Industrial design interests me. For as long as I could remember I've wanted to design cars. Car guy is not an addition to my personality, it's not a topic to chat about at family gatherings, it's not something that is a passing interest as a young adult. From day 1, the initial, the beginning, I haven't, I won't have been a car guy, I am a car guy. A core, a center, a middle, each person has that little stone of being in the middle of them, an essence. If I had to define further, I'd say I'm a utilitarian, working class, car guy. Super cars are boring, chub killers, they make me soft. A vintage Jeep, an original beetle, an old Corolla, a Chevette, a Lada 2100, are vehicles that stir my heart. Industrial design is simply the design of products, the initial phase of feeling and impact, the look the shape the idea of an object. Industrial design intrigues me, as objects have feeling and emotion, as well as use. Mechanical design is more specific, mathematic, more of how the jib is cut than what the jib should be in the first place. Industrial design covers Car design. Intially, at the beginning of the automobile, mechanicals were designed first, and the body came second, but by the mid 30's that idea was long gone. The popularity of personal vehicles began to invest it self permanently on their earth. When the majority of mass population all partake in something, the simple function complicates to a whole new level of original usage, meets individualism. As long as the object is in abundance, and provides the desired original function with acceptable quality, the customers secondary wishes become priority. With this process repeating for many generations, the primary function of automobiles is nearly extinct. I've been doing research on my desired career as an automotive designer, and as an automotive industrial designer it seems that the program results, no matter the school, seem to have a funneling affect. Students breeze through school, with many finished projects, with this sudden increase in flow, comes a decrease in diversity. The final products, which for all intensive purposes are the future of automobiles, the things I love, all seem disgustingly similar. Emotion is purely reaction, an effect of the original cause. When I view these printed concepts, these carved ideas, I feel emotion. Wild lines, complex curves, edges changing from sharp to soft, swooping window lines, variating wheel arches, width stance, aggression, but there's a problem. There is no emotion to these new vehicles, rather funneled ideas of a some how standardized industry, free and open to design anything, as long as it's the same thing as before. The great thing about industrial design is you have the opportunity to design the future, it's your discretion to actively take the challenge of guessing and directing where the world will go. Of all those who have this opportunity in their career, the items we deal with every day seem to have the greatest impact. They are the feeling in our hands, the motion, actions, interactions of our day, and this is what excites me about industrial design. Having reviewed many new vehicle designs over the past 10 years, I get discouraged to see that these people who seem to have the money for such and elitist education, do not take the opportunity to design a new outlook for themselves. Rather, recycled predictions come in the form of similar, blobs of vehicles, designed simply from aesthetically focused and functionally ignorant visions of tomorrow.
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