car design thread

Interior design is picking wall colors and pillows and if you look at their criteria, having low cost, high acceptance rate and a high graduation rate are critical and not part of ACCD's program

 

That image immediately reminded me of this image. The car is very different but the atmosphere is similar. Could be the same rendering software and, looking at the reflections, it could even be the same environment.

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Speaking of Car Design Academy, the founder, Eric Stoddard, designed this electric single seat car that was just launched. It uses the electric car tax credit to offer a $0 lease option. Kind of interesting. My complaint is that non of the images show any kind of scale and the cars look sort of toy like, so it is hard to get a feeling of how the car would really look in person.
https://aiomotors.com/

 

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Interesting as I place interior design as slightly higher in importance when buying a car. Its the interior I will be living in.

 

Better but still a long way from great

 

My point was that “Interior Design” is not “Automotive Interior Design”, it’s general interior design, dealing with homes and offices, picking colors and pillows. If it was Automotive, yes very important, and Art Center would be on the list.

 

Whenever I get the communications from ACCD it is head shaking. It all went downhill as soon as they switched to "professional educators" after Don Kubly. The direct connection by the leader to the industry experience, and the boot camp of attending Art Center. Also, look at the schools massively increase of non-teaching staff.

Now it seems that the school wants to instill fuzzy wuzzy crap and save the world. That is not what made the place the leader in providing graduates that could immediately make meaningful contributions to their employer.

I am not happy to know that this has happened.

 

Nice looking Pininfarina Teorema
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This is almost all universities public and private. Says something that they held out so long. Anything further would be P&R.

 

But that direct connection to what Art Center's existence was about from the president's office was a part of what made the school different. I don't necessarily believe that the president needed to be an Art Center grad but it needs to be someone that was successful in a role within one the fields that the school trains for.

President #3 was the first of the continuous string of "professional educators". I guess their ability to write flowery words for alumni communications, suck money out of donors, and say the right words at gatherings of other "professional educators" is the qualification.

I remember attending an alumni gathering in Dallas around 1989 (?) where #3 attended. He really had no grasp of how bad it was that Chuck Jordan had gone public with his displeasure with the school's Trans program. John can talk more on the quality of the graduates as he did sometimes did the interviews of the graduates during his career.

 

As a design school (but not transportation) grad, I'd like to add my perspective – largely in agreement with the last few days' comments. To me, part of the problem, growing in academia since the 1960s and pervasive in the last decade or so, is that practical disciplines have gotten a chip on their shoulder about not being intellectual or theoretical enough and then opened the door to all kinds of BS which has undermined their effectiveness in training young minds for the real world (in all its ambiguity and complexity). In design, there has been a drifting away from the idea of harnessing the individuality, subjectivity, and randomness of talent in the service of making objects that work, surprise, and inspire. In design (and art in general), there's a lot to be said for being exposed to, and absorbing, as wide a range of influences as possible WITHOUT analysing them to death. It's obviously right (and well overdue) to pay more attention to what women and non-white ethnicities can contribute and increase their opportunities to do so – who can deny the wonderful influence and work of figures like Ed Welburn and Ralph Gilles? – but NOT useful to dwell on past injustice for its own sake. With respect to car design in particular, I can't firmly pin down why American cars evolved, over a century, a look so distinct from European and Asian cars, but for me it's enough to know that the difference is culturally mediated and LEAVE IT AT THAT. Car design is to a great extent a vernacular art, a form that is not afraid to draw from any quarter, and the field should be proud of that and accept/respect that creativity is best ruined by over-thinking. End of rant (from a confirmed lefty, by the way)...

 

Exactly. I was raised in an Ivy League family, and raised eyebrows when I expressed an interest in applying to ACCD from high school in the 1970s. It was pigeonholed as a 'vocational' school, to which I said, "Well, there can't be much wrong with vocational school then!"

 

I did a summer program at Chrysler while at ACCD. There were 6 of us from different schools: ACCD, Wayne State, Long Beach, Cleveland Institute, something in New England, and the last I can't remember or maybe it was only 5 of us (it was a long time ago). Some things I observed were the ability to draw had a lot of variation in the group. I remember especially for the New England guy his concept that a designer could get away with anything as long as he did great work. He went to absurd examples but missed the point that no one starts out as being that great at the beginning of their career. Nor did he quite get that design is being sold to and approved by suits that expect corporate decorum.

Something else I saw was how an ACCD grad at that time going into automotive already understood that industry and could put their artwork on the wall for consideration immediately. This contrasted with someone Chrysler had hired that a 3 months still was incapable to putting anything on the wall. Not saying that graduates from other schools could not be just as good or better than an Art Center grad but what ACCD delivered was a high minimum standard for those that made it through.