And how it could be fixed.
Have you tried to Google “Behance Car Design Sketch” lately?
If you do, I bet your eyeballs will be assaulted by a barrage of out-of-proportion, often even out of perspective “vehicles” whose massive wheels and impossibly tiny glass fight for your attention, yet they all look the same. We have been fetishizing sketching to a point where we have lost sight of what matters, especially in the design academy’s world.
Over the past forty years, many automobile design courses have popped up in various locations worldwide, all seemingly with the same goal: to separate wealthy kids’ families from an atrociously large chunk of their cash in exchange for the “high education” needed to enter the field.
Except that’s not what they deliver, in most cases.
The proliferation of for-profit design schools flooded what has always been a small job market with bright, resourceful, and creative young professionals that sketch like demi-gods and make ace renders but know nothing of designing a vehicle. The result are hundreds of portfolios full of shiny eye-candy whose wheels don’t turn, suspensions have no travel, zero outward visibility.
As a former Pininfarina studio chief wisely stated in this brilliant Form Trends article
“You don’t pretend to beat Federer by simply hitting the ball hardest.”
Any game’s rules are there to be challenged, bent, or changed, but refusing to learn them in the first place gets you nowhere. Small wonder that “junior designers” ‘ market value has been driven below zero, as the supply of “sketch monkeys” vastly exceeds the little market demand for them.
I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe…
…like plenty of talented young designers and supposedly “senior” ones, blissfully ignoring the most fundamental manufacturing realities because they’ve been issued a vehicle design diploma without ever see a technical drawing and a typical section.
I’ve seen 1:1 scale “epowood” (rigid resinous material used to make life-size vehicle mock-ups) models milled with bonnets whose shape could not be stamped, with shut-lines placed regardless of manufacturing technology,
Once, and this is one I’ll never forget, I’ve “taught” a smooth-talking, supposedly experienced colleague how to calculate the total diameter of a tire in millimeters from the sizes written on its sidewall. Enough said.
While the world certainly has worse problems than this, I feel for the families who get tricked into spending large sums on courses and masters whose titles sound impressive but offer little actual value in exchange.
Is there a solution?
Of course, there is. The formation of future automobile designers should be taken over by the automobile industry itself. Each year, according to their actual necessities, each manufacturer’s design studio should train a small number of thoroughly vetted candidates for free in exchange for a few years of a contractual commitment to the company once tuition will end.
I’m under no illusion it’ll ever be put into practice, but I believe it’s high time to have this discussion within the automobile design business.
Why car design education is broken was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
from UX Collective – Medium https://uxdesign.cc/why-car-design-education-is-broken-7f27ca0216a8?source=rss—-138adf9c44c—4