” he says. “If you follow the Twitter account, the service will generate a new avatar specifically for you.”
Keiichi Matsuda presented an extract from his upcoming Hyper-Reality series of films, which explore a future of ubiquitous augmented reality.
“The film explores the augmented city from the perspective of a driver,” he says. “By taking the signage into the digital layer, you can start to think about the city being able to dynamically direct flows of traffic. It means the city stops being a fixed entity and starts becoming a much more fluid, dynamic landscape.”
Architect Pernilla Ohrstedt‘s Glitch Space installation, which consisted of over 100,000 white vinyl dots applied to the space, provided the backdrop for the exhibition.
“These dots represent what driverless cars in the near future will see and capture in the blink of an eye,” she explains. “They will constantly be scanning the space around them, capturing three-dimensional data in the form of a ‘point could’. What we’ve done is recreate this point cloud on the walls and surface of designjunction.”
The Dezeen and MINI Frontiers exhibition took place at designjunction during London Design Festival from 17 to 21 September 2014.
The music featured in the movie is a track called Contemphasic by Bankcee.
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.
The post Dezeen and MINI Frontiers showcased
“provocative ideas” for future travel appeared first on Dezeen.
Would-be undergraduates aren’t the only ones with innovative new educational opportunities at Parsons The New School for Design. There’s also a new Master of Fine Arts program in the works. Slated to launch in the fall of 2015, Parsons’ full-time Industrial Design MFA is geared to professionals who want to further develop their industrial design practice as well as those who are new to the field. As for the curriculum, developed by Rama Chorpash, expect well-crafted opportunities “to employ advanced making skills and critical inquiry to design products at various scales of production, from low- to high-volume, and from desktop manufacturing to systems involving global supply chains.” Students will cap off their two years of study with a thesis project “that develops innovative or provocative designs carrying forward or challenging industrial design theory and practice.” Excited? The program’s official kickoff will take the form of “Product City: Shortening the Supply Chain,” an October 30 panel discussion featuring Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez (founders of Makers Row) and Stephanie Schacht (head of responsible growth at Etsy), with Chorpash and Victoria Hattam (professor of politics at The New School for Social Research) moderating.
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