Keith!
I wondered if you might be interested in this.It’s BMW designer Chris Bangle talking about Cars as Art.
I think it will give good insight into what I mean about pure designers.
As well, as how people work in BMW group, the way it’s so far ahead of the curve.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_bangle_says_great_c ars_are_art.html
It’s quite telling, how he sees a car designer in the same terms as a sculptor.Watching them carve the clay models, you can see why he would identify with the craft.
All of his designs are deeply sculpted, and have quite dramatic curvature, known as ‘Bangle Curves’.
A broader point is, that when you look at designers ideas on paper, and I’ve seen a lot over the years, however good the sketches and drawings might be.
It’s quite impossible to tell whether the concept is worth throwing *** M at in investment, without seeing the full sized model, fully to scale, in real life, in the shape the finished production model will be.
Another interesting fact, is that although these models are in clay, when the production vehicle is painted, to my mind, some colours are brilliant for smaller sizes of vehicle but simply don’t work at all well with larger ones.It all feeds back into the reason you need to make a full size scale model of the vehicle you intend to manufacture. For you need to paint trial a full sized production vehicle, and look at it, to appreciate the quality of its presence, before you will really know whether it will work.
Although, stylists and designers are associated, there is another agent called a Colourist, who mixes up the colours to create the aims of the designers and stylists. Let me give you some insight into what I mean. You have contributed and seem to be quite interested in the Austin Rover site.
Well, years ago Rover manufactured vehicles painted in a colour called Nightfire. I am choosing this one, as an example, because it was a high runner, and you will have probably seen many examples of this on the roads. It is a vivid metallic red. But if you looked at the vehicle at night, in the dark!
And walked round to the reversing or number plate lights, and looked closely at the white light shining on the car body, you would see that rather than being the bold red your eye normally perceives; the colour was speckled with shades of blue and green and yellow, in fact, all the colours you would expect to observe in a real fire at night.
Can you see how complex and subtle the Colourists job is? When they make up a batch of Paint for vehicular production, different colourists might start from different bases altogether, before eventually getting, to precisely the same, final finish. For instance a blue colour might involve a degree of green, and depending on the base they work from initially, it could look quite green at first, before the full depth of colour is finally achieved to create the desired effect.Perhaps the colour of the vehicle might be gold for instance. Now you could create gold from a base colour of orange, or you could create it from a base colour of green, or perhaps even white. The thing is, what you would never see looking at the finished vehicle, is what a paint technician would observe as the colour is applied, which is all the various, diverse elements of the spectrum the colourist has employed to create a highly individualistic, unique colour in a very artistic way.
Now perhaps your swift admiring glance, does not consciously register those colours that form the effect that create the presence the vehicle has; but I liken this to the way that frequencies outside the accepted range of the human ear contribute to the effect of acoustical sound we appreciate, when for instance we feel a low note that we do not hear, from a long organ pipe. Something in our brains, and our other sense’s, like touch or feeling, tell us that the note is being played.
We know for instance that the human tongue has only four areas of taste. Yet to hear wine specialists talking of the various flavours they detect in a drink, you would conclude that our sense of taste was a great deal more complex. Of course what really happens is that our senses are not working independently of one another, in isolation. But of course they work together simultaneously, with our eye detecting the rich colour, our nose detecting a particular bouquet, our sense of touch within our mouth detecting texture, and our sense of taste all combining to create a complete impression of all the diverse elements that have contribute to the production of that particular wine.
This is why Frenchmen have a distinct advantage in the area of cuisine and libations, because with their incredibly huge nasal equipment, they can obviously absorb far more information than any normal human being.
And of course, this is where in my opinion, many audio designers go wrong, because by designing equipment that are strictly limited in their nature to that which the ‘average’ ear detects alone, they are denying the many other senses, that normally function and actively contribute to our full appreciation of the entire spectrum of acoustical sound.They say, that ‘we should limit designs to the range the ear detects’, and that at first, seems perfectly reasonable, but with a sagaciously greater and deeper appreciation, of how our various areas of sensation, work simultaneously and contribute together to our complete appreciation of art, we see that posture is entirely unreasonable.
The recreation of the musical effect is not complete, (for those that are intimately familiar with the reality of acoustical sound), something is missing, and we find ourselves looking for and seeking an additional essential, qualitative element, which has been lost altogether, through the misplaced initial concept of the design.These links are by the great British Percussionist Dame Evelyne Glennie, who is profoundly deaf, and lost nearly all of her hearing by the age of 12.
She claims to be able to sense sound with her body, not her ears, which of course do not function correctly.
http://www.evelyn.co.uk/live/hearing_essay.htmHere is a TED Movie entitled 'How to listen to music with your whole body'.
Featuring Dame Evelyne teaching and playing, sponsored by BMW.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_ to_listen.html
To accept the proposition that our senses can be served and engaged with, as though they operated in complete isolation, from one another, is to me, quite absurd. But that is essentially, what many would have us accept. Our bodies in a great Concert Hall might absorb 50% of the sound, and all the senses involved, actively contibute to the musical experience.
How satisfying is a wine with no colour or bouquet?
A rose with no perfume?
And so, these elements of design, the shape, stance and colours create a physical presence that is the vehicle you see on the road. But the next future steps are even more interesting. Nanotechnologies will eventually be more and more involved. The number of uses that can be made of nanotechnology in the car industry is enormous.
Take, for example, scratch-free windscreens: If one mixes silane, large molecules made of silicon, metal and alcohol groups, with water, these convert into silanols, which in turn develop into blobs several nanometres in size.
Chemically elongated molecules can be attached to these, the ends of which contain the chemical element, fluoride, familiar because of its use in toothpaste. If one removes the water from this mix, referred to as "sol", the blobs form an unbroken network.
In this way a viscous gel is created. If this gel is then applied to vehicle surfaces, the molecules with their fluoride heads behave on the open surfaces in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. It is this layer of fluoride ends that makes it hydrophobic - like in the case of a Teflon frying pan.
The characteristics of these coatings offer considerable advantages: The coating is transparent and can be applied as clear lacquer over the paint on the vehicle body. Furthermore it can be water-resistant, so that dirty water does not dry into a layer of dirt on it. This lotus flower effect, also called "easy-clean", allows water to trickle down more easily and makes it almost impossible for dirt to latch on to paint. BMW Group is carrying out research into this effect, which is called "hydrophobing". Water, when it comes into contact with the fine nanostructures on the leaf surfaces of the lotus plant, trickles down very easily and takes all the dirt with it. This is also the idea behind special nano paints; graffiti created using such paints can be wiped off as easily as chalk from a blackboard. One disadvantage of such artificial coatings up until now has been their lack of permanence, as artificial coatings, in contrast to plants, do not grow again.
Using nanotechnology the paint on a vehicle could even be designed as a solar cell, although this has yet to be realised. The electricity generated from such a cell while the vehicle was stationary could be used to recharge the battery or to cool the inside using a heat pump. This is still a long way off, however. Help with air-conditioning is provided in the form of windscreens that incorporate nano-scale components, which, depending on the current applied, increase or decrease the rate of light and thermal radiation.
Even today vehicle light is produced using nanotechnology, with the LEDs of high-quality braking lights equipped with nanometre-scale layer systems that convert electricity into light more efficiently. Another plus point: LEDs convert electricity directly into light visible to the human eye, whereas braking lights and light bulbs take a little longer to do this. This difference can represent several metres braking distance. By now the intensity of LEDs is so high that grouped together they can create the dipped beam of front headlights.
Anyway!I hope these many diverse thoughts and points are of great interest to you.
To be sure, you’ve picked an eminently sensible vehicle that’s quite ideal for your requirements.
And it’s great to hear about your little boy, you must be very proud of him. I guess he is very proud too. Let’s see a picture sometime.
I hope all of you really enjoy your great new car to the full, as its something to revel in when you have a new one, its sounds as if you are going to make sure you have good time.
I liked VW’s Bavarian Bernd Pischetsrieder, he is an excellent engineer, a real petrol head and a keen driver, I always thought very highly, of him personally. And I think he saved a lot of jobs in the U.K. at the helm of BMW.It’s a little known fact, but you may be interested to know Sir Alec Issigonis, the British car designer and engineer who created the Morris Minor and the Mini, was a first cousin once removed, of former BMW, VW and Scania AB Chairman, Pischetsrieder.
Good Luck to you and your lovely family, as you have lots of fun and enjoy your new vehicle.
Best Wishes!
P
