Re*Move

The trouble with eight-point plans

As a fair-weather cyclist - the kind that wonders why everyone else is in such a rush - I'm really at a loss with London's "coordinated" attempts to sort itself out as a great cycling city. Here's the latest campaign, to tackle theft:

LCC's eight-point campaign plan:

1. Creation of a police anti-theft squad A dedicated police team must tackle cycle theft, engaging in pro-active ‘stings’ to find persistent offenders and gangs.

2. Tougher action against selling stolen on websites Websites need tough rules on ID, and sellers must be made to provide real photos and frame numbers.

3. Code of practice for bike shops Bike shops must make proper checks on seller ID and bike provenance. A new code of practice will enable those that sign up to it to demonstrate their good standards.

4. Tougher action against street markets Well-known locations for selling stolen bikes such as Brick Lane market must be policed much more aggressively.

5. A central repository for recovered bikes A central location where people could recover stolen bikes would make it easier to unite owners with the large number of bikes that are recovered.

6. Regular stakeholder meetings Cyclists, police and politicians must meet regularly to ensure that cycle theft is given sufficiently high priority.

7. Increasing secure parking provision Thousands more secure cycle parking spaces need to be built for homes, estates, shops, educational institutions, workplaces and transport hubs.

8. Better education for cyclists Cyclists must be given sensible information to help them protect their bikes, such as registering the frame number online, buying insurance, and using strong locks. They also need tips on avoiding buying stolen bikes.

Why is secure parking for bikes item number 7? An eight-point plan is useless, unless it's set in order of priority. And right now secure infrastructure is item 7. First will come police squads, dealing with cyber crime, canvassing shops with codes of conduct, chasing market holders, building a database, meetings. Unless of course, this list isn't prioritised.

In the Netherlands the reality is that cycle theft is rampant, but most people ride cheap bikes and are used to it, albeit irritated. London's bike boom is a consumer boom as much as it's about getting around - people buying smart bikes and worrying about where to put them. There isn't really any good storage - in Dutch cities there are manned parking stations, there are safe places to park at work and there's plenty of places to hook your bike outside where you need to be. It's not perfect, but it's probably (quite seriously) a five million times better situation than we have in London.

The list, indeed the London Cycling Campaign site, smacks of lots of time spent in brainstorms, or on "advocacy", and no role to play in building infrastructure. The absolutely most important thing that matters if London is to be a great city to cycle in is that infrastructure is reprioritised towards bikes. Most crucially bikes must take priority over pedestrians and cars (which is basically the way it works in Holland - get out of my way, I'm on a bike).

Almost all the lessons we need are close by, in countries like Holland and Denmark. Indeed a study two weeks ago argued that Dutch children were the happiest in Europe - it's not measured, but I have no doubt that a contributing factor is that most cycle to school. Or ride to school with their parents.

Trying to define this stuff ourselves, how London should work as a cycling city, as some kind of exercise in original thought, is a bit like making your own nails to build a fence. Or building your own web browser to display web pages.

We need to gather the best practice lessons fast but step forward, onwards. We don't have the right infrastructure - pathways and storage - and if we're going to build it quickly, when there's no money around, we need to be smart. The London Cycling Campaign website could be about infrastructure and every decision should be visible. Every junction, pavement, post, ramp. Where are improvements planned? What do people want? Which companies are helping co-fund secure storage (in, for example, each office lobby)? Which council budgets, and which taxpayers, are paying for what? Instead we have people trying to change behaviour. In what sounds to me like meetings that will have intangible outcomes. Seven, in fact.

Related reading: If Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, what is a bicycle shed (by Joe Simpson) A lesson in business from the French (by Mark Charmer)

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Post consumerism? A crisis in design, a crisis of ethics: a time for change

I just got married. Hence have been away for a while, and why the lack of posts. It's not unknown for such activities to cause people to reassess their priorities, and begin to question stuff they previously took for granted. So, this could just be me. Yet I sense something is in the air. Something feels different...

Take the election in the uk right now. The media-spun forgone conclusion we began the campaign with has been thrown open by a number of things, including a TV debate which shook-up the status quo. Every day, social media channels are exposing the bias and vested interests of traditional publications and big business. The entire event feel not only more open, but exciting, and 'different this time'. As Gordon Brown discovered yesterday, you are never 'off record' anymore. And in all of this, among the optimists such as your author, there's a sense that we - the people - can make a difference. Our say somehow feels like it 'matters more' this time.

Then take the auto show in Beijing last week. The western auto companies unveiled products that whispered of a sense of relief. The crisis is over, and now China's growing auto market will allow them to simply continue as they were, thanks very much. Ford, at least, showed a city car. Yet I haven't found many people who are impressed with Mercedes' vulgar - and dubiously dubbed - 'shooting brake concept'. Or anyone who actually needs, or cares about the BMW Gran Coupe concept. And while many were still busy laughing at Chinese 'copies' of western models, those who stood back saw a set of Chinese car designs that had a level of genuine credibility that was unthinkable just two years ago. Some even noticed the Chinese Government initiatives, and the impacts they are having on development of Chinese electric cars, which could have some interesting consequences for the old guard. Better Place gained a foothold in the world's largest country - despite being increasingly poo-pooed by some in the developed world, but Chinese firms are developing similar charging infrastructure plans of their own...

There's a sense that the more switched on people are looking, scrutinising, and questioning the status quo more than ever before. It's apparent in design and design criticism as much as anywhere else. Ultimately, the very role of the designer is being questioned. While this may be somewhat frightening, it at least means we may be moving to the next stage of the debate, beyond dubious tick-box, shiny apple-green sustainability. Rather than become all preachy, the main point of this piece therefore, is to draw your attention to a series of important articles and events reflective of this new, deeper line of questioning. If you're a designer, or design student, I'd argue they're required reading...

The underlying contention they all make, is that many designers are - far from making things in the world better - complicit in simply encouraging people to consume at an ever growing rate - messing up peoples' heads, and screwing the planet in the process. So what role for the designer?

Core 77's Allan Chochinov perhaps framed this most eloquently some time ago, in his 1000 word manifesto for sustainability in design. Now a couple of years old, it nonetheless still resonates and provides a useful starting point. More recently, Munich professor Peter Naumann's "Restarting car design" looks set to become a seminal piece, and is one all students of transport design need to read. Judging by the shock-waves it has generated, and the response to it from those I've spoken to in the auto, design and education sectors, he has hit the nail on the head. Because increasingly, it isn't just industry that's in the firing line, but design education institutions that are being questioned. For its part, the Royal College of Art is currently hosting the "Vehicle Design Sessions". There have been two so far, and both have touched on the areas I'm discussing. As Drew Smith's write-up chronicles, the panelists at the first - sustainability focused - debate, were unanimous in their view that vehicle design students should now look outside of the established industry if they were truly intent on using their design skills to have real impact in the world. Perhaps not what you'd expect from an event held at one of the world's leading vehicle design courses.

For those students of design interested in more than just the design of the next sports car, all of this raises a dilemma. How do you balance the necessity to find employment and money, without simply tramping up a well-trodden path, or falling into big-industry - pandering to whims and being emasculated from affecting meaningful change?

I doubt many will find that quandary any simpler after reading Carl Acampado's piece, but it's a necessary read nonetheless. Entitled  "The product designer's dilemma", it is bound to strike a chord with many of its readers. Acampado touches on the conflicts that the average designer - and indeed typical consumer - today faces in balancing personal desires, ambition and personal success, with the best way not to fuck up the planet. It's an impassioned piece, and just like your author here, Acampado has no real silver bullet solution to many of these problems. Yet his "dog for life/do it with love" message resonates loudly, and without wanting to sound all soppy, could be an interesting mantra to apply both as a consumer and in whatever area of design you practice. Please read the piece to see for yourself what I mean, if you haven't already. It echoes the voice of many of those I have mentioned above, and contrasts starkly with the PR-spun froth that consumers are (hopefully) growing increasingly sick off, yet which nonethelesss still dominates media 'opinion' that we are bombarded with every day. Stuff that I might add, is now the domain of much online green media, not just the likes of auto.

A final point. "Drive less. Save more" proclaims the title of the most recent email to land in my inbox, which is from the Energy Saving Trust - a UK Government sustainability body. In terms of missing the point completely, yet perfectly representing a very particular 'old way' of thinking that I'm taking issue with, I can't help thinking that it sums things up rather neatly. New approaches are needed. Thoughts on a postcard please... or alternately in the comments box below.

Image credit: "Consumption reflected" - Zohar Manor-Abel on flickr

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 29th April 2009. Full disclosure: Joseph Simpson is a visiting lecturer in Vehicle Design at The Royal College of Art. The thoughts expressed here are his own, and in no way necessarily reflect the views of the Vehicle Design Department or the wider College.

Driving the change: Renault and the pitfalls of marketing electric cars

I spent the back end of last week in Portugal, and while the trip was nothing to do with work ostensibly, I couldn’t help noticing that Lisbon appears to be the one place in Europe where Renault has succeeded in selling the new Megane in significant numbers.

That observation alludes to an altogether bigger storm in a teacup that’s been blowing around Renault since the Frankfurt auto show last September. Back then, you’ll remember that Carlos Ghosn effectively bet the future of the entire company on EVs taking off in a big way – the company unveiling four electric vehicle concepts which will be put into production from next year.

Renault's Twizy concept from IAA Frankfurt 2009 - a concept it has susequently advertised extensively.

That move surprised a normally conservative car industry. What’s surprised more since Frankfurt though, is that Renault’s advertising campaign has been dominated by the four concepts and the whole zero emission (“Z.E.” in Renault speak) concept – rather more so than its mainstream Clio, Megane, Scenic and Laguna models. They’ve even been running a rather sickly TV advert featuring a rather serious voice-over and heart-string plucking Keane sound track, which Robin Brown neatly pointed out, managed to make a genuinely innovative, radical strategy look like green-washing (see it below):

Above: Renault's "Drive the change" advert

If you’re flying in Europe at the moment, you’ll probably have noticed the campaign, too. It’s called “Drive the change”. Renault appear to have bought a lot of airport advertising space in Europe’s key hubs to highlight their plan – so, on Thursday, the first thing that greeted me in arrivals at Lisbon was a giant Twizy advert. Now, according to Steve Cropley’s column in this week’s Autocar magazine, Renault – and Ghosn – are under fire in the French press for focusing too much on these electric models that are still two years away, and hurting sales of the current range

Italian ZE advert, and a Drive the Change advert on the back of a car magazine

This rather neatly illustrates some of the issues car makers are going to face as they provide (and governments encourage) a move to an increasingly electrified automotive fleet. With the average man on the street probably still skeptical about climate change, and perception – in a country such as the UK – of the EV being rooted in the milkfloat, how does a company raise awareness of, and ‘market’, forthcoming electric cars? Are conventional methods going to work? Perhaps not.

Not only that, but from the perspective of the car maker’s financial health, there’s a need to continue squeezing every last drop of revenue from current ranges (and by inference, the internal combustion engine), which is difficult, while also trying to convince people that EVs are the way forward and you’re leading the way in green initiatives.

There’s no one obvious solution to overcoming such headaches; Renault is just the first to face this problem, and it certainly won’t be the last. However, I suspect we’ll see a diverse set of approaches to marketing new powertrains, which broaden the current toolbox of approaches.

There is however, one approach currently employed today, which feels even more tailored made for helping the public understand the benefits, and 'believe in' EVs. For years, car makers have pushed cars into rental fleets – primarily to ease over-supply, and help boost registration (ie sales) numbers. But a known, acknowledged benefit is that as lots of people get exposure to your models, and are (hopefully) impressed by them, the model in question makes a strong enough impression that next time they’re in the market to buy a new car, that car goes on the shortlist, and potentially ends up being converted into a sale for the car maker.

Clearly, Renault’s alliance partner and leader-elect in the electric vehicle world - Nissan – can see the value of such an approach, because last week they announced a deal with rental car company Hertz, who will rent the forthcoming Leaf from 2012 in Europe and the US. It looks like a smart, and obvious move for both parties. The chance to truly try before you buy – and perhaps spend a couple of days with an EV, outside of the confines and limitations of the dealership sales network, is surely a key tool in convincing both the sceptical and the curious that an EV is actually what they want to buy. Drive the change, as Renault would say.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 22nd February 2010.

Poundbury - an essay in how not to design a new town

Poundbury is Prince Charles' 'exemplar' urban environment, built on the edge of Dorset's county town, Dorchester - in the UK. It is held up in some planning and design circles as a template for how we should design future towns, and in other circles it is ridiculed. As some of our contacts have been discussing it online in the last few days, I thought it would be appropriate to publish my perspective, in the form of a re-worked extract from my 2008 Royal College of Art Thesis - "The future of the car in the city". The short essay follows:

Above: Pounbury streetscape - as seen from the green

Introduction

“It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.”

Alain De Botton’s withering description of Poundbury village – a recent extension to the town of Dorchester in Dorset, is typical of those made by both mainstream and architectural media following the opening of Prince Charles’s ‘model’ town.

For many it is purely the architectural form that proves to be Poundbury’s undoing, but the most interesting aspect of this place – and what makes it a worthwhile study, is its urban design principles and attitude towards the car - both in terms of the theories and ideologies its designers used, and in the physical manifestation of the place itself.

Background and history

Poundbury exists today primarily thanks to HRH Prince Charles – the Duchy of Cornwall. His views on architecture, and how in turn the architecture profession has received this, can be read elsewhere. What specifically interested me was that Poundbury’s “…entire masterplan was based upon placing the pedestrian, and not the car, at the centre of the design.” To understand the relevance of Poundbury when considering the relationship between urban environments and the car, it is necessary though, not to focus on Poundbury’s visionary Prince Charles, but Leon Krier – Charles’s masterplanner, and New Urbanist.

Krier’s book – ‘Architecture: choice or fate?’ – sets out the principles that form the basis of New Urbanist theory which he employs at Poundbury. Not a fan of large, modern, metropolitan cities – he argues that they develop in problematic ways – nor Suburban sprawl, Krier instead suggests a model of ‘the city within the city’. These are smaller urban villages, situated close to one another, yet that don’t physically connect. The intention is to “re-establish a precise dialectic between city and countryside.”

Poundbury embodies these ideals, situated approximately two kilometers from the heart of Dorchester town centre. In between the two is a less dense, greener, urban ‘strip’. The place is split into four quarters, being built in phases (currently only phases one and two have been completed). Each quarter comprises it’s own mini-centre - a square intended as a focal point, for people, rather than cars.

Above: Pounbury schematic layout in relation to Dorchester, as I see it

Experience

Yet visiting Poundbury and observing how people actually live there, reveals deep flaws in Krier and Charles’ model. Poundbury feels like a village that has not yet been through the industrial revolution – yet (paradoxically) it feels dominated by the car. The central squares are not ‘people’ places - they are car parks. The streets around them are deserted of both people and vehicles. Ultimately, you discover the cars have been shoved out of the way, into back alley muses containing nothing but garages, eating up acres of space. The result is that both streets and courtyards are devoid of life and feel soulless.

Walking through Poundbury is analogous to Jim Carey’s chatacter in the Truman show. Life feels somewhat fake. In part, this is unsurprising - The Truman show was based on and filmed in Seaside, Florida which was designed by the ‘fathers’ of New Urbanism – Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and a place which Krier speaks about enthusiastically in his book.

Ultimately, despite being planned as “…a high-density urban quarter of Dorchester which gives priority to people, rather than cars, and where commercial buildings are mixed with residential areas, shops and leisure facilities to create a walkable community”, Poundbury’s fails in three key areas, expanded upon below:

• Services

Richard Rogers argues that for a place to be truly ‘walkable’ one needs the ability to work, live, play, (by inference meet people, eat, shop, entertain and be entertained) within the same (1 mile or so?) area. Although Poundbury was developed as a mixed-use community, as one might expect, many of the people who live there do not work here, and vice-versa. Likewise, the keystone services and amenities taken for granted in cities and towns - the supermarket, cafes, bars, a cinema, restaurants, educational and academic institutions, gyms, theatres, a take-away, a library or bookshop – simply do not exist in Poundbury. Poundbury has a high end hi-fi store, three wedding and bridal shops, and a ‘Budgens’ mini-mart shop masquerading as “Poundbury Village Stores”. Bluntly, being denied the amenities modern people and modern life require, strangulates Poundbury.

• Accessibility

If the designers had truly wanted the residents of Poundbury to use their cars less, then would it not have been more pertinent to explore and create better links, pathways and services between two of the places which Poundbury residents might most frequently be predicted to need access – Dorchester and the nearby Tesco’s supermarket? The supermarket sits only 1.4 km away as the crow flies (fig.26), but there is no path, no route for pedestrians, or other vehicles - so almost everyone drives there, as the supermarket is just around the ring road. Dorchester itself is 1.6 km from Poundbury’s central square. These distances (around 1 mile), equate to around 20 minutes walking time - too great a distance and time to prevent time-pressed people from using their cars. Alternatives options to jumping in the car are needed, and they are notable by their absence.

Above: an annotated aerial view of Poundbury with key landmarks and POIs in Dorchester marked

• Parking and streetscape

This area is the one Poundbury comes closest to getting right. However, some short-sighted ideas, and odd implementation, create issues. Krier is right for suggesting, “The speed of vehicles should be controlled not by signs and technical gadgets (humps, traffic islands, crash barriers, traffic lights, etc.) but by civic and urban character of streets that is created by their geometric configuration, their profile, paving, planting, lighting, street furniture, and architecture.”

Yet somewhere between drawing board and physicality, things have gone wrong. Poundbury does feature narrow, winding streets with ‘dropped kerbs’ that seem to discourage cars drivers from traveling particularly quickly. At the same time however, its lack of real hierarchy and distinction in building types – and the apparent desire to completely remove street signage, or implement any technology – means that the place does, to use his words about certain other places “demonstrate [its] unique capacity to disorientate, confuse…” Poundbury isn’t readable; it isn’t legible to an outsider.

Parking is worse still. The overarching desire to maintain ‘order’ – for everything, including the car – and to be neat and tidy, seems to have created issues when it comes to dealing with where to put stationary vehicles, and how much space they are allowed. Vast parking mews at the rear of houses tends to keep vehicles off the main road, but the benefit of this is questionable. The garage mews take up enormous space in the areas behind houses, occupying huge tracts of land that in ‘real’ cities simply isn’t there. Squares and courtyards have no focus, no life, and where there is some focus like a shop, simply become car parks.

 Above: one of the many garage mews, which take up acerages of space in Poundbury

If the intention was to put pedestrians (or even cyclists and other small vehicles) first, Poundbury might have looked at employing the incredibly successful ‘Woonerf’ system seen in Holland – which limit the space for cars on residential streets – and makes the street-spaces vibrant, safe environments in which children can - and do - play. Might it not have been better to move the cars out to two, maybe three main ‘areas’ on the edge of the development? But then this would raise the prospect of creating multi-story car parks, which Krier criticizes for little good reason, but at great length, in what he has written.

Conclusion

Poundbury is an interesting example of an attempt to build a new development in the early twenty-first century. Objectively, its failure is not down to the plain-to-see distaste for modern, nee modernist architecture which its facades embody, and for which it is most commonly criticised. Instead it is the failure to provide any vision or any excitement, about how the future of urban environments might be, and how people and vehicles might move around and share space, that disappoints most. Worryingly, for a place that is intended as a counterpoint to sprawl and overcoming car dependency, Poundbury provides little in the way of a blueprint for how things could be done.

It is also a lesson in why not to look at mobility as only being about cars, and why a creeping agenda of discouraging or limiting movement and mobility could be dangerous. Should others try to ape Poundbury’s developers, they too risk becoming preoccupied with trying to create well meaning solutions that don’t take into account the needs and desires of modern lives. One hope that if future developments try to counteract the car and its impact, they don’t forget about other forms of private mobility, which can complement or repurpose traditional cars. Sadly, for all the anti-car bluster, there is not a hint of a cycle lane, a bike park, a PRT system, a car-share scheme or a Segway to be found here.

An opportunity has been missed here, because of a refusal to embrace and experiment with new ideas, technologies, and products. This place could, and should have been an exemplar or a test bed in how we might live and move in the future. Instead, what best encapsulates the failures of Poundbury is this: its inhabitants appear condemned to a life on Dorchester’s ringroad, traveling to a big-box Tesco’s store, built on a greenfield site, in a car that weighs twenty times their weight, and typically has three empty seats.

One can only hope that those tasked with helping shape future towns and cities - both in the UK and abroad - who are now bussed to this place to ‘learn’ from it as some kind of example, recognise its failures and don’t condemn the inhabitants of their future towns to the same fate.

Published by Joseph Simpson on 17th February 2010

Some notes and information on this piece:

This piece is an adaptation from part of Joseph Simpson's Thesis "The future of the car in the city" - Royal College of Art, June 2008. A full set of references for this piece are available on request, but are not included here in our usual hyperlink fashion as they mainly refer to offline sources.

The piece is not creative commons licensed in the way our usual pieces are, as it is sibject to some copy right from The Royal College of Art. Please contact me if you would like to use or reference it so that I can grant permission. A copy of the original piece in pdf format is available on request.

Joseph Simpson visited Poundbury in October 2007

Following Ford in 2009 - a year in five minutes

For those of you who regularly follow this blog, it won't come as much of a surprise to learn that during 2009, we closely followed Ford of North America's sustainability and design work, so we thought it would be fun to pull together some of the best bits in a video - five minutes of Ford:

The video makes me realise how many interesting and genuine people we've met at Ford over the past year - thanks to all of those who gave us their time and made us feel so welcome. Ford has had a good year - especially compared to GM and Chrysler, but that doesn't mean it should rest on its laurels. As you can see from my last article - The 2009 Ford Hedge - we don't think they're front runners in the green space, but that's not to say they're not doing some interesting things. You can dig deeper into our archive, by searching our Ford tagged articles, which will flag up everything from the past year. Personal highlights included interviewing J Mays, Sue Cischke telling us about Ford's interest in things like Zipcar and High Speed Rail - and the response pieces from Dan Sturges, Amy and Robb, and Drew Smith. 

And, just for laughs and because it's Christmas, here's one of our favourite videos of the year. For anyone seduced into believing that car companies can suddenly get good at in-car IT, enjoy our hysteria as we try to use the voice recognition of Ford's Sync, on a 2009 Mercury Mariner. 

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 22nd December 2009

Full disclosure - Ford of North America sponsored the Movement Design Bureau's research work during 2009

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).

Five Trends for the Tens

There are some really important changes going on that will shape the process of designing cities, and how we move and interact in them, over the next decade. Here's Mark's shortlist:

1. Huge cuts and a focus on the essential

Everyone - from entrepreneurs to public administrators, needs to adapt to a world where innovation "culture" is no longer focused around the bleeding edge, the piece of the economy that is the "growth" market. Instead, the most important innovation will focus on achieving dramatic cost savings or improvements in the usefulness of essential services - stuff that absolutely has to happen, rather than 'nice to haves'. In other words, the target market will be the "decline" market. Don't be scared. This is surprisingly good news, because we'll focus on solving big problems, instead of peripheral ones.

2. The gulf between skills and jobs

While today's corporates and governments meet at "Cloud Computing" conferences to debate how to put their boring, dated processes online in new ways, a new generation of digitally-empowered workers is approaching over the hill. These people need jobs, and already have, on their own laptops, far more flexible, powerful, communicative tools than almost anything that exists in the firms they're applying to work for. The result is going to be a crisis - new skills and new tools that many firms will resist adopting until it's too late. Young people will be hired into environments, start using 'enterprise' systems, and conclude that everything is lame. Successful firms (and governments) will attract the talent, harness these people and embrace the constantly evolving set of tools these people bring for themselves.

3. Big office space becomes obsolete

We all need somewhere to work - but what most organisations don't need is large buildings with big reception areas and "working" floors packed with desks and computer workstations. Yet today, the office is the definition of modern business and modern cities. This is about to change. Expect great confusion as developers and property owners resist the change (and the resulting fall in building values), while others see the opportunity to create larger, more flexible living and working spaces, possibly made available in completely new ways. You'll also see networks of people who came together digitally move into physical environments for the first time, in a big way. This will be exciting. Remember, New York lofts used to be warehouses and factories. Throughout history, new communication networks, from ships to railways to cars, have always led to the creation of new physical communities built because of them.

4. Consumerism in crisis

This one deserves two paragraphs. A couple of questions will dominate debate over the next few years. Will we expand or reduce the gap between rich and poor? Is a society whose wealth is measured based on the production and consumption of things, or the manipulation of their on-paper value, actually sustainable (economically, not just in terms of resources).

The dramatically changing ability of people to share what they do and think has the potential to reshape the way we decide what to buy, and how we articulate the experience of using those things. We're not saying you won't buy stuff - it just won't be the same hierarchy as it's been for decades. As the ripples from the financial crisis continue, fundamental questions about what wealth is, what it means, and how it should be demonstrated, will make for an interesting era. Notions of ownership have been in flux ever since most people stopped buying music, as an object to own. In an era when an iPhone is now a more useful, cheaper, social vehicle than a Ford Fiesta for many (especially young) people, an "Apps" culture means we are likely to buy lots more virtual stuff, rooted in software, where the emphasis is on doing rather than just having. The authenticity of objects, and the connections and associations they imply, is also likely to become ever more important.

5. Open versus closed

London's teenagers are likely all by themselves to generate and organise far more data than London's public authorities will over the next ten years. As the power of open source collaboration stretches beyond software, as the masses rush to share updates, pictures, and video of what they're doing and what they think, we're going to hit some nasty issues. These might be about security, privacy, lifestyle, even thought. But a lot of them will be about people defending existing approaches, who seek to undermine and discredit those who believe that by sharing ideas, knowledge and resources, we can create more wealth and better cities. Watch this space.

Joe and I would love to talk to people who have views on any of this. Bounce us a note, leave a comment, or please share this with others who may be interested. If you're in London, drop by and we'll film your comments. Or if you want to write a nice guest blog, we'll post it.

Mark Charmer is a researcher at The Movement Design Bureau. He's also a co-founder of Akvo.

The 2009 Ford Hedge – A Review

Like a prized suburban garden, Ford is cleaning up in the neat-and-tidy-American-car-company stakes. Joe Simpson pushes past the perimeter and asks, is it enough?

Last week, 100 ‘agents’ pulled the covers off the 2011 Ford Fiesta at the LA auto show in the climax of the six month-long “Fiesta Movement”. Just a couple of weeks before, Automobile magazine named Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, their man of the year, which must be all the sweeter for Dearborn considering GM promptly lost its second CEO in eight months.

Yet there’s another way of looking at where Ford currently stands, a viewpoint that throws away the rose-tinted spectacles. Ford is lauded in America because it has avoided the traps fallen into by Chrysler and GM. But is that enough to define success? As someone who has just spent the last year looking at Ford’s approach to sustainability, I should be well placed to do that.

One year ago, the company quietly opened its doors to us, two British researchers armed with video cameras, and said “go in, ask questions and poke a camera where cameras haven’t been poked before, let people see how Ford is changing”. They had no control over what we said - a potential PR rep's nightmare. Yet it was just one part of Ford’s strategy to communicate more openly, and be more social. Crucially, it also wanted to show the world it was going green – Ford was changing.

"Poking a camera in.." in this instance with Nancy Gioia and the Plug-in hybrid Escape

Standing up

So what’s changed? Last December, we found a company reeling from the fallout of the auto bailout debacle. Auto CEOs were just one rung down from bankers in the evil stakes, and many commentators had wrongly lumped Ford into the same boat as GM and Chrysler, saying it needed bailout money to survive. It didn’t, and wanted to let the world know, so then newly appointed head of social media, Scott Monty, spent the next few months contacting and correcting every blogger, analyst and media commentator on Ford’s position.

Come January’s Detroit Auto Show, the wind was changing direction. The Lincoln C concept proved Ford was in touch. A downsized, premium vehicle for Ford’s limping upmarket brand, based on a Focus platform, felt very of the time. More importantly, Ford’s self-titled “electrification” program got underway in the form of a Magna-built Focus Battery Electric Vehicle, and a commitment to build two electric vehicles (EVs), more hybrids and plug-in hybrids by 2012.

Ramming home the point about Ford’s seriousness was an actual car – one available to buy right now. The Fusion Hybrid could not only run fully electric up to 47mph, but it bested the Camry Hybrid’s EPA figures and wowed critics at how ‘right’ Ford had got the powertrain. It also featured a driver interface that in a nutshell encapsulated what the new Ford was about. Developed using ethnographic research techniques, in conjunction with Ideo and Smart Design, ‘Smartgauge’ was a reconfigurable, four-level coaching interface which helped drivers to ‘learn’ their Fusion Hybrid, ‘grow’ with it and become more efficient drivers over time. Developed by engineer Jeff Greenberg and his team using simulators in Ford's incredible ‘Virtex’ lab on its Dearborn campus, when we got to drive it, we thought it was proof Ford was truly going places on the eco front.

Mark Charmer 'driving' in Ford's Virtex lab simulator

Sitting down

Yet it’s a sign of how fast things are moving in the green car world, that today we no longer feel Ford is level pegging with the front runners. We know Ford possesses some world-beating engineers, who are developing things entirely cogent with what other car companies are doing, yet the company’s strategy feels conservative and the message isn’t clear.

In September, at Frankfurt, John Flemming pulled the covers off a euro-spec electric Focus and announced a trial fleet of 10 cars for the UK. Sadly, no one noticed because in the very next press conference, Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn stood up, said that the auto industry had until now been merely tinkering around the edges, pulled the covers off four Renault EVs which will all be on sale by 2012, and effectively bet Renault's future on electric cars. Meanwhile, BMW's quietly built 600 Mini Es already, GM’s letting anyone with two legs drive a prototype Volt, and come last week in LA, VW showcased not just another Up! variant – but one that will do 96mpg. What did Ford do? Launched a car we’ve been able to buy in Europe for 18 months…

Ford's strong corporate culture has shielded it from accepting reality. I sense that within the corridors of power in Dearborn, there’s a frustration and lack of understanding as to why people don’t see Ford as green, and why there doesn’t seem to be the same level of interest and excitement in Ford’s electric cars as there is in – for instance - GM’s Volt.

But having watched Ford and the wider industry through this period, it’s clear to me that one reason for this is that Ford’s proposed ‘clean’ vehicles don’t have the same design-led, risky, visionary, ‘exciting story’ elements to them as the current crop from GM, Renault or BMW. The electric Focus and Transit Connect simply look like regular Focuses and Transits. Compare that with BMW's Vision Efficient Dynamics, which is a design and materials–led radicalization of a future coupe. Or Renault’s Twizy – a small car/scooter cross which feels ideal for the world’s growing number of mega cities.

The BMW Vision Efficient Dynamics - an all together different look for the car

Indeed Ford's green future looks more conservative than GM’s Volt – which while nearly three years old, is a fundamentally different car to anything GM has produced before, and one which – thanks to the company's ‘troubles’ – has a bet-the-company, edge of the seat, ‘will they won’t they manage to make it’ PR story wrapped around it, which has the world gripped.

Don’t scare the neighbors

Part of the problem could be J Mays, Ford's global design chief. Asserting to me this summer that "I have this crazy notion that an electric car should look like, shock horror, a car" Mays' view that electric cars shouldn’t look weirdly different might be a major weakness. Of course, in times of economic uncertainty, and when consumer acceptance of cars with radical new powertrains is far from assured, this may turn out to be a safe and sensible approach.

Yet it is just that - safe. And I can’t help but say that if Ford really wants to go green, and have people believe it is green, then it has to stick out its neck. It needs a halo, a vision – a car and a story – that grips, wows and inspires people. Because I suggest to you that in the next five years, there will be more change and upheaval in the automotive world than there was in the past 100. And that those who dare most boldly, will be rewarded most handsomely – with long term profit.

There’s a strong sense of history and tradition at Ford. In recent times, that tradition – the Ford family tradition specifically – has provided the firm with a backbone to cope with the horror scenario that has engulfed the US car industry, leaving it as the only one of the big three not in bankruptcy. But that strength could stifle the company, too. Dearborn, Ford’s home, resembles a suburban estate, with still carefully trimmed gardens and a freshly painted fences. But beyond are derelict lots and empty streets.

Now ought to be Ford's moment to be truly inspired by its past. To look back to the man who started - and risked - it all, Henry Ford. Because Ford needs its Model T for the 21st Century. And it needs to remember what the great man said: “If I’d have asked people what they want, they’d have said faster horses”.

Joseph Simpson is a researcher at The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Posted on the 7th December 2009. Full disclosure: Ford has sponsored The Movement Design Bureau's research in 2009.

The pitfalls of sustainability

 
An image from The Paper City exhibition and Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Miniumum...or Maximum Cities event at the University of Cambridge, which was organised with Blueprint magazine and the Paper Cities exhibition, which moved up to the famous university town having been at the Royal Academy for the past few months.

Tim Abrahams has produced an excellent write-up of the event over on the Blueprint site, which I’d urge you to check out if you’re interested, because I think he raises a series of important points about where we find ourselves in relation to the sustainability debate.

For some time now, Re*Move has proposed an agenda where sustainability was the context rather than an end in itself, and like Tim, alarm bells rang in Cambridge, because we were left with a feeling that the only reason anyone is doing anything today is in an attempt to be “more sustainable”. When it comes to movement and transportation, this approach of sustainability first is clearly causing problems, because it seems to be preventing us from envisioning and demanding the future that we actually want to have, and instead pushing us towards something influenced primarily by guilt over past excess.

For example, a lot of transport debate in the UK today centres around whether or not we should be building a high speed rail line to the north of England. Anyone who suggests this is a daft idea is right now likely to labeled both unprogressive and anti-sustainability . Yet anyone who dares suggest a third runway at Heathrow is a good idea, is obviously hell bent on seeing the planet rapidly burn.

Yet the pitfalls of high-speed 2 are multifold. We can already get from Manchester to London in two hours, so should we really prioritise spending billions on reducing this by half? And while it’s automatically assumed that getting the train is better from a carbon perspective, throw real-world load factors into the bargin, and the reality is that a modern, full Airbus is comparative. Meanwhile, the car (which has apparently lost its number one spot to the airplane, in the planet mauling stakes) has improved so much in the past five years that if you’re driving two-up in a Golf diesel, you’ll definitely produce less carbon than going on the train. For me, the biggest issue with High Speed 2 is that an idea which is fundamentally two-hundred years old seems to be stopping us from pushing the boundaries of imagination about what we might do instead, that would be palpably better.

So some of my talk at Cambridge bemoaned this sense that we’d got stuck with a handful of transport formats, and that – with cars and trains at least, they were monocultural. We’ve sized everything to fit them, and one of the reasons we aren’t all riding round on things like Segways in cities, is that cities are fundamentally designed, and sized, for people to use cars. This might sound like I’m suggesting we simply have to keep using cars – as they are - to get around cities. I’m not, but what I’m pointing out is the need for a systems level approach. Will you enjoy trundling up the A40 in a Renault Twizy? Or would you be altogether more tempted by the idea of La Regie’s concept scooter/car cross if you could zip up and down one of Chris Hardwicke’s Velo-City cycle tubes on your way to the office?

Sustainability is the context we now work in. And we’ve little doubt (and are very happy with the notion) that in 5-10 years time, our cities will all be full of things like electric cars. Which will be great for local emissions, but highlights the problem with today's short-sighted sustainability focus, as it won’t do anything to stop us from spending half of our lives sat in traffic jams.

If we simply focus on sustainability as our end point, we’re likely just to end up with a mildly de-carbonised version of what we have now. And the likelihood is that we won’t even achieve that, because when people know they’re saving carbon, they psychologically feel (and often financially are) able to do more and just end up ‘reusing’ what they’ve saved.

Sustainability has created a psychology of fear, where we fear to dream of real improvement and hesitate to think big. What do we mean by improvement? Things which work more quickly or get us places faster, thus providing us with more free time or time with our families and friends. Things that are measurably more fun, or more exciting to ride in or drive than what we have today. Things which cost us less money to use, own or run. Better means thinking about how we link up travel – so we might spend more time in one place and combine trips – rather than rushing from one short hop flight destination to another. Better might mean finding a way to link leisure and business travel together.

But better also means new. New ideas, new products, services and concepts. In essence, we need to dream, and be allowed to think big. If we think of the figures who created some of our totems of mobility – people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Andre Citroen, Frank Whittle – we still admire and count on the inventions and contributions they made for our mobility backbone today. On Re*Move, we try to highlight and showcase the work of people we hope or think might become modern day IKBs or Whittles. But there are precious few of them around. I’d go as far to argue that the contributions and inventions made by these famous figures, would never have happened had they been around today, working in this world constrained by the fear of sustainability. We are not simply going to solve the predicament we are in by attempting cut, after cut, after cut. We are going to have to dream, and dream big.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 1st December 2009

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