Two Major Industry Shows Illustrate How Visual Design Meets Technology
A century ago, a small group of Italian painters called the Futurists stormed Paris with the idea that zooming cars, or steam-belching trains, were more beautiful than a Greek marble statue.
That was then. If this week’s massive Detroit Auto Show, and the gargantuan Computer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas are any indication, the technological tastes of the Futurists have overwhelmed the visual arts in a very big way.
At both venues, cars and gizmos offer visual pleasures. At the Detroit Auto Show, the eye feasts on attractive grills, angles, paint jobs, and lights. Our vision follows those beautiful “lines.” The CES has got Las Vegas abuzz over increasingly high quality color screens on televisions and mobile devices. The devices are also about power and ingenuity, something that certainly enamored the Futurists (who tried to capture it in oil paint!) Their locomotives and factories have become our fast computers and fuel efficient engines.
The venues are vast. Las Vegas has made room for 150,000 “techies” to look at 20,000 new products (displayed over more than four football fields of floor space). Motor City will probably draw 700,000. They will see about 40 new car models and lots of bells and whistles.
Although the “look” counts, the new way of describing the visual effects with cars and consumer electronics is “interaction.” It means how devices relate comfortably to people. The term has several synonyms. At CES it is “The Year of the Interface.” Even carmakers are talking about how computer devices interact (or interface) with drivers (telling them what’s happening inside the car, and outside, on the road).
The interaction goes into some detail at CES. The newest thing is “look and tap,” where you activate something on a computer with your eyes, then use fingers to control it. The resolution for the eyeball has become phenomenal (with more pixels). Though unaffordable for most, large high definition televisions now are a mere inch thick. “It’s like hanging a painting on a wall,” said one tech expert. (Meanwhile, the super thin “ultrabook” computer is the biggest item this year, with 60 new models coming out).
For all the visual finesse, the computer experts say there continues to be a very human hurdle to progress. Some call it the “search and organization” problem. Now that device owners can download unlimited stuff—emails, tweets, music, photos, videos, documents—it has become hard to find what you are looking for.
At many art schools, solving this kind of problem has often come under courses with names such as “interaction design.” Everyone is in search of a way to visually and logically store and retrieve materials. Perhaps only in Detroit, however, has the local art college tried to tackle “transportation design” as well. That is a priority at the College for Creative Studies (CCS), some of whose students are showing design sketches at the Detroit show. The school collaborates with automakers and parts designers so students understand the art of making cars better.
Last month, students worked with parts makers Visteon and OSRAM to model new kinds of car lights. Some of the CCS students also participated in the annual Michelin Design Competition. This time Taylor Langhals won with his sketches of a futuristic “Chevrolet Stretch,” a car that morphs to fit tight city driving. “There’s a romance between the driver and the exterior of the automobile,” Langhals says.
One of the contest judges, GM designer Bob Boniface, had won the student contest 20 years earlier. He said that students in art or design schools have precious time to dream up future possibilities, as well as learn the engineering reality. “They all seem to be very well informed and their research is thorough,” he said of this year’s art school contestants.
With the new emphasis on smaller fuel-efficient cars, there is no need to scrimp on exterior design, the Detroit experts are saying (though small cars can present challenges for interior panache). One small-car solution is being offered by Chevrolet, which has revived the once-popular Dodge Dart. It is being called compact “with flair,” since it’s designed after the sleek Italian Alfa Romeo Giulietta.
Not every sleek thing is going to work, as every CES convention has shown. Over the last few years in Las Vegas, 3-D TV has tried to gain a consumer foothold. Nobody wants to wear 3-D glasses. Still, television designers speak of one day offering screens with visual holographs (as done with laser beams now) that create a “complete immersion” visual experience of three-dimensional depth and atmosphere.
So cars and computer gadgets are very visual. Their merits also hinge on power—something that the Futurists, in their own way, were saying a century ago. Today, however, talking about the subject is getting harder and harder. At the Detroit show, you might still hear, “What a gorgeous grill! Look at the dashboard!”
In Las Vegas, however, as one talented tech writer illustrates, it’s a whole new language. He writes about “running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Android OS” and the “quad-core, 7-inch tablet, the MeMo 370T,” which, by the way, is like “the Prime and runs a Tegra 3 chip.” When words fail, we still have the visuals. We have beautiful objects to point our fingers at.
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