Design Talks

Observations on design

The shape-shifting MINI Vision Urbanaut rethinks the vehicle to be more than transport

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Nargess

In 1959, the Suez Crisis led to oil shortages and the rise of fuel prices across the western world. British Motor Corporation responded by creating an economy car which was affordable and used little petrol. The Sir Alec Issigonis design for the original Mini was genius. The tiny motor car he invented for BMC could pack in more passengers than any other in its comparable size – and it was super-fun to drive too. The Boomers and young hip urbanites fell for its no-frills approach and go-kart drive. The Mini felt democratic; it was effortless and iconoclastic and starred in The Italian Job alongside thoroughly cool Michael Caine. It became and remains a symbol of 60s counterculture.

With the traditional motor car experiencing what only can be described as an existential crisis, modern MINI has a chance to become a symbol of the progressive 2020s. Maybe it can even become the future personal transport choice for gen Z. The MINI cars produced under BMW Group ownership in the last two decades are stylish products. They are good-looking, like the original they handle a little go-karty and don’t feel too elitist for urbanites. Yet I can’t help thinking there is something missing from the modern MINI formula. The marque could be so much more. Enter the MINI Vision Urbanaut, a shape-shifting electric vehicle that rethinks personal transport’s form and function, and it feels like the right direction for the brand.

Talking to the BMW Group creative director Adrian van Hooydonk earlier when the brand revealed its radical future vision under #NextGen, he told me: ‘MINI customers typically live in urban environments and I believe they are even more ready for electric drive and new ways of looking at mobility than perhaps our other brands. We can definitely go faster in this direction. The Vision Urbanaut shows how MINI can take our BMW iNext thoughts to another level. I think we can use MINI to push these concepts further.’

Take a closer look at the MINI Vision Urbanaut here
Images above (c) Hartmut Nörenberg and below (c) MINI

Highlights of London Design Festival 2017

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Nargess

The creative industries are worth close to £90bn a year to the economy, offering some three million jobs here. It is a ‘serious, big, wealth-earning and reputation-enhancing’ sector, Sir John Sorrell told the Financial Times this weekend. These numbers came back to me as the London Design Festival (16-24 September) kicked off bringing colour and creativity to pockets of this dynamic city.

In its fifteenth year, LDF is expecting some 350,000 visitors. Sorrell founded the festival. He feels London’s advantage over copycat events has always been our rich creative education system which dates back 180 years when the state set up the Government School of Design in Somerset House to improve the quality of design. It is also thanks to an open city, an international city that embraces people of all colour, race and religion – something that became rather clear when, unlike most of the nation, the majority of Londoners found the concept of leaving Europe completely absurd.

Fifteen years on and LDF is bigger, bolder, braver and crucially more inclusive – representing voices from the international community and not only star designers which seemed to be the case in previous years. This year’s festival, which officially began on Saturday and will go on all week, feels more confident. LDF has grown to include Design Frontiers at Somerset House, Landmark projects around the city, Design Junction at King’s Cross and a whole host of pop-ups from Brixton to Clerkenwell and around the city.

Sir John Sorrell seems pleased with the event as he joins our group for a preview walk around the Victoria and Albert Museum. This is traditionally LDF’s main hub where exhibitors are asked to choose a room and create work that responds to the space and collection. For me the V&A exhibits are the most exciting part of LDF, for this unique place is a living museum, constantly evolving to be an expression of my city, its past, its now and its future – and it carries infinite personal memories.

The exhibits are a big mix tackling various themes from sustainability, ageing to materiality. They include Leaf, a bionic chandelier by the V&A’s emerging talent medallist Julian Melchiorri. Here his chandelier explores how biological micro-organisms and materials can convert waste and pollution into valuable resources. Then Scooter for Life by transport designer Paul Priestman addresses ageing and mobility. Whilst Czech glassmaker Petr Stanicky works with the possibilities of materials with two installations – a mesmerising site-specific work offering pixelated vistas of the surrounding V&A in the delicate September light, and a geometric thick glass structure that plays with our sense of perspective. Then, set designer Es Devlin’s High Tide for Carmen takes us on a bit of Alice in Wonderland trip to the making of her scenes for the Georges Bizet’s opera.

A visual treat is Flynn Talbot’s Reflection Room which looks incredible in the Prince Consort Gallery, a vaulted space rarely visited. It is dramatically illuminated on either end by the Australian artist’s trademark blue and orange lighting. He says the blue is symbolic of the ocean and the orange of the vast sunsets and sunrises of his childhood.

While We Wait by Palestinian architects Elias and Yousef Anastas explores the cultural claim of nature and is inspired by the Cremisan Valley between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The lace-like structure of local stone spirals softly up the Medieval and Renaissance rooms as we are encouraged to enter and take a meditative and reflective moment inside. Form and objects also chart cultural identity and ideas by V&A artist-in-residence Lobna Chowdhary.

Yet my pick of the V&A exhibitions is Transmission by London designer Ross Lovegrove in the incredible Tapestries room. His 21-meter-long flowing installation and free-standing three-dimensional tapestry works are made of tactile Alcantara – the colours offer the exact pigments of the stunning renaissance textiles that surround it. Lovegrove was inspired by the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries on display at the far end of this dark and mysterious room. In a reflective moment, he expresses his longing to explore such non-commercial projects, of taking this installation to other historical locations and to see how it responds and lives on.

Away from the V&A, as part of the Landmarks projects, architect Sam Jacob Studios presents Urban Cabin, the fourth project in the Mini Living research initiative to see how intelligent design can help city life. Sitting on the Southbank behind Oxo Tower, it explores London’s identity and what the city means to its inhabitants. Jacob questions the concept of private home, how we can challenge the existing (possibly outdated) model to be relevant for today and future urban inhabitants living in crowded cities where property is limited and expensive. He proposes a mixed private and shared space explored through food and books. Urban Cabin offers a shared open kitchen to evoke the feeling of street food and markets, and a micro-library, a cross between grand library and the books piled by our bedside. It is brilliantly constructed with opposing materials – precious stone, building foam, expensive timber, cheap wood – stacked sculpturally to create both shelving and exterior structure. Then the communal modular structure is covered in copper mesh to reflect the surrounding city life.

Elsewhere, Stellar Works presented Indigo: A Cultural Iconography at the Design Museum, an installation by design duo Neri&Hu exploring materiality in manufacturing, the craft of making and the associations between old and new and east and west in attitude, form and application.

Finally, at Design Junction Campari offers Campari Creates a stylish floating bar on the canal at Granary Square, King’s Cross to serve classic Campari cocktails and launch La Vita Campari. This lifestyle book is a hybrid of arts and ideas, design history, liquid history and cocktail book, and it was created by Spinach for Campari and authored by me. The book will be available at the barge until the end of the festival.

Nargess Banks

See previous years’ highlights here.

Utopian visions: SO-IL’s MINI Living at Salone del Mobile

Posted on April 11, 2017 by Nargess

In 2011, the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto built a house in central Tokyo designed to break with the traditional codes of living. His House NA challenges ideas of comfort and of privacy – the lightweight living hubs stack one on top of another to be inhabited privately or collectively, and are exposed to the busy surrounding city.

House NA is meant to be provocative, a visual argument for exploring new forms of architecture that respond to a new way of urban living. MINI Living – Breathe reminds me of Fujimoto’s project for it is also exploring living away from the traditional single-family house unit for an imaginative and unexpected dialogue.

Exhibited as part of Milan’s coveted Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone, Breathe is the third architectural installation in the MINI Living ideas-sharing initiative launched last year. Along with its parent company BMW Group, MINI has been active in investigating the role of the car going forward – questioning its position as a vehicle, looking at how it can respond to our changing lives, going as far as to question private ownership.

MINI Living is taking these ideas further by working with architects to study new utopian solutions. The first of the proposals Do Disturb, shown here in Milan last year, touched on the idea of shared and collaborative living spaces in urban areas. Then Asif Khan’s Forests at the London Design Festival in September offered additional city hubs with communal access. Breathe wants the physical building to connect its inhabitants to their natural surroundings and the environment. And it feels like the most complete study so far.

Here MINI worked closely with New York architecture practice SO-IL to imagine a structure that amplifies the awareness of our physical surroundings and the environment, explains its principal Ilias Papageorgiou as we wonder around the mesh structure that seems to organically work its way through the busy buildings of via Tortona extending high up into the sky.

The mesh skin is semi-transparent, flexible, and self-cleaning; it also filters the air and floods the building with natural light. The inhabitants of Breathe are at once connected to natural resources – to sunlight through the mesh, to water that gets collected on the roof, and to air that is purified by the façade. The building structure is prefabricated and, following the Milan debut, will be dismantled and re-imagined in another city.

Breathe is concerned with the building giving back to life, working on the idea of a home as an active ecosystem that makes a positive contribution to its environment. Papageorgiou says: ‘Our lives are changing; our living is changing. Traditional boundaries between living and work are becoming more blurred and our lives are much more mobile and precarious. So, maybe we don’t need more space but different types of spaces – more shared spaces.’

Breathe dismisses the traditional organisation of the residential house for a vertical stack. The communal lounge and dining areas are positioned on the ground level, a level up houses the sleeping and bathing area replete with a charming open-air shower surrounded by wild plant life, whilst at the top we are greeted by an exotic garden with extensive views over Milan and a chance to peak through some of the roof terrace apartments.

This is a building with no formal narrative as such. Through the manipulation of air, light and water a series of atmospheres, spaces and experiences form organically to be treated for collective experiences or intimate and private activities.

‘We see this as an opportunity to reflect on such pressing issues as the sustainable future of our cities and this idea of conscious living,’ says Papageorgiou. He notes that his practice takes a more holistic approach with all its projects, adding, ‘we feel there are no quick fixes or magic solutions. For us it is more about changing attitudes and the process.’

Breathe feels alive as it changes its mood with every movement of light, constantly evolving, almost teasing with its play on privacy, another reminder of the Japanese house and the use of semi-transparent dividing walls that allow a little exposure but retain a sense of delicate, subtle privacy.

Papageorgiou seems delighted by the comparison. ‘The core of our work involves exploring different relationships between space, the ideas of open and closed, through layering of fabrics, light and shadow to create various experiences from intimate to private to collective.’

Breathe is light, informal and transient. Oke Hauser, architect and creative lead on the MINI Living project, tells me the idea is to break away from the rigidity of architecture that is perhaps too logical, static and ‘glued together,’ he offers. ‘We hope to trigger ideas on what architecture can become, look at new ways of building and how a house can perform in this way – always with a focus on the people who live inside the building. Architecture can be stuck on old ideas and we think we need to come up with new creative solutions.’

Nargess Banks

Read our previous reports from Milan design week

Top five creative moments in car design in 2016

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Nargess

As we start to bid farewell to 2016 and welcome a new year with all its fresh promises, I started to put together a list of my top five interesting speculative car design moments of this year. BMW Group’s Vision Next 100 collective of concept cars for MINI, BMW and Rolls-Royce was the first to come to mind as these vehicles are a bed of vibrant ideas, begging to be explored. Then came Bentley, and the marque’s softly radical approach to the future of luxury in the world of ecological, autonomous driving.

Tesla, of course, had to be included for its dismissal of the strict automotive codes in so many ways – with the products, the people, the stores, the approach. Jaguar Land Rover ‘s impressive contemporary life cannot be ignored.

And Volvo, for as skeptical as I initially was about the company under a very different ownership, the brand has really moved forward in new and exciting ways to remain Swedish in spirit yet rather than be a Scandinavian parody, the marque now represents a nation that is global, connected and therefore exciting.

There are, of course, others doing equally interesting work too – Lexus with its uniquely brilliant vernacular, Mercedes-Benz and its confident design language, Maserati’s successful venture into new segments, Audi’s clear visual language, Volkswagen’s brilliant electric world car proposition. But five was my number so…

… here’s my list and in no particular order: via ForbesLife

BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce navigate the future

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Nargess

Speculating the future of the car is pretty fascinating territory. The automobile has essentially remained the same, evolving technically rather than conceptually since its birth well over a century ago. Now, as the car moves closer and closer to becoming a personal gadget with multiple faces and functions, its next life is open to all sorts of interpretations. It certainly is an exciting time to be involved in the vehicle design world.

We’ve been in dialogues, or more accurately in marathon conversations (to borrow a phase from curator and art historian Hans-Ulrich Obrist), with a number of the more enlightened car designers (most notably the visionary Chris Bangle) for a number of years as they journey through this new phase. It is therefore extremely satisfying to see some of these ideas come alive.

To mark its centenary, earlier this year BMW unveiled the Vision Next 100 concept study. The futuristic shape-changing sporting saloon is an intriguing study into the BMW of the not-so-far future that runs on clean energy, moves autonomously, and is constructed through modern manufacturing methods.

Then last week we were shown BMW Group’s other two marques’ imaginative futures. Mini’s Vision Next 100 concerns itself with personalisation, working with artificial intelligence to create a transport hub that adapts itself to each and every user for an interesting shared urban transport concept

Whilst the Rolls-Royce concept 103EX offers the ultimate luxurious personal transportation portal for the future – it is the embodiment of bespoke automotive luxury, where the autonomous function allows for a supremely sumptuous cabin equipped with its very own virtual butler.

BMW’s head of design Karim Habib explains that exploring new and advanced manufacturing methods is at the heart of his Vision concept as it means bypassing the current outmoded forms of automotive manufacturing – conventional tools that are expensive, not very ecologically responsible and restrict design flexibility and freedom.

Advanced technologies like rapid manufacturing and 4D printing won’t necessarily produce components or objects but instead intelligent, networked materials for exciting possibilities in design and engineering, he says. In terms of material, the extensive use of lightweight and tough carbon (used in the i3, i8 and 7-Series production cars) is an indication of the changes to expect in the world of automotive materials.

With the BMW brand identity centred on being the ‘ultimate driving machine’, the team looked at how to contain or even enhance the emotive side of driving when the car is driverless. Here, the Vision concept can be driven or piloted – much like the i8 Spider revealed earlier this year. When not in autonomous mode, the augmented reality will guide the driver, projecting the ideal steering line and best speed onto the windscreen, and it will warn of dangers ahead, road obstacles and so on. In ‘ease mode’ when the car becomes driverless, the steering wheel slides away and the cabin transforms into a living room/work space.

For Mini, the focus is on the car as a personal, individual and adaptable gadget that also helps forms communities. At the heart of this concept is connected digital intelligence. This Vision 100 is a fully automated vehicle, wrapped in a discreet, silver blank canvas that alters according to the individual user, their mood and the situations they encounter.

Inside, the designers have worked primarily with fabrics made from recycled or renewable materials. The visible and non-visible carbon components, such as the side panels, are made from residues from normal carbon fibre production. Anders Warming, head of design, says in the future the choice of materials will become even more important throughout the design and production process.

Crucially, the marque takes the concept of shared living, explored in their inspired installation at Salone del Mobile, on the road by looking at how the vehicle can connect likeminded communities and help share their experiences. For instance, a user gets hold of some last-minute tickets to an exhibition preview as the car identifies another user who may also appreciate the show and coordinates a joint excursion.

For Rolls-Royce, the design team lead by Giles Taylor set out to envisage the ultimate expression of the future of super-luxury mobility – the haute couture of motoring, he muses. Here the team are delving deep into understanding the meaning of future luxury, of what constitutes modern luxury – a subject much at the heart of our marathon conversations with Taylor. For the marque it is a question of balancing craftsmanship, an individual spirit with high tech wizardry and seamless connectivity, delivered in the tranquil surroundings of the Rolls-Royce cabin.

The Rolls 103EX is based on an advanced lightweight platform equipped with a high-performance electric drive to allow for the body design, its various specifications and equipment to be tailored specifically to suit the needs of the individual customer. Taylor says progress in composite materials and technologies will have a decisive influence on how production can be customised in the future so the marque can achieve its goal of producing the ultimate bespoke car.

The cabin is a peaceful oasis incorporating warm tone Macassar wood, a carpet of hand-twisted silk (very very expensive to produce, confides Taylor) and soft silk on the upholstery. Designed to ‘waft’ along, with the chauffeur obsolete, the driver’s seat, steering wheel and instruments are superfluous for a completely new sense of open space.

Virtual intelligence directs the car and fulfils the passenger’s every need, at times even predicting their wishes. This softly spoken virtual butler appears on the full-width transparent OLED display, and is named Eleanor after Eleanor Thornton the model who inspired sculptor Charles Robert Sykes’ iconic Rolls bonnet ornament.

The sculpture’s form and proportions are impressive too and a bold move for the brand with Taylor noting that in the future we should expect a more daring Rolls-Royce design. There is much theatre here with the roof and coach door dramatically opening to reveal the interior of the vehicle as passengers gracefully step out. We also love the tailored luggage, now stowed in the long bonnet with a simple mechanism opening a hatch in the side of the car to present the luggage to the waiting hands of the porter…

It is fascinating to see how three brands with such unique identities have chosen to respond to the second life of the automobile. And these Vision 100 Next vehicles are very different conceptual studies, each marque navigating an intelligent path through the competing demands on the role of the car in its next phase – in its new life.

Nargess Banks