Re*Move

iPad - The best things come to those who wait

Two weeks ago a man called Mark Nitzberg did a lovely thing - he sent me an iPad from California. Mark's a board member at the Akvo Foundation, where I spend much of my time right now. He wants to know what I think about it - how it changes the way we use computers, whether it's any good, and whether you can read a book all day on it. So I've been giving it a whirl. I'll write more about the actual device, and what the big deal is over the coming days. But the thing is, I can't really describe the iPad to you until I do a bit of a recap - a few snippets of my perspective on the evolution of personal computers. So here goes.

In 1993, I got a job at Apple Computer. It wasn't in Cupertino, or even (as you might expect as a Brit) in Stockley Park, near Heathrow. It was in Warsaw, Poland.

Set on Jana Sobieskiego, a particularly bleak stretch of road out in the Warsaw suburb of Mokotóv, Apple Poland HQ was above a hat factory (filled with scary old ladies), and an Amway franchise (filled with scary Americans).

I was there for about a year, and learned a lot. Apple, "in between Jobs", so to speak, was struggling. Although its state of limbo was one of those things that I only really understood with hindsight. I was surrounded by technology. I shared an office with two guys. Marcin and I would throw paper at eachother all day while doing "marketing". Andrjez, a wonderful kindly man, would sit at a Mac Quadra 950, carefully designing Polish fonts to be used in Mac System 7. Because his computer had a 33MHz Motorola 68040 processor, it was actually categorised as a super-computer, requiring a special import license into this fragile new democracy, just four years beyond the collapse of communism.

I had a Powerbook 170. With an active matrix black and white screen, it was the absolute business - a dark grey wonder that was full of original ideas. It had the keyboard set back close to the screen, and a "track ball" - a dead-ringer for a pool ball - set on a ledge at the front of the computer. It had folders dotted around the desktop, and I could write wherever I was because it was genuinely portable, with little feet that twisted around at the back. I could connect it via "Appletalk" to other computers. I think we even had staff electronic mail running.

It's difficult now to describe just how dull most computers were back in the early '90s - after an '80s childhood of BBCs and Spectrums, Killer Gorilla and Donkey Kong, the personal computer future had fizzled into a way to run a digitized version of the 1970s office. I could type my own memos, print things off myself, decide where to save things and what to call them. I could even now take my computer with me to other places and use it there as well. While I was there, I could make things bold - or even italic. I could do all the things people could do in the 1970s, without needing support staff.

One day what looked like a pizza box arrived with a monitor on top, that had speakers. It was a Mac Centris 660AV, the first computer to be imported into Poland, as far as we knew, that could show video snippets and play music clips. It had a fancy innovation called a DSP, which stood for Digital Signal Processor. That meant it actually had another computer processor inside, which handled most of the video and sound. The clips were pretty tiny on screen - and the sound was okay but we all had CDs, which seemed much more useful, because they connected quickly to your hifi. So most people would say, "well what can you do with that?" And to be honest none of us had a good answer. It also had something called "GeoPort", which meant you could use a modem, so the computer could connect through telephone lines. But we didn't really use that.

One of the guys was also toting an Apple Quicktake 100 digital camera. Most people couldn't understand the point of that, either. I think it cost about $400 (to put this in context my Polish salary then was $200 per month, and that was above average). It could hold 8 photographs at 640x480 resolution. Which you couldn't do much with. Even bleak early '90s Mokotóv was blossoming with colourful Fuji and Kodak and Agfa signs above shops, where you could take your film camera and get prints developed, sometimes while you waited. So people would say, "Why would you want a digital camera when a film camera is really cheap and more useful?"

In early 1994, I was given an Apple Newton Messagepad. It was tiny - well actually it wasn't. It was an alien size - quite long and bulky. But it just had a screen - and no keyboard. Well actually, it had a stylus, a plastic thing that you knew you'd lose. And you would attempt to write on the screen and watch it convert each character into words. I took it out to a dinner with American and Irish friends that night and passed it around the table. Everyone thought it was fun, but noone could really make it work properly. And by the time it got back around to me, the batteries were dead. It was a digital notepad, for which there was no need.

Late that year I went back to London and worked for Apple, then Compaq, then Dell then HP, later in the '90s.

Apple and all the others spent a long time playing around with technologies that weren't yet really ready. But all this stuff is ready now. When I first got hold of an iPad two weeks ago, it felt like an alien size, but as an iPhone user it's all so familiar to use. But it is really different to any other computer.

The point of the iPad is that people can actually watch and read material off the internet. They can do it for ten hours. They can do it without sitting poised like a typist. That first Apple Powerbook 170 I had was bold enough to put a trackball at the front of the portable computer, and let the keyboard sit behind it. Apple's now been bold enough, and clever enough, to remove the keyboard altogether. A year ago this would have been premature. But now the internet is easy to use by just clicking around most of the time.

Microsoft's tablet computers, sold half-heartedly by PC makers, were insufficiently developed and timed too early. In computers, as in most things, timing is everything. Apple's timing is impeccable.

People who say the iPad isn't any good are the people that think the world is worse now than it was in 1955, or 1965, or '75, '85, '95 or 2005.

It isn't. It's a better world. The iPad is great - a product absolutely in tune with its time, not too far ahead or in any way behind. And it'll make the next ten years much more interesting. Just watch – or read, or follow.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Photo: the Sign / Movement Design Bureau kit museum in Bermondsey includes a Powerbook 160, a close relative of that PB170 I mentioned earlier. London, 5 May 2010.

Goodbye SAAB

We're not going to act like it is a surprise, but we're still shedding a tear or two this afternoon after confirmation from GM that it is to shut its Swedish sub-division SAAB. After years of new product starvation and the collapse of talks with Koenigsegg and now Spyker, the brand from Trollhattan - beloved of sensible professionals the land over - will shortly close its doors.

The death of SAAB saddens me in a way that - I'm sorry to say - the demise of MG Rover didn't. I can't entirely put my finger on why, but perhaps it's a personal thing. My piano tutor throughout my formative years had a fabulous green 900 that I regularly used to ride in. I've known many architects who drove, and raved about, SAABs. Sarah's dad used to have a 9000 as a company car, and her mum runs a current generation 9-3 convertible, which to me is much cooler than its competitors from BMW, Audi or Merc, even if by any objective measure it's somehow 'less good'.

How it's come to this is well documented, and not worth raking over again - but what happened is a good example of why mergers and takeovers can be a bad thing. Prior to GM's investment, SAAB made sub-cool, idiosyncratic cars, which while rarely regarded as class leaders, were at least different. The aforementioned 900 run by my piano teach was bought in 1990 - largely thanks to it having a vast boot, needed for transporting her husband's paintings across Europe to their native Hungary for exhibitions. Back then - to the 9 year old me - a car whose ignition barrel was on the transmission tunnel, which wouldn't let you turn the car off unless you locked it in reverse, and which had a turbo boost gauge, was the height of excitement. 

A real SAAB - in Detroit. Oh the irony.

It's testament to what SAABs were then that she still drives that very car to this day, and that as far as I know it's still running as sweet as a nut. Its qualities - safety, solidity, spaciousness, ergonomic intelligence and an image that was resolutely different to BMW, Mercedes or Volvo, was what attracted so many of the professional classes to the brand. Nice, smart people - doctors, architects and teachers, drove SAABs. In my view, it's to GM's eternal shame that they couldn't capitalise on this. They kept the looks, the funny ignition barrel and the good dashboard ergonomic, but started basing the cars on platforms that were far from in their first flushes of youth. The 90s 900 based on the 80s Vauxhall Cavalier/Opel Vectra being the classic example. That was fine for a while; the people who bought SAABs weren't bothered.

Yet the upper echelons of the car industry were changing, and GM starved SAAB of the ability to keep up. While GM were completely failing to get the appeal of SAAB to a predominantly European buyer, BMW and Mercedes were inventing and filling niches left right and centre, that were changing those buyer's perspectives. What they did was create demand among those very classes who once-upon-a-time had driven SAABs, for small premium hatches (1 series, A-class), SUVs (X5, X3, ML) and small lifestyle wagons (3, 5, C, E, A4, A6). Worse still for SAAB, while GM was dithering, Audi hauled itself out of VW's shadow, and turned itself into a premium brand that (until very recently) became what you bought if you wouldn't be seen dead in a Beemer or Merc. All the nice, design-aware people were suddenly driving Audis.

By the time GM admitted defeat, the 9-5, once the mainstay of SAAB's range, was 13 years old, and had acquired a pair of bizarre Dame-Edna Everage spectacles on its snout. Find another mainstream car in the industry that's anywhere near that age and I'll eat my hat. Its age alone sums up where GM went wrong. But there was so much more. The new 9-5 - reputedly signed off years ago, still isn't here - and probably never will be (at least as a SAAB). It was still running around Millbrook proving ground on final validation tests when I was there in September. A great shame, because even though the new 9-5 was unlikely to ever be a 5 series-beater, it was an impressive enough car, which priced right, might have hit its target quite well. Combine that with the fact that Anthony Lo and team in Russelsheim had knocked out some fantastic-looking, authentically SAAB-feeling concepts over the past few years, and one starts to think that had GM only had big enough balls and deep enough pockets, the story might have been very different.

In the cold light of day, SAAB clearly no longer stacks up. Sales are too low, and it's a European niche brand. The American's never really got it - certainly not well enough to own it - and GM needs to save money. So shutting SAAB is the only thing it can reasonably do now.

But stop for a minute and consider these things. The topic du jour in the car world (actually, with Copenhagen, just make that the world - full stop) is green issues. SAAB, thanks to its Swedish roots and early implementation of things like catalytic converters, has long been thought of as a green, clean brand. So when everyone else is busy inventing new faux green 'sub-brands', GM is busy killing a fully authentic one. Smart.

Continuing on the green theme, if we look to current and future gasoline engine technologies, today's talk is largely about turbo-charging. Ask anyone in the industry which company is synonymous with the word 'turbo charging', and I guarantee they'll give you one answer: SAAB. SAAB practically invented the technology, it has for years used it on its cars, and I think I'm right in saying every car it currently sells is turbo-charged. So just when you want to talk turbos, and how you’ve years of knowledge and history building them, you go and kill the world's most famous turbo-charged brand. Welcome to the world of GM.

Finally, design. In an era when people will pay - frankly - silly prices for an Arne Jacobson chair or table, and have more design ‘literacy’ than ever, Swedish design ought to be a major selling point. SAAB's design foundations, and design language feels apt for our times. Retrained, sophisticated, clean, pure, and non-showy. There's depth in SAAB's design too. The seats in SAAB's cars have long been regarded as some of the best in the industry, and to this day are still paragons of ergonomic comfort. Likewise the dashboard. Everything is ergonomically right, and falls to hand. And if you've ever been to a motorshow on press day, you'll usually find us folks from Car Design News down the SAAB stand, bathing in the cool white lighting and Swedish chairs, partaking in the best lunches and cappuccinos at the show. Cars like the Aero-X concept show that there are people working for SAAB/Opel who understand what good, Swedish, SAAB design is about too, and how it could be used as a selling point. And I haven’t even touched on safety. Yet now it’s all academic. 

The 9-X concept. Which people like me would have automatically bought ahead of the default Audi A3

In years to come, books will doubtless be written about bad management, which will use GM's handling of SAAB as case studies in how things shouldn't be done. Such thoughts make us sad, so we'd prefer to remember some happier things about SAAB. Stig Blomqvist flying through a rally stage in a SAAB 99 Turbo, the comedic torque-steering power of various Viggen models, the theatre of the Aero-X concept’s lifting cockpit canopy, and lazy summer afternoons, wind-in-the-hair in the back of a top-down 9-3 convertible. They might not have been perfect, but SAABs had this way of making you feel deeply secure, happy and content. In a world where so much is changing, and so much is uncertain, we still think there’s room for that kind of car. It's just a pity that GM never saw it. So goodbye SAAB, you will be missed.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th December 2009

Related reading: 

On Saab's Passing (by Ben Kraal, on his blog).

Report from Detroit: We Bear Witness (Firebird Man).

Pranav Mistry at TED: the thrilling potential of sixth sense technology

Where will augmented reality (AR) - and the current crop of AR apps, eventually lead us? While many are sceptical about its benefit, surely AR's indicative of a push towards some form of hybridised digital/physical world? Pranav Mistry, in a recent TED talk (video above), provides perhaps the most convincing vision of where we may end up - with some frankly jaw-dropping technology demonstrations.

What's interesting about this 'sixth sense' idea though, is that rather than simply making you go 'oooh' at the tech, you can actually being to understand how this would be useful and valuable in real life - geniunely bringing the physical and digital worlds together.

Crucially (and unlike AR right now) it means that we don't face a future walking round looking through tiny screens either - which is encouraging. Suddenly, anything is a screen, but as Pranav suggests towards the end of the video, what's really interesting is that this potentially helps us to:

"get rid of the digital divide, but it helps us to stay human - and not just be machines, sitting in front of other machines".

Amen to that. Best of all though, Pranav plans to make the software to do this open source... watch this space. Things could get really interesting.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 23rd November 2009

"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." *

* Henry Ford - upon the introduction of the Model T

Dan Sturges is a transport visionary. For twenty years he’s foreseen and been tackling some of the transport-related problems the rest of the world is only just starting to grapple with. Sturges isn’t anti-car. He is simply pro shaking up mobility full stop, and believes that far from just moving people in to electric cars, we need to introduce people to a variety of vehicles - ones that are the right size for each journey they make.

A couple of months back, I chatted to him over skype about his current thoughts on his company Intrago, the future of mobility, and what the auto industry is up to. You can see an edited highlight of that video below, and then after the jump I’ve pulled out and discussed what I think are the key points he made.

Fast charging EV batteries and the future of the fuel station

We're heading down a road where large numbers of cars will be powered by batteries in the future. Aside from the cost of batteries (dropping fast), the main reason for consumers to hesitate about jumping into an electric vehicle (EV) in the next few years, is range anxiety. We are not suddenly going to develop cars with batteries in them which will cover 500 miles on a charge, so how are we going to cover longer distance journeys?

The auto industry is (sensibly) proposing a solution which meets the average driver's needs about 95% of the time. You'll be able to drop the kids at school, get to work, and then home again via the shops all on one overnight charge, which you'll do either at or outside your home. But for road trips and non-average commuters, a host of new partner firms (and industries) claim to have a solution to the range problem. Best know of these is BetterPlace - who are developing an electric car charging network in several countries, and who will provide roadside swap stations in Israel and Japan within a couple of years, where you drive in and a depleted battery will be swapped - within two minutes - for a fully charged one.

But there's another solution which falls between the standard eight hour overnight charge, and the battery swap solution. It's known as the "fast charge" and it's a term which is being bandied about with increasing frippery. We've seen a section of the emerging EV industry (both start ups and established auto OEMs) change their tune about this. Back in 2007, no one had an answer to the problem of how to juice up the car's battery quickly if you ran out while on the go. Yet just two years later, here's the stock answer:

Futurama

I was speaking yesterday at Burning Rubber, a LowCarbonSouthWest event.

Southwest England is Britain's first official UK "low carbon development zone". The region has an amazing technology legacy - think Roman Baths, Georgian Cities, Brunel, SS Great Britain, Concorde. It's got great coastline, a strong surf culture, hilly, beautiful cities and green icons like The Eden Project. It's also the part of Britain most closely linked to the idea of the permanent traveller - the South West is Britain's leading hippie region. If it had good, flexible flows of investment capital and more inward and outward migration I'd almost call it Britain's California.

I argued to the audience that while the car industry is working out how to replace combustion engines with electric motors and batteries, it's worth asking whether in twenty or thirty years' time it's what we'll need. Are they simply servicing a declining market, while something else altogether different happens outside the window? Rather than being about electric powertrains, could the real answers be related to something else - how we live and work?

The dangers of designing for a false future

The writer Hamish McRae once told me (in the Hole in the Wall pub in Waterloo) that "the future of how we move is entirely connected to the future of how we work", and his thought has shaped my thinking ever since. Those British and French engineers built Concorde for politicans concerned with national prestige and jobs, and for airlines who where, in the early 1960s (Concorde was launched in November 1962), in the middle of a jet-age boom fuelled by postwar technology and wealth. This had seen tremendous wartime advances in aircraft design and propulsion take us on an incredible performance curve from 1940 through 1960. For context, remember that Concorde was only launched four years after the first transatlantic jet services were launched in 1958 between London and New York. It seemed reasonable back then to believe that speed would dominate as business people would want to be in London for a meeting in the morning and then an evening reception in New York.

Of course, aviation's development curve took on a different path. Instead of getting ever faster flights for an elite, minority "jet set", the 1973 oil shock and the flight of creative engineering talent in the early 70s from mechanical to information technology meant supersonic became a step too far. The reality of work and leisure took over and the world embraced flights for the masses. In the 1960s, airliners replaced ocean liners and airports supplanted seaports (Britain effectively moved its main passenger ports from Southampton and Liverpool to Heathrow) and subsonic airliners went on to redefine flows of migration and underpin and expand globalisation through the '70s, '80s and '90s. Boeing, while getting government funds to develop an SST, cannily developed the 747 as an insurance policy. Pioneers like Juan Trippe (who led Pan Am and is why we have the 747) eventually moved over and people like Freddie Laker and then Herb Kelleher, Richard Branson, Stelios and Michael O'Leary created today's air travel reality. Today we have incredibly low cost flights for the masses supporting migration, everyday business travel and leisure (unfortunately all still powered by 1960s-era engine designs).

Norman Belle Geddes and the 1939 New York Expo

I remind you of the above for context - about how technologies and visions developed in one era often only really create massive change in another one - and how some distract and others define what comes next. Which brings me back to cars, home and work. Today, the majority of people outside the centre of cities live a lifestyle that was first showcased at Futurama, the General Motors' pavilion at the 1939 New York Expo. Americans (and everyone else) were dazzled by designer Norman Belle Geddes's vision that people would live in communities linked to highways, using their own fantastic vehicles to flow smoothly and comfortably from one place to another. We would finally face the death of distance.

Lots of people and businesses loved Futurama. It helped the car industry find a way forward from a Fordist world of slightly dull, standardised mass-made cars, and it influenced the entire world's concept of what urban development should be. The economics of vehicle manufacturing could scale to meet it, property developers loved it, and it suited employers who could access a bigger workforce pool, all addicted (often through debt on car and house finance) to perpetuate the lifestyle. Yet the reality of the cost and blight of the resulting highway infrastructure, congestion, high energy costs, pollution, and the enduring draw of dense, sociable old pre-1940s cities undermined Futurama in fundamental ways.

So in 2009, 70 years on, with General Motors just bankrupt and great tracts of suburban America covered in unwanted repossessed, stripped out McMansions, are we facing the end of Futurama as a blueprint? Has it literally stopped being sustainable?

Hamish McRae's wife is Frances Cairncross. She wrote a book in 1997 called "The Death of Distance". Written 12 years ago, that's as good a place as any to start working out what comes next. It explores how the communications revolution - the internet and mobile phones - will change our understanding of, and response to, distance.

And perhaps the ultimate irony here? Norman Belle Geddes, architect of Futurama, was the father of Barbara Belle Geddes. Some of you will remember that Barbara played Miss Ellie, the epicentre of the Ewing family, in the 1980s TV series Dallas. The one all about the excesses and lure of '80s capitalism, and the power of American oil.

It's ok. My head hurts too.

Mark Charmer is founder and managing director of The Movement Design Bureau. Images: Futurama exhibition. Source - Wikimedia Commons Update. I added Southampton as a key passenger port. Northern bias, overcome. 19/1/10

Driving an electric vehicle (EV) - what's it like?

Right now, the vehicle revolution looks set to be electric, but very few people have driven an EV to date. So to dispel a few myths about electric vehicles being about as quick as a milkfloat, or as attractive as a noddy car, we though we'd use our recent experience in the Smith Electric / Ford Transit Connect BEV to tell you what driving an electric car (well, van-based car) of the future might be like.

Starting up

Getting in to Smith’s demonstrator Ford Transit Connect EV is just like stepping into a regular Transit Connect. It looks like any automatic transmission vehicle. There are two pedals and a centrally mounted gearshift, with park, drive and reverse ratios. It’s when you turn the key in the ignition that things get different. Instead of the churn of a starter motor and the flare of revs as an internal combustion engine bursts into life, what you’re instead greeted with is a barely perceptible whining noise, as the car’s 12volt system powers up, and the diagnostics run a check on the traction batteries. Once that’s done and they’re powered up, you hear a ‘pop’ noise as the connectors kick in, signalling the vehicle’s ready.

Moving off

From there, it’s simply a matter of slipping the gearshift into drive, and then silently, eerily, moving away. The lack of sound is – quite unsurprisingly – the thing that takes most getting used to. If you’ve ever sat in a car being pushed or towed with its engine off, the first few yards you cover driving an EV will feel familiar. Your brain, used to the gentle rise of revs from an internal combustion engine, struggles to comprehend that you’re moving without sound. Video:

Accelerating and on the move

Moving away from rest is a doddle. Simply press the accelerator, as you would in an automatic car and the van hurries away from the line with no fuss. Electric motors produce nearly all of their torque from zero rpm, which means good acceleration at low speed, and instead of the rise and fall in acceleration rates (and engine noise) you’re used to from an internal combustion engine, there’s simply a constant, linear accelerative force – as if a giant elastic band has been attached to the front of the van, and is hauling you toward the horizon.

One thing that's worth noting is that you do become more aware of other vehicular noises - from the tyres, wind, and interior of the vehicle. We wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of work going into the next generation of electric vehicles to really try and muffle or eliminate some of this other ambient sound, as we suspect that if - say - the interior developed a creak or rattle in your electric car, it'd really draw attention to itself and prove to be much more noticeable and annoying than in today's internal combustion vehicles. Nontheless, the lack of motor noise makes this whole experience feel, as Vinay suggests from the back seat, “a little star trek” – the van has only one gear ratio, which means you just don’t feel the same sense of acceleration. So it comes as a surprise to look down and find you’re doing 60 miles per hour. This thing is not slow. Video:

Braking

The most noticable driving difference in the Transit Connect EV over a regular car or van is the regenerative braking system. Prius and other hybrid drivers will already be familiar with such systems, which capture energy when a vehicle is slowing down, and feed it back into the battery. The Transit Connect EV has the most aggressively set up type of this system I’ve yet driven – and if you’re clever and read the road ahead, it means you’ll rarely need to touch the brakes. Simply lift your foot off the accelerator, and the vehicle begins to slow – quite quickly – to the extent that, when exiting a motorway at 65mph, the van had brought itself to a stop at the end of the off-ramp, without me touching the brake pedal at all. Video:

Our view

If you’re British and of a certain age, your perception of what an electric vehicle will be like is probably rooted around the milk float – the ancient morning delivery vehicle with a top speed of around 15 miles per hour. Smith Electric, Ford’s partner on this project, actually used to build those vehicles as far back as 80 years ago, but the Transit Connect EV bears so little resemblance to such a device that the method of propulsion almost ought to be given a different name. Both are electric vehicles, but comparing the two is like comparing Issigonis’s original Mini with a contemporary Porsche.

The most complementary thing we can say about the Transit Connect BEV is that it drives at least as well as its internal combustion counterpart, and in many regards it’s better. It easily keeps up with traffic. The lack of drivetrain shunt, engine noise, and not needing to change gear significantly reduces the load on the driver – meaning they’re free to concentrate on the road. Smith report that fatigue and strain levels in drivers of its EVs are significantly lower than in equivalent internal combustion powered vehicles. Critically, in the small delivery vehicle market, this should lead to safer, more aware drivers, who have fewer accidents. The proof of that particular pudding will be in the eating, when these vehicles go on sale in the US next year. But Smith report that of the drivers on its existing fleets who’ve made the jump from gasoline to electric drive, not one now wants to switch back to an internal combustion engine. From a group of drivers who are notoriously hard to please, that’s the best endorsement going.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 2nd September 2009.

The Movement Design Bureau team visit Smith Electric's production facility in Washington, Tyne & Wear, UK on 17th August 2009. Thanks to Dan Jenkins and everyone at Smith for being so accommodating and patient. Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009

User research on the Ford Fiesta: the view from some real life Antonellas

Ford is proud of the new Fiesta. It's been Europe's best selling car, pretty much every month since its launch. And having spent much of last weekend driving one, and clobbered through the 400 mile Newcastle to London journey in one, in one go - it's easy to see what all the hype is about. The car is good. It looks relatively fast, even when it's stood still. It drives like any contemporary European Ford (which is to say, extremely well), and Ford considers it good enough to be going on sale in the US next year. It's even full of so-called big car features - keyless entry, leather uphulstery, ipod integration - that sort of thing.

But back to that word 'hype'. Part of Ford's aggressive push around the new Fiesta has been to talk about the importance of utilising persona-based design techniques. A design persona is a completely fictional character, created by the marketing and design departments, to which everyone involved in the development of the car can refer. The persona 'personifies' many of the lifestyle attributes that the car's target customer would have. They behave, have the same types of job, same types of friends and like doing the same types of things that the real world customer will do. And in the case of the Fiesta, the persona's name is Antonella.

According to press quotes from Ford designer Moray Callum, who we interviewed earlier this year:

"Antonella is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties. She is also completely imaginary. She was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that served as the basis for the latest-generation Fiesta."

However, while Ford has been keen to play up the importance of design personae in its current processes, and especially the one behind the Fiesta, many others - including ourselves, are sceptical about their usefulness. As Ben Kraal suggested, in response to the New York Times piece on this subject:

"Are the personae the result of long study of buyers and owners, aggregates of hundreds of tiny specific observations of many real people or are they simply invented from thin air?"

He goes on to suggest that he suspects it's the later, based on the following statement, again from Callum:

"Antonella cares more about the design and function of her telephone than that of her car. Her priorities in the Fiesta are visible in the car’s central panel, where controls inspired by those of a cellphone operate the audio and air-conditioning systems. Designers working on the Fiesta referred to the shape framing the dashboard instruments as “Antonella’s glasses.”"

So when Ford lent us a Fiesta recently, we wanted to try to test this development methodology's success using some real people (among other things - watch this space for more Fiesta content). Believing that, in fact, one of the biggest 'problem areas' that exists in car design today centres around designers rarely getting to spend time with, nor being able to understand the real needs and desires of their customers, we carried out some research in the real world... which consisted of shoving a video camera in people's face, and asking them what they thought.

We don't suggest this is conclusive, nor is it particularly scientific, but this five minute video features eight young professional 25-35 year olds who live and work in London - all of whom are target market customers for the Fiesta. Specifically, we've edited this video around their views on that interior design, inspired by Antonella's phone keypad and sun glasses:

If you haven't watched the video above, then this is your 'spoiler alert' warning. The views we got were quite interesting. Specifically, boys, rather than girls, seem much more won over by the car's centre console design. And judging by our research, the women we spoke to are looking for something in a car's interior that is much more sophisticated and classy than the keypad of Antonella's (presumably now three year old) mobile phone.

Does this illustrate the pitfalls in using design personae, such as Antonella? Partially, yes. While it is easy to see the usefulness of one dreamt-up character around which everyone on the project can focus; a made up character who can't answer back is very different from real people, in the real world who have real lives. Understanding what those people want from their car, asking them the right questions, and then being able to filter the information they provide and turn it into something that they never dreamt was possible, is to me the definition of the role of a good designer.

As one of the people in the video later said, the problem with the Fiesta's interior, is that it feels like something that "was designed by a bunch of male designers, who think they know what women want in the interior of a car", and that "in three years times, it will look terribly dated". Which is a shame, because otherwise the Ford Fiesta is an (externally) good looking, grown up, but still very fun to drive small car.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 26th Auguest 2009

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoing The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009, and the Ford Fiesta was lent to us by Ford UK's press department free of charge. We have an independent brief, and are free to say what we want. If you don't think that's the case, we want to hear from you.

Silently rolling down Smith's production line, Ford's first EV is here. We drive it

It’s been a long time coming, but be in no doubt that the electric vehicle (EV) revolution is finally upon us. What makes us so sure? We’ve seen Ford’s first EV coming down a production line, and actually driven it on public roads.

While GM has long stolen headlines in the US with its Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid, cross-town rival Ford now looks set to beat it to market with a humble Transit van. It might not be Aptera-sexy, but its impact on the environment – especially in cities – could be in a different league to the trailblazers currently in the market, like Tesla.

Whereas most car drivers still worry about the range limitations inherent to electric vehicles, with a van or small truck – where daily routes tend to be predictable, and well under 100 miles a day in urban settings, ‘range anxiety’ for the driver practically disappears. Ford’s move to make its first mass-market electric vehicle a van, therefore seems smart – especially as many will go into big fleets, where operators can closely monitor vehicles and provide detailed feedback on the performance of what is still quite new technology.

First Ford Transit Connect BEV (here as Tourneo - a crew version) for the US, on the ramps in Smith factory

The Transit Connect BEV as Ford calls it, goes on sale in North America in 2010, but the first vehicles to hit American shores are rolling down a production line right now - in a factory in North-East England, where they’re built by Smith Electric Vehicles. Earlier this week, Smith’s Dan Jenkins showed us the first Ford Transit Tourneo Connect BEV on the production line floor, which you can see in this video below:

Smith has a long history of building electric vehicles, with a number of big-brand customers in Europe such as Sainsbury’s (supermarket), TNT (deliveries), and TK Maxx (retail) already using its vehicles in their fleets. They’ve been converting Ford vans for some years, so the official partnership between Smith and Ford that was announced last year – which will ultimately see electric Transits being built in a factory in Kansas City, seems logical.

The real proof of the pudding is in the eating though, and having seen the first production vehicle on the factory floor (see video above), we then got to drive Smith’s demonstrator prototype, fresh from a tour where it was shown to people like Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. As you’ll see in our video (below), from the back seat, the feeling of traveling at 50 miles per hour in a vehicle with no engine noise, feels more than “a little star trek”. But the real story is that, from behind the wheel, the Transit Connect BEV drives just like a regular car or van, only one that’s much simpler to operate, and much quieter on the move. We've driven the future, and it's electric:

Check out more videos from the day we spent with Smith on our Blip TV channel - and watch this space for more blogs and videos on this subject, which we're following very closely. All Movement Design Bureau material is available for republication under a Sharealike Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on the 21st August 2009

Images - Robb Hunter

Disclosure - Ford is sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's design and research work in 2009 - however we have an independent brief and say what we think. If you disagree, we want to hear from you. Thanks to all at Smith - and especially Dan Jenkins - for giving up their time to show us round the factory.

The last 12 months of auto design - Joe's favourite things

I returned from France a few days ago to find Robb and Mark discussing the last 12 months of cars and car design, because they were thinking about which ones ought to be entered into the upcoming Spark design Awards.

While the auto industry’s been in the doldrums for some time now, Spark Awards provides an opportune moment to take a look at some of the more interesting cars, concepts and automotive details of recent times. So without further ado, here’s a scratch list of some Simpson favourites…

BMW Gina

Designed years ago, but then dumped in a secret hanger until such time when BMW needed an on-demand concept to unveil (the opening of BMW-Welt proved to be just such an occasion), BMW’s Gina is arguably the single most innovative thing to have happened in auto design for years. As its mastermind Chris Bangle remarked at unveiling “what do we need the skin of a car for anyway? What is it made out of? Does it have to be made of metal?” Too few ‘what if’ questions are asked in the auto world, and the moments that they do happen are typically hidden from public view – as this one was for so long. But we’re glad it finally saw the light of day, and that like all the best concepts it asks more questions than it answers.

Nissan Cube

In a world where even family hatchbacks are competing to set the fastest time in the class around the Nurburgring, Nissan offers a leftfield approach. The Cube has been around in Japan for years, but now Europe and the US are getting the second generation. Why? Nissan realise that most drivers aren’t interested in the minutae of cornering finesse, or top speed; they’re interested in something that manages to provide huge utility, but have personality at the same time. The Cube has both in spades. Essentially a box-on-wheels, it features a ‘sun and moon’ set of dials, ‘curvy wave’ seating, and asymmetric styling in the shape of one side rear window turning around the corner into the rear windshield. When he had one on test recently, Michael Banovsky noted “I feel awful leaving the cube downstairs at night. He looks so sad”. It’s the kind of car that elicits such feelings. Jean Jennings, Automobile Magazine and long-time Spark friend, raved about it to us recently, too.

 

Audi LED lights

They’re by no means universally loved, nor were Audi first to introduce LED headlight technology, but through smart design strategy and brilliant detailed execution, Audi have taken ownership of the LED headlight. Subtly different on the R8, A6, A5 and A4, the wavy bands of bright white lights, piercing through the daylight when in DRL mode, are now as much an Audi identification hallmark as the shield grille and four rings - leaving you in no doubt as to just which type of car is behind you, and would like you to move over, thank you very much…