When Design Goes too far....

Car share sounds interesting. It has one probem though. Ever notice how dirty public transport is?
I bet “public cars” would have the same problem. Current cars are very nice and comfy inside but would be a nightmare to keep clean in this situation. Finding someones left over french fries between the seat wouldn`t be cool.

Maybe privately owned cars that can connect into a central autodrive system?

It doesn’t necessarily has to bring it’s own wheels. Just the cabin. And the interior could range from a simple seat bench up to all kinds of luxury, you can ever imagine :smiley:

do you have zip car where you are. Their vehicles are pretty immaculate and you can get anything from a Yaris to a Jaguar.

Thats a cool concept! I guess Im just a little skeptical about human behaviour regarding public/shared property.

I used City Car share for a couple years… it was surprisingly well kept up. The only problem was that sometimes people would be late bringing back their cars or they were low on gas.

other problems were that the locations weren’t always ideal and that if you were in a 3 hour meeting, you were paying for the cars for those unused hours

Overall it was amazingly easy to check out cars and use the service. For about $20/ month you’re given a key fob and when you need a car, you schedule in the hours and location you want the car online. It looks just like setting a meeting in outlook showing open slots and car types. When you arrive the car is set to open for your fob and you just get in and go - you never even need to talk with anyone. Brillant!

Interestingly enough I am working on a solution to the current transport issues.
I am hoping to liberate this through an app. The vision I have of the future is automated taxi’s which is cheaper by collecting passengers based on time contraints and the trip they are taking. By 2015 Microsoft and Toyota (which have teamed up), are aiming to connect cars to the cloud. Many people will prefer surfing the web/video calling people over driving I am certain.

I am young, 18 so I have only just started driving on the road and I have already given up my vehicles. The following generations will see less and less need to actually ‘drive’ a car. However I see it growing more as a Recreational activity, with the adoption of electric cars they will be able to be raced within cities due to the almost complete removal of noise. Reference Nissan Leaf Nismo >> Nissan LEAF NISMO RC Shakedown - YouTube

There are far to many resources being wasted on mass production cars as well as the amount of fuel consumed for cars commuting with just one or a few people.
I read somewhere that we manufacture 50 million + cars a year. Is our goal for everyone to own a car? IBM states by 2050 70% of people will be living in cities with 27 megacities which is a city with over 10 million people.
According to a video on TED we spend 30% of our income on owning a vehicle, which we utilise 8% of the time. The ‘Reinventing Mobility’ video made by BMW states we spend 20% of our income. How is that justified?

Hopefully will be able to get my project onto Kickstarter soon… sucks living in Australia!

Sounds like you got it all figured out. Good luck to you.

didn’t we all at 18 :laughing:

Mine did not stop at 18, lasted long after that.

Have to say though “oldskool” you are closer to the target than my fellow 18yr olds who were fitting superchargers on 427 cubic inch V8’s and going for the fastest time “between the bridges”, which was our local quarter mile. The majority of them became Darwin award candidates.

What a coincidence! In my neck of the wood you don’t see Dodge Chargers but I saw one yesterday in a car park and boy did it look ugly! I had to rinse my eyes at the next public fountain. I was never big on American car styling but this took the cake. American cars of the past had some form but now they all look like bricks.

Luckily I walked into a Lambo Gallardo and the world was good again :slight_smile: Hoping to walk into a Reventon one day.

End of slightly off topic rant :slight_smile:

Just read through all the previous posts (almost). About the Dodge Charger commercial, I think it is more in place with the Superbowl commercials. Just pure American Ridiculousness and over the top. There was another commercial with reference to the movie “Fast Five.” The narrator said something like (sarcastic voice) ‘its fast because it was used in the movie.’

All in good WTF humor. Not a design lead.

I just read all of the four pages of posts - we all take and get something unique from that Dodge commercial, whether we think it’s cool or hate it! Interesting that it polarized some of you - like a game with Tim Tebow at QB.

I think this one below from Corning is a good example of a company foreseeing its technology in some very useful and appealing ways - it’s just enough far ahead not to be possible, yet convincingly real - comforting almost:

You have probably seen these before, but they are similar to the Corning glass one so I thought I would post them.
First is better+newer than the second. Both by microsoft.
Again futuristic but not that far-fetched that they seen unreasonable.

oy. I think all three of those are bad- the corning and the 2 microsoft ones. They don’t jive with my vision of the future, and instead show off why everyone’s going to end up slouching all day by looking at flat touch screens. There’s no life in any of those. Sure the last 3 are less apocalyptic then the dodge commercial, with people smiling at their rectangles and what have you, but they fail to show simply how disconnected those devices would make everyone. I would love nothing more to start a tech company and prove all these corporations wrong… the future isn’t in adding menus to every bit of data to analyze, or making every service touch screen. It’s in enriching our lives through interactions that are as minimally invasive as possible. If it takes a five and a half clicks and swoops and drags to turn the radio in my car on or turn the fake light in my stove on, that’s stupid and ridiculous. None of those solutions really address the big issue of smartphones taking over social situations- where they are so obtrusive that they detract from life experience, instead of enhancing it. These videos show the result of current-gen smartphones being built around productivity- they are equally obtrusive but in a different context… in my mind, none of these companies get it.

/end rant

ineo - yours is an interesting take on the role of technology.

I don’t task technology with the responsibility of being happy-go-lucky or making me happy, I instead like to view our technological advances through the filter of making our tasks easier, more accurate and/or quicker so that we can get on with our lives and smell the roses. It seems you might be mad at the tech for forcing you to go through tasks before smelling those roses?..or what if the technology actually had roses growing amongst it so that we could smell them while completing tasks? Just a little lighthearted banter to gear up for more in depth thought.

:slight_smile: It seems that at least twice a week I encounter a service-oriented person frustrated while trying to interface with a computer. They inevitably tell me, “oh, if this thing would just wake up”, or “sorry, computer’s running slow today”, or “I’ll have that record up in just a minute, the network is acting up again”…to which I always reply (with a smile), “hey, take your time, it’s better than carving in stones”.

Perhaps I am nit picking here, but I cannot stand the way you start some of your articles with a blanket statements about designers. A year or two ago, I remember reading your post on gifts for Christmas and it started out something along the lines of “As designers we take gifts seriously. Very seriously.” I found this very insulting. I realize in this article you aren’t making such a superficial claim, but I just wanted to point it out.

Who is the above directed at? If it is a personal concern, you should probably send a private email or PM.

lol

all chargers should be automatic, to have to manually set the voltage is vile and reprehensible.

all chargers should be automatic, to have to manually set the voltage is vile and reprehensible.

LOL