A new car

Here’s an interesting interview at Metropolis on the future of the car, as envisaged by William Mitchell at MIT.
He sees part of the current car problem as being that the car industry is suffering from inertia, terminally. New design-led thing is required. Across disciplines. And that requires a change in the way we educate designers…

“One of the huge problems with design has been the way that the lines get broken up into these traditionally defined disciplines. You’re an architect or a graphic designer or a silicon-chip designer or an interaction designer, blah blah, blah. The big, important design issues just don’t fall in these categories anymore.”

“They sprawl in messy ways across them. We have architects, urban designers, economists, mechanical engineers, electrical geeks, and we put them together into an intense multidisciplinary design environment. And we do it in a way that’s different from the way that you’d organize a multidisciplinary team on an architectural project, where everyone has their role. We say, “Yes, you have expertise that you bring to the table, but it’s everyone’s responsibility to contribute to everything and educate the rest of the group as necessary on the issues that you know most about.” … The strategy is to go out, find what you need to know, and bring it back to the design project.”

… “You can never say, “Well, I’m an architect, so I don’t do battery technology.” You just can’t. These are the directions design schools and universities have to go in.”

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Posted by Peter on 02.04.10 in education