Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: despite tweaks and refinements, car design has been restricted by mechanics for over 100 years. Now the development of driverless and electric technologies offers a bewildering array of possibilities, explains branding expert Dylan Stuart.

With driverless cars now being trialled in the real world, the automotive industry is set to face its biggest revolution in 100 years. Car design in the near future will not be bound by the constraints of the last century – like internal combustion engines, forward-facing seats, static dashboards and many other familiar elements. In fact, the automobile could be completely reimagined.

It’s about time. Few devices in our lives have advanced so much technologically but remained so static in their overall design. Now, the driverless and electric revolution could radically change how the vehicle is packaged inside and out. The mechanical constraints that limit how the interior is configured – like gearboxes, engines and drive shafts – will be removed.

Suddenly, there is an opportunity to think about how cars can truly become living spaces. Do seats always need to face forward? Do windows always need to show what’s going on outside? How should all the entertainment, communication and information possibilities be configured once the driver is freed from driving?

Car brands that already know how to create desirability through seductive sheet metal and driving pleasure will now need to consider how to provide a very different experience – from entertainment and communication right through to the mobility experience beyond the car. This will mean thinking much more broadly about where to create lasting emotional brand connections, even though the end consumer may neither drive or own the car anymore. In a nutshell, this means creating a completely different consumer experience.

Most car brands today are recognisable because they have a visual language grown out of constraints set by 20th-century technology – the “face” of the car created by intake grilles and lights; proportions usually dictated by having an engine in the front, external mirrors, etc. Will car manufacturers attempt to preserve the design cues that have historically defined their brands? Or will they evolve and change based on new parameters?

To give a very real example, electric cars don’t have radiators so they don’t require a front grill. However, the grill is one of the most distinctive design elements car brands use to create product recognition. The challenge will be creating something immediately recognisable, without the familiar cues.

California’s Tesla brand has already made the conscious decision that the car of tomorrow should look very much like the car of today. Their products have not been conceived with a futuristic and paradigm-breaking design. If anything, they are rather conservative. There’s still a front grill – but it’s completely fake. This was done intentionally to enable more people to accept what is a very progressive product through its reassuringly familiar appearance.

If Tesla’s success is an indication of things to come, there will be a significant period of time where car design remains broadly similar to today despite huge technological shifts, if only to promote consumer acceptance of new technology.

Skeuomorphism, the idea that led to Apple’s original camera app looking like an old camera on screen, will play a major role. We take touchscreen technology for granted now but when gesture control first came into existence, skeuomorphism allowed something very new to feel familiar and intuitive.

The same will happen with the car. There will come a point when many of those familiar design cues will simply not be required. But because people typically need time to adjust, a lot of redundant design features will linger. The key unknown is how long it will take for consumers to accept and trust new technology without the need to hold on to the familiar, and subsequently how car brands will respond to a new freedom in design.

I believe that we’ll see a faster change in the use of interior finishes and materials. Cars of today are often woefully traditional, largely sticking with wood, leather and plastic – and the plastic usually has a leather effect! The materials used in car interiors may differ in quality across different models and brands, but are surprisingly consistent in how they are applied.

As the car evolves, more high-function and high-tech materials will be allied to unique, proprietary finishes. Is leather really the most premium material for a car seat? Is wood really the cue that’s most appropriate to connote luxury? If more surfaces become interactive, do finishes need to be completely rethought? Do they even need to be real? As the car becomes a platform for communication, transportation, work and entertainment, the possibilities for reimagining the car interior – the way it’s laid out, constructed and finished – become almost infinite.

At a more fundamental level, the way a car looks on the outside will only remain something that matters as long as the car continues to be a means of self-expression – a road-going avatar. If people still want to self-actualise through the car, then the exterior styling will still be crucial: projected image and pride of ownership will still have value.

Perhaps the real differentiation will move inward, the exterior being irrelevant and the interior becoming the only thing that matters. Think of a first class seat on an aircraft that looks the same as every other.

Of course there will still be enthusiasts who love cars as they always have; for the beauty of the object and the visceral experience of driving. I’m going to be one of them. But this will become a narrow, expensive niche. Much like owning a horse.

The car industry is on the verge of its biggest design opportunity ever. Technology is allowing us to completely reinvent the aesthetics and experience of mobility. The transition will, of course, take time. But the shift has begun.

Dylan Stuart is a partner in charge of strategy at design and branding firm Lipincott. His previous clients have included American Express, BP, Four Seasons Hotels, Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz and NBC. He was previously a brand strategist with Landor Associates, focusing on the automotive, entertainment and aviation sectors.

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From left: Kano Computer Kit, The Extrapolation Factory & Grow It Yourself Mushroom Materials

The Design Museum’s annual Designs of the Year exhibition opens to the public tomorrow – as always, it’s a fascinating show, but a challenging one to put together.

This year’s exhibition showcases 76 projects (more than 60 percent of which are from overseas) spanning architecture, digital, fashion, graphics, product and transport. Chosen by a panel of industry experts, it’s a vast and disparate collection, with banknotes, cars and a toilet that could save millions displayed alongside couture fashion and crowdfunded games.

The show’s graphics were devised by London studio Kellenberger-White (whose handpainted typographic identity for Glasgow International is one of this year’s showcased projects), with 3D design by Benjamin Hubert Ltd. The modular construction aims to make use of the venue’s vertical space while concealing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of individual stands, and the typographic identity helps unify displays.

The graphics build on last year’s concept of using a simple headline above each display to draw visitors in, a system that works particularly well for smaller objects or those which are difficult to comprehend at first glance. The same typeface is used throughout, ensuring every stand receives the same treatment. Headlines and captions are printed in black, but an entrance display uses neon pink and orange lettering, while a wall of credits and another featuring a running total of people’s choice votes combine lilac and aqua text.

Instead of being arranged by category, projects are loosely grouped into seven themes: ‘sharing what we have’ (projects financed by public donations or crowdfunding); ‘sharing what we know’ (projects born out of collaborations); sustainable designs; projects which ‘encourage exploration’ (such as medical technology and games); design with everyday impact (from everyday clothes to buildings); designs for change and designs which aim to stimulate our emotions.

Each theme is explained in more detail at the exhibition entrance, but with no map or graphics to signpost sections, it can be difficult to tell which is which – particularly as several projects fulfill the criteria for more than one category. This system can be difficult to make sense of, but offers a much more engaging walk through than grouping projects by type (though Asif Khan’s 3D Megafaces feel oddly isolated alongside Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Designing for the Sixth Extinction in a central corridor, particularly as the small screen and model in Khan’s display do little to convey the impressive scale of the project).

Sawdust’s 3D type for the UK edition of Wired & Pentagram’s identity for MIT Media Lab

In previous years, graphics has perhaps received less attention than other categories. This year, however, it features some of the most eye-catching displays – from Kellenberger-White’s section which showcases printed communications for Glasgow International alongside a sample of the original, hand painted lettering, to Sawdust’s, which uses large-scale images and close-ups to show the detail and depth of its 3D type for Wired magazine. (Irma Boom’s beautiful all-white embossed book for Chanel No 5, however, doesn’t fare so well against the minimal white display).

Of the architectural displays, the most engaging are those which feature plans, scaled models, materials or films explaining the process behind finished buildings and complexes. It’s difficult to showcase architectural projects in such a small space, but these added extras help give some sense of the scale and complexity of the work featured – a difficult thing to get your head around in displays which rely solely on photographs.

On the product side, it was also great to see displays with swatches or prototypes giving some insight into the product’s development. This isn’t always possible given the space, of course, and the museum has no control over what visuals and items nominees submit, but for visitors, this can help provide some much-needed context when viewing what can seem an overwhelming array of inventions.

It’s a great snapshot of the year, however, offering a glimpse of 2014’s most exciting innovations, from the socially conscious to the beautiful, as well as projects which could have a significant impact on learning, medicine and science. It’s also a rare chance to view some luxury concept cars and catwalk designs up close.

Putting a show like Designs of the Year together is a hugely challenging task – there is no one overarching theme, narrative or aesthetic, and with nominations announced in January, there’s just a couple of months to work on the layout – but Kellenberger-White and Benjamin Hubert have made a great job of the design, providing a simple, unifying system with some lovely added touches (such as curved displays and the peg board for visitors’ votes).

As always, it’s impossible to predict what will be named this year’s overall winner on June 4 – especially after last year’s winner, Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, departed from the trend towards honouring projects for social good – and with so many great designs on show, the judges have an unenviable task.

Designs of the Year 2015 is open until August 23 at Design Museum, Shad Thames, London SE1 2YD. See designmuseum.org for details or to view the full list of nominees. Category winners and an overall winner will be announced on June 4.

Content guidelines be damned, we always feel compelled to post OK Go’s music videos because they’re just so damned creative. So when we heard they were doing a commercial for Chinese furniture brand Red Star Macalline—which is something like China’s Ikea—we didn’t know what to expect: Would the company reign them in? Sinicize the content? Or do the smart thing and let them do whatever they want with their visual trickery galore?

Well here’s the video, hot from the hard drive, see for yourself:

And in the following vid—not so much a behind-the-scenes as a brief explanation—you can see why they opted not to have the band sing in Mandarin. The dubbing is not hard to spot:

This week’s warm remembrance of Australian-born journalist Betty Lee, who passed away earlier this month at age 93 in Toronto, appears in the paper where she made her most lasting contributions, the Globe and Mail. It was penned by another very capable Toronto-based writer, Lisa Fitterman.

Lee began making her mark at the Globe and Mail in 1959, when she returned from a six-year undocumented professional stint in New York City. From Fitterman’s obituary:

Over the years, Lee wrote numerous important features and series, including one in 1963 about Arthur Lucas, a soft-spoken giant of a man with a long criminal history who, with Ronald Turpin, had been hanged at Toronto’s Don Jail the year before. Their deaths would mark the last time capital punishment was enforced in Canada and Ms. Lee, who used trial transcripts and extensive interviews to produce the series, sharply questioned the fairness of Mr. Lucas’s double-murder trial from the get-go. She wrote that every bit of evidence presented had been circumstantial and not a single witness placed him at or near the house in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood where two bodies were found…

Lee traveled the world for the Globe, won a National Newspaper Award for a lengthy hard-hitting series on the insurance industry and, in 1972, became the first female Southam Journalism Fellow at Massey College, at the University of Toronto, to be allowed to use the college on a daily basis – just like the men.

Fitterman, on her personal blog, links to the obituary with the tease: ‘How amazing to think of a time when newspaper scribes were given a year to write articles such as a 32-part series on the insurance industry!’ In the early 1970s, Lee also wrote in the Globe and Mail about how her retina became detached while watching Last Tango in Paris. It was the beginning of long-lasting vision problems.

Lee’s partner Dorothy Knight, who survives her, inspired her to write the 1975 book Lutiapik, all about the latter’s experiences as a nurse in the Arctic region. RIP.

by Caroline Kinneberg

Lupe García—the creative director of recently Casa Cavia in Buenos Aires—is following in her parents’ footsteps. Her father opened La Panaderia de Pablo restaurant, while her mother founded Ampersand—a publishing house rooted……

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