A popular attraction at any major motor show are the concept cars, with their quirky angles and outlandish curves. An innovative design initiative by the DIT may ultimately see an Irish school of car design in Ireland. Brian Byrne reports
Concept cars are designed by enthusiasts pushing out the envelope of our idea of the car, sometimes to an apparently ridiculous degree, they are invariably trying to prod us to take a different view of personal transportation.
Now, the likelihood of one of these exotic creations coming from the imagination of an Irish designer is getting closer to reality, thanks to an initiative by DIT Bolton Street and Gallic Distributors, importers of Citroën cars to Ireland.
Two years ago a pilot car design programme was run in Bolton Street, under guidance of Citroën's since-retired head of design, Arthur Blakesely. Since then, one of the students has gone to work full-time at Citroën's design headquarters in Paris, and some 16 people are currently doing a transportation design module in a design studies programme set up by Professor Jim Horan, head of architecture at DIT.A full-time car design course is a distinct possibility, while even a master's degree in the subject is accelerating quickly from the slow lane of dreams to the fast lane of feasibility.
"The current module consists of two strands - pure design and technical background," says Horan, who participated as a student in the original pilot. "In the first, students learn to draw vehicles, to understand how they are represented and find ways of illustrating graphically the ideas they have.
"The technical side includes some history of car design, the ergonomics required for carrying people and luggage, and the legislative requirements for areas such as visibility and lighting."
In addition to drawing, students build scale models incorporating their ideas, and produce both diagrammatic and 3-D drawings. A number are using computers to generate 3-D images, reflecting the route already taken by most manufacturers.
All the participants in the two-year design studies programme have come with transportation design as a secondary interest, yet all we spoke to said the module had already affected their overall ideas on design.
"Very few people in the design world know much about transport design because it involves objects that move," says Urs Stemmler, a car designer of 10 years' experience who commutes regularly to Dublin from Citroën's Paris design HQ to teach the transportation module. "As soon as something moves, there are questions of ergonomics, mass, aerodynamics, and possibly danger. So it opens up a whole new world to designers."
Indeed, Stemmler believes the relatively recent merging of the design "languages" of transportation and industry is already showing "crossover" results.
'On the one hand, we have traditional cars exemplified by the main products from Mercedes-Benz, or Ferrari or Aston Martin, for instance. On the other, we have vehicles crossing over between 4x4s and wagons - MPVs - and which offer a much more practical approach. "The design starts to reflect that practical approach," he says. "They start to look like highly-stylised products more than pure cars."
Stemmler also says he's learning from the students coming to the module with a totally "blank sheet". "They come from backgrounds which are not those of designers, or of car buffs, and they probably reflect most of the public who buy cars and see them in a way which most of us car designers don't, because our views are distorted from working every day in the discipline."
Jim Horan feels that, if the car design module was longer, or full-time, the current students would be well-poised to continue in the area, if that was what they wanted to do. He's open about the fact that a full-fledged master's programme in car design is one of his underlying ambitions.
"The support we got from Gallic and Citroën meant that an initiative was begun and was successfully developed," he says. "The DIT is expanding, moving to a new campus at Grangegorman, and a lot of things that might have been difficult in the past should become possible over the next five or six years."
The fact that there's no car manufacturing in Ireland is no barrier to the establishment of a world-class school of car design, he believes. The converse is often the case: he points to Italy as a major car manufacturing country which has a number of world-famous design houses, but no school of car design.
"Car designers tend to be a very mobile group, who travel the world and work for different corporations. Look at our former engineering student, Cathal Loughnane, who took the pilot course and then went to Citroën in Paris. He didn't even have fluent French, but when you're drawing, that itself is its own language, so you can communicate."
Urs Stemmler, who can work with the best and brightest young design students in the world, is more than impressed with the people he comes to teach in Dublin. "They have enthusiasm, passion and commitment," he says, "and I find it very interesting that they come from a variety of backgrounds and age groups. The group here also has a lot more women than usual, which gives everything a much more balanced approach."
So, at the Geneva Motor Show of 2010, or even sooner, it's not impossible that the main attraction could be a novel car design by an Irish designer, man or woman. Yesterday's vision of Jim Horan's could be tomorrow's reality.