Sketching Thoughts: The Car Dream
Fabio Filippini ponders the essential allure of the automobile’s shape.
The Car Dream over the ages ( photo © Fabio Filippini)
It is well known that most car designers spent their childhood drawing cars. However, they were far from alone in this: a great many people who didn’t become automotive design professionals used to draw cars in their childhood days as well.
I was lucky enough to become a professional designer, and thanks to my career path, I regularly participate in international classic car events, both as visitor and judge. Those so-called Concourses d'Élégance take place in beautiful sites, with car collectors coming in from all over the world.
What strikes me there each and every time are the amazement and envy-of-sorts betrayed by those enthusiasts, as soon as they realise their interlocutor is a car designer. Generally speaking, these are all enormously successful individuals, who own incredibly valuable car collections of the kind any designer could never hope to obtain. Yet they would often admit, perhaps with a hint of self-indulgence - albeit sincerely - that they have always dreamed of being a car designer.
In fact, this is what passion for cars is generally like: irrational and instinctive. The car fascinates, excites and embodies feelings and emotions. It acts as ultimate symbol of the industrial and economic revolution of the 20th century, epitomising both its positive and negative effects in a perfect manner. No other man-made object has thrilled the masses and individuals worldwide to the same extent during this period - regardless of people’s origins, gender and age.
Engineered Emotions
All the way from its inception, the automobile was strongly associated with meaning and emotion. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in his Manifesto of Futurism, proclaimed that «a racing car, with its bonnet adorned with large snake-like pipes exhaling explosive breath... is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace», thus celebrating beauty and elevating it to the status of a symbol of progress and speed. Similarly, Roland Barthes wrote his praise of the myth of the automobile, comparing the Citroën DS with the great Gothic cathedrals, in 1957. So for over a century, the car has been interpreted by great artists and museums’ permanent collections, such as the MoMA’s in New York City. The automobile also became an integral part of pop culture and cinema - not to mention its recurrent mythologisation, courtesy of the television universe.
The small man’s car dream (photo © Aston Martin)
The automobile’s popularity derives from both its functional purpose and from values that have supported the social and economic progress of our modern nations. Yet these meaningful factors are further sublimated by the aesthetic qualities of the product, as they convey sensations of speed, freedom and puissance to the observer.
Undoubtedly, the shapes and surfaces of a car, in conjunction with its interior equipment, are among the most complex and refined achievements of the entire artificial, man-made realm. Automobiles are the only mass product comprising the most sophisticated functions and technologies of today’s human knowledge in their entirety. Furthermore, the car is not ‘simply’ integrating them at once, but associating them with a fourth dimension: movement!
This is what makes cars so extremely fascinating to us. What arouses emotions and passion in all of us. However, due to the impulse of epochal changes and recent dramatic global events, we are now witnessing a definitive transition between two different eras, entailing consequences that are difficult to predict and perhaps even to control. For quite some time now, the automotive industry has found itself facing new challenges, and the ‘Automobile' object must adapt accordingly - by totally changing its own paradigm.
The Road Ahead
As an icon of 20th century values, the car should try to perpetuate those still valid today: mobility, social development, freedom and passion. Simultaneously, it should try to overcome anachronistic expressions of extreme speed, ‘supremacy' and aggression, as well as fully eliminate negative factors, such as pollution and danger.
This process has been evolving over some decades, with safety awareness and sustainability issues having partially transformed the industry and the automotive offer. Consumption and emissions levels have thus been drastically reduced, compared to only few years ago. Safety became a priority, contributing to saving thousands of lives on our planet, every day. In addition, production processes have improved enormously, allowing complete control over the entire life cycle of vehicles - more so than with any other mass-production good.
Nostalgia: Yesterday’s future (photo © DFT)
Over the past decade, the spreading of hybrid and electric technologies has accelerated this change, while some manufacturers are already offering hydrogen and fuel cell propulsion to the markets. Progress in these areas will not be linear, but, far more likely, exponential.
Another substantial change will come with the autonomous car, as it interacts with global service systems, leading to new forms of mobility and allowing greater fluidity of transport, while fully adhering to established standards of safety and sustainability. Indeed, new business models based on service, rather than product, will completely transform the experience and imagery associated with cars.
There is no question that car design has to evolve substantially for it to express the core values of this new era: Speed being now represented by the immediate ubiquity of global streams of data, whereas power tends to be measured in terabytes. As a consequence, the imagery of the automobile should embody more earthly and human values. Perhaps through emphasising the spirit of travel, eventually even slowness, in order to facilitate freedom to discover unexpected horizons and places. This provision might enhance one’s experience of nature, enable the sharing of experiences and allow for the possibility of new configurations adapting to multiple needs.
A richer on-board experience can derive from newly integrated services, through virtual reality, as well from the sensorial quality of the cockpit. That way, all physical senses are involved: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and maybe even taste.
Indeed, the flexibility of innovative propulsion systems, with their ‘stand-alone’ components merged through flows of energy and data, should allow an exceptional multiplicity of shapes, proportions and colours, resulting in an expression of great variety through various design interpretations.
In order to achieve this, it will be essential to ensure that the automobile of 21st century continues to express positive values; that it still arouses passion and admiration; that it represents the highest skills of human progress, thus contributing to a new egalitarian and sustainable form of development for the whole planet.
Meanwhile, the responsibility of designers will be to perpetuate that unique prerogative within the world of artificial objects, by ensuring that the car continues to express beauty and emotion. Thus it shall remain a dream object - embodying exactly that dream so many people were trying to draw when they were children.
