2004: China.
Scale Model and Illustrations on Display at Michelin Challenge Design™
Biography:
Magnus Goransson, 27, from Malmoe Sweden.
He is currently finishing his Master of Design at Queensland College of Art in Brisbane, Australia.
Description:
During 2002 I was getting more and more bored with most car concepts since they seemed to address no real issues, there was the SUV, the sports car and the future SUV and sports car. Nobody seemed to really challenge the conventions anymore, and that gets boring. The SUV was king, taking over the market, big, expensive, environmentally unfriendly, dangerous, space wasting and gas guzzling.
The market in China is about to explode, no doubt about it, a couple of hundred million Chinese might buy a vehicle in the next decade. Today there is a total of 500 million vehicles in the world, and they are giving us obvious problems, as well as freedoms. What would happen if the number of vehicles doubled? 7/10 of the most polluted cities are Chinese. Where is all this going?
Nobody can stop the explosion. But some of us are privileged to be able to say something. Sometimes I think that industrial designers might be some kind of low-level gods. We have the power to change habits without people noticing, we can create and we can destroy; we can change people’s daily life to the better.
In every product we should be careful not to add problems instead of solving them.
This concept is my voice, and it says that we should be very cautious about what future vehicles are occupying our roads and fields. We don’t need more SUVs or sports car, we need vehicles that last a lifetime, are modifiable and adaptable, can handle the environment, are simple (both in use and in construction) and gives the buyer actual value for the money, not status and misinterpreted freedom.
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