Back in art school, my first car class assignment involved looking at alternatives to present day (1991) vehicles. It was a Chrysler-taught class. Only being a design class at an art school, the focus wasn’t on technology and engineering, it was on some different sketching and idea generation techniques they were teaching us. And while fun, I didn’t find doing only those things especially challenging.

Although I did spend time drawing, as it turns out I spent the bulk of my time researching vehicular propulsion systems at the county’s main library where, among other things, I could use microfiche viewers to access information not then readily available as it is today on the Internet. I even still have the research I did in a rather thick hole-punched notebook full of glossy print-outs spit from now-ancient copying machines at a dime a piece.

Anyway, my solution was essentially what is in that video above; from the interchangeable superstructure sitting atop energy cells, to the “fly-by-wire” system I lifted from articles in Popular Science discussing the latest fighter plane technology. What started out as some very simple sketches (such as those above), turned into an engineering project not all that different than my final aircraft design project at Notre Dame.

A couple of month’s later while everyone else was still working on getting their sketching technique honed and working on hawt marker renderings for presentation, I was still busy doing engineering doodles (such as those shown above) and trying to figure out how to most efficiently get the maximum number of people into a van-like shape; a shape I’d based on beetles and from which I derived the name “Scarab” for my design.

In the end, for my presentation to Chrysler, I wound up doing a lame, ergonomically-incomplete side-view marker rendering (B&W shown here; not sure where a color version is) and trying to explain what I thought was a cool engineering concept. It was panned. No one expects art students to spend time thinking about engineering; especially not back in the early 90’s. It was all about the aesthetics and mine weren’t even complete.

So much for that class. But for our end-of-year show where all the car companies and some other manufacturers walked through viewing our work, I built a wire frame model of the concept (above), thinking that if people saw something three-dimensional, they’d see the possibilities. If they did, no one said anything. I apparently wasn’t doing an especially good job communicating the idea, which I suppose isn’t too surprising considering I was a first year design student.

Which leads me to why I’m posting about this project here and now. There are some old ideas that I want to put to rest and so I intend to take the time to revisit those ideas once and for all and post about it here. I figure that by publicly saying I’ll do this it will encourage me to make time. Plus, I now have another reason for taking these through to a level of satisfactory completion. So expect me to post something on a weekly basis about these old projects; especially because I don’t want to lose sight that this blog is also about Industrial Design.

I intend to go chronologically and so that actually means there’s one project that pre-dates the Scarab which will get my attention: a concept clock that was dismissed by the same Industrial Design department chairman who ridiculed someone else’s concept of people ever having mobile phones the size of a deck of cards. Unfortunately I don’t have any sketches for the clock concept I presented. But as I’ll be revisiting forms on these projects anyway that doesn’t matter too much. Besides, I never finalized the gear system and I’d like to be free of any earlier constraints I might have inadvertently placed on myself. So expect it to pop up first at some point in the near future.

{Video Copyright (c) The Discovery Channel}