to achieve a design strategy we should break up the strategy into two categories, those being the design goal and form development. The design goal should include the design processes and how to achieve the design goal. This is a very important step in moving a project forward as it determines the rules that govern the design. It gives direction. Form development is also an especially important process for car design as it forms the design. There are several ways to achieve the design goal and I am going to outline the steps that I will be taking to accomplish my goal, they will also help me achieve the definition of my goal. It is important to remember that these goal definitions are not set in stone, and may change partway through the design stages. With all this put together it will inform me of a framework with which to work, this in turn will help me develop the design I am striving for.
In terms of the form I will be using a technique used by many designers and artists to develop forms. I will be using a line template developed so that the forms themselves take on a refined look, one that will make the car look whole in terms of the lines that are used to create the form. The template will use the lines created by smoke, these lines are fluid and of course aerodynamic in themselves and will create the overall look of the car.
I will be using these smoke templates to develop a language that the form will be able to communicate. I have chosen simplicity as a theme for the car and I think smoke or the way smoke reacts to the world seems simple but of course is far from it. I have looked at simplicity and developed a set of rules that I will endeavor to follow to achieve this goal. They are as follows
Law 1. Reduce
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove. For example, The least amount of lines/surfaces used to make the form and still keep structural elements.
Law 2. abstraction
by retaining only the information needed, ie simple. This can be done by using flowing lines so that the form can retain the other laws but only those laws, to stay simple.
Law 3. Time
No one likes to suffer the frustration of waiting. Thus we often try to find ways to beat the ticking hand of time. We go out of our way to find the quickest option or any other means to reduce our frustration. When any interaction with products or service providers happens quickly, we attribute this efficiency to the perceived simplicity of experience.
Law 4. knowledge.
Knowledge makes everything simpler. At first form is difficult to understand but through these laws form becomes easier to understand.
Law 5. difference
acknowledging contrast helps to identify qualities that we desire.
Law 6. context
things are not always as the seem.
What looks simple (appearing in the periphery of simplicity) is definetly not simple because there is a lot more to it than meets the eye.
When applied to form, the mathematical equations to 3D model or produce the form would be quite complex. For example the context of physical form vs. computer generated form.
Law 7. trust.
“in simplicity we trust”
trust wants transparency. Transparency wants simplicity. Simple facilitates a true feeling of trust.
These laws should combine to create the spirit of the form, however I predict that I will be doing a lot of “sculpting” in terms of my first designs will be anything but simple. This is because I have to fore fill all the parameters of the car, ie. Usability, functionality innovation, and sustainability, but I think the next part of the sculpting process will of course be subtraction of certain elements of the form, thats not to say that I will subtract functionality all together, rather I will adapt the form design to incorporate it in a more simple way. This will form the re-dsign process too.
The production process will be important for defining the final form, as if it cannot be manufactured then it is a lost cause. I will be using composite materials such as carbon fiber or a natural replacement. Future advancements in the manufacturing process will mean that sheets of this material will be able to be printed, and then press formed into panels, these panels will then be assembled into the final form of the car, this will resemble the final form. Paints would be used, perhaps a solar energy receptive paint that would be able to act as solar panels always storing energy into the battery so that you would not need to have an alternator. The structure scheme would therefore be an exoskeleton, with a skin.
I have done research into form to see how car designs are influenced by the times, like during the cold war and the development of the space race, cars would grow wings and face rockets, they would have dome windows and would mimic what people thought the future was going to look like. Of course often the predictions of the future are not all that accurate, and today we still do not have flying cars, we do not have a car that can fold into a briefcase like in the Jetsons. The bat-mobile was of course one of those cars that took on that whole rocket ship look, and today it seems a little far fetched even for the next 20-30 years.
When looking into the next 20-30 years you can say that many things will change and improve, to the extent that we could not possibly conceive those changes, however it is important to look at the infrastructure in place today and look at how quickly something physical can change. The Internet has changed so rapidly that it has left many people in its wake. The older generations of this world have found it difficult to keep up to date with technologies because they can be developed so rapidly and this is in part because of the nature of technology. It is such that it often does not take on a physical form, or it is only a small object of which could be designed and implemented very rapidly and the systems that these technologies grow, grow along side and improve to the same extent.
Cars however can not be developed at the same speeds in the commercial world. This is because of a variety of reasons including just to name a few, engineering. Legislation, manufacturing, societies physical limitations and the list goes on. It takes years to develop a car not to mention the huge amount of money, and it would not be possible to develop new cars every year. Cell phone companies on the other hand usually release new phones every year, they therefore have the technologies updated along with the infrastructure of cell phone communication. The leap from 2g to 3g phones is the equivalent of changing a whole fuel source for a car. The problem here lies with the infrastructure of the car, in terms of how to deliver the fuel source, roads to be developed and the huge limitations of legislation like safety.
the car will be designed with usability in mind. The car will have a personality, when looked at it should provoke a “WOW” factor. This will be mostly achieved by the form of the design. This therefore will be car that people want to use as a car that explains their personality to the world, it will be a fashion statement. Based on my people research, I found that the majority of people used their car for 1 or 2 passengers and only if they had children would they use the cars other seats. Usually a family has more than one car depending on a variety of circumstances. This means that say for a family of 4 only two cars are needed if you have two, two seater cars. This would allow the car to be smaller and would contribute to fuel efficiency through the reduction of weight. Smaller cars also have a shorter wheel base making it more maneuverable through a tighter turning circle thus improving driving through cities. Given that most of the population of the world live in or near cities. this would help. 3 or 4 wheels should be used as it would form a good base on which a frame could be built that would hold all the necessities. By large the usability will interact with the production process as of course when you are building the car you have to know how the car will work as to what to build. A different design would require a different frame, for example if I was to design a car with only one door, it is possible to manufacture the cockpit differently because access only needs to come from one part of the vehicle.
the car I will be designing will be a hydrogen combustion powered vehicle, that is to say that it uses some of the same technologies that we use in cars today, a combustion engine, fuel tanks, gearboxes, wheels, breaks and so on. All these factors must be brought together so that it functions as an automobile. This is the industrial design part. The car must of course be practical to a certain degree.
Here are some constraints that I will be working with.
Small to mid size
Combustion engine.
Hydrogen fuel tank.
Doors
4 seater, probably 2×2
Unique use of materials and manufacturing process
400km range
Alternate fuels include.
Electric.
Hydrogen combustion.
Hydrogen fuel cell.
Compressed air.
Solar-electric
the electric car is in the beginning stages of a dominant run, that is to say until something better comes along. Roads have been laid for the domination, these depend heavily on battery systems and efficiency, for without these technologies being developed further, the electric car has a short lived dominance. Batteries are not eco-friendly at this point, that is to say, chemicals and a lot of energy goes into making the batteries and they are not efficient enough to give the car a long mileage not to mention their expensive nature. Electric engines are efficient at the moment but further technologies such as regenerative breaking (creating electricity while breaking) will be refined to where there is little to no waste of that energy.
If Hydrogen is burned, it creates virtually no pollution.
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Hydrogen does not exist naturally and so it must be extracted from other chemicals, such as the electrolysis of water. Such processes requires very large amounts of external energy to accomplish.
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The vast majority of current Hydrogen production in the US is made by a catalytic conversion of methane gas, because it is easier and cheaper than electrolysis of water. However, those processes of using fossil fuels to create Hydrogen create around 9 pounds of carbon dioxide for each pound of Hydrogen produced
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A scientific Law called the Conservation of Energy requires that the external source of energy MUST supply at least as much energy as the hydrogen could ever later release.
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Hydrogen gas has very low density, where one pound takes up nearly 200 cubic feet of volume. So gaseous Hydrogen is not very practical as a fuel.
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Compressing Hydrogen to 3,000 PSI is very difficult, very expensive to do, and requires a lot of external energy to accomplish.
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The sum of these factors, and others, make Hydrogen a rather undesirable fuel for vehicles currently.
At the moment hydrogen combustion is not a viable option to the automotive market, but there are a few reasons that make it the more realistic option in the short term. It is not viable because of the huge amounts of energy that are required to extract pure hydrogen from the atmosphere. Currently we use non-sustainable energy to produce hydrogen, so therefore hydrogen is not sustainable, however it is only a matter of time before they figure out how to generate energy from nuclear fusion, not a nuclear reactor, rather the combination of two hydrogen atoms at extremely high speeds and density to create similar amounts of energy to the sun. this in turn will provide the energy required to get hydrogen. When hydrogen is burnt, they by product is water, clean enough to drink. The beauty is that current engines can be converted to run on hydrogen, liquid or gas. It uses the same processes as LPG. Every current car could be converted to run on hydrogen, meaning that there would be less energy used to recycle current cars and so on. In the current climate, it is not feasible, but the loss of the combustion engine will see many car enthusiasts looking for something else to fill the void. Electric cars do not convey the male dominance of its combustion companion. I think the reason I would prefer to have a hydrogen combustion dominated society is because I like a lot of the old cars, and with a simple conversion kit similar to an Liquid Petroleum Gas conversion these old cars would not become obsolete, leaving space in the future for these cars to become green. Also if petrol is no longer sold many hundreds of millions of cars will have to be recycled again costing a huge amount of energy to achieve this goal.
Hydrogen fuel cells run into much the same problem, although they generate electricity rather than just being burnt and there are also no nasty by products of the running circuit, it takes more chemicals to create the chemical reaction process in the fuel cell, meaning a lot of energy to start with again. It comes back to the same problem of where do you get the initial energy from.
Compressed air is an interesting fuel, as there are obviously no pollutants. The problem here is that the amount of compressed air needed to move a car is a lot, so much so that it becomes problematic. It does not take a lot of energy to compress the air, but it takes a lot of compressed air to move a car. With advancements in weight reduction and the engineering of better compressed air engines, this might become a feasible alternative for city drivers, but not for long distant haulers, the such that live in Australia for example.
Solar electric share some of its problems with all of the above. It would not have a limited range during the day, because it would gather all its energy then, but at night it would need to store that energy and adding batteries would add to weight therefore decreasing the efficiency of the car. Solar panels have a long way to go as I think currently they are only something like 5% efficient, meaning they could become very good at getting that solar energy, further if every car had solar panels on them, while they were parked they would be producing electricity, which could be fed back into the grid, effectively creating a huge solar station in every city.
The future will involve to some degree all of these technologies. It is inevitable. It took some time before the combustion engine defeated the steam engine and so the same will be true here. It may not be that any one of these will become the sole trader, rather it is likely that all will contribute to some degree, such as solar panels on a hydrogen fuel-cell car, and hydrogen combustion with an electric hybrid, but you get the idea. Only the future knows where we will be taking these technologies and how they will develop. What I predict happening in the future is for governments to capitalize on the ability to legislate the use and development of one fuel in particular. It is in their interest to do this as it will generate money much the same way that they tax petrol and diesel they will be able to tax whatever fuel will be used. If electricity becomes the chief fuel they will not be able to differentiate the use of it in your car or for your house and therefore they will not be able to charge this tax. This will make it very likely that they will create legislation to use one fuel more than others and it will not be electricity. To further add to the probability of hydrogen becoming the most widely used fuel source, governments will also be able to invest into the manufacture of hydrogen, so they would make money in both the manufacture and tax of the fuel. Whoever so chooses to try and get the governments of the world to commit along side some fuel manufactures and car manufactures will make a lot of money. The next twenty years are ripe for the picking in terms of all these areas.
I predict they will use hydrogen combustion because of its ability to be taxed and its integration with todays current infrastructure. The future unfortunately will not change as rapidly as we would like to predict. Hydrogen combustion will also be able to be integrated into current cars, for example a kit would be able to be bought that would be added so that the engine would accept hydrogen much the same way that todays LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) conversions work. All this leads me to predict that cars in the future will not change as much as we would like them to, however they will become “green”, safer, faster, and better looking ( to a certain extent) but the limitations are there to restrict the development, or rather guide the development of the car of the future.
My car design will be innovative because of the use of a different fuel type, though it would be a conventional type combustion engine, and would need all the conveniences of todays cars, it would be able to be innovative through the production process and materials that are used. I think there has not been enough exploration into these areas in the automotive industry and there is room for innovation. There has been progress in the use of the materials and the manufacturing processes but not the link between design and these processes.
I think looking at the future most people would see that electric vehicles are the only way to go and where I think there is significance is where I explained that hydrogen combustion will become more used because of government intervention and legislation. Its not a leap forward in terms of changing the way cars are propelled but it is a different way of thinking about how the future is going to develop.
There is no way that in the next 20-30 years any type of public transport will be able to provide every one living in a city all their day to day needs, the car is not going anywhere, it will change significantly but it will not become any less important as a mode of transportation.
What will be truly innovative is that this car will be designed for a market that has not yet been realized. Several things need to happen before there is even a market for hydrogen combustion engines. Government legislation, the development of clean energy to create pure hydrogen, fuel companies to create the energy and finally car companies to develop the cars to use. Infrastructure should also change as a result of these changes.
