Symposium Advanced Automotive Design at the TU Delft

Last Friday (Sept. 25th), I attended the Symposium Advanced Automotive Design organized at the TU Delft as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Industrial Design Faculty. It was a very nice event in which top designers from the automotive industry (all of them TU Delft alumni) shared a bit of their work and experience as designers for these well known firms as well as giving us their view of the future of automotive design.

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The keynote speakers were Fedde Talsma (Exterior Chief Designer at Volvo), Adrian van Hooydonk (Design Director at BMW) and Lowie Vermeersch (Design Director at Pininfarina) who were asked to choose a fragment of a movie as introduction to their talk. We also enjoyed shorter presentations by other TU Delft designers working for Ducati, Alfa-Romeo, DAF, Mercedes and Audi.

It was quite an interesting event, yet I felt a little bit disappointed with it. The symposium was advertised as a mobility event and as such I expected to hear a bit more about mobility and how these industry giants were approaching the issues at hand (congestion, pollution, inequality, sustainability, etc.), but found out that they don’t seem to be in the ‘mobility’ industry, but simply in the ‘car’ business (don’t know why it surprises me)… sounds similar but is actually NOT the same. So yeah, lots and lots about how their new cars are electric or hybrids and about styling and technologies used, but not that much about how to approach the mobility issues.

Only Lowie Vermeersch seemed to try and get into the subject a bit more, in terms of how the important thing is to have vehicles that work as part of a mobility system instead of trying to ‘get as many cars out there as we can’ (a phrase I was disappointed to hear more than once during the event) and just focusing on what the individual vehicle does (or looks like).

In any case, it was still very cool (they gave us lots of eye-candy) and so I wanted to share the videos of the 3 keynote speakers which I got from Collegerama. You can head there to see the full video of the whole symposium, I just thought that these were the most interesting talks to share and unfortunately enough, Collegerama is a great idea, but the user interface of their system sucks a little bit when you only want to hear a single speaker.

Hope you enjoy the videos, and by all means I would love to hear your comments on what these fine TU Delft alumni have to say.