GENOMICON

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t been superficial enough recently etc, so I thought I’d write down a series of thoughts about ring-tones for cars. Because people have been talking about this recently – on account of electric cars being completely silent, so you won’t know they’re coming unless you look both ways before you cross the road.

1) I saw this on my fav website Notcot.org yesterday:

2) and it reminded me of those musical roads they have in Korea.

and Japan.

3) The whole notion of quiet cars needing to make noise, reminds me of The Locomotives Act of 1865, in which the law stated that someone with a flag had to walk in front of a motor vehicle to protect the roads and the public from injury… or maybe it was because the people passing the law had interests in the rail industry, and wanted to control cars. I’d say the latter… knowing what we know today etc.

Still… 150 years later, cars have killed more people than all other weapons in human history put together. Probably.

4) Some people already have ring-tones… massive bass-speakers that are so loud that they cause your trousers to rustle from 3 blocks away.

5) Have you noticed how the more someone spends on a car stereo, the worse their taste in music is?

6) There’s going to be wankers aren’t there? I just know it – someone’s going to use “Born to be Wild” or “The Ride of The Valkyries”. I imagine that what is cool/not will coalesce out very quickly – although this doesn’t seem to have had much effect with phone ringtones.

7) But if everyone who drives an electric car is one of your Tofu-Types they’ll probably play… I don’t know… what sort of music to Tofu-Types listen to? Whale noises? They’ll probably not go for music at all and go for something natural – like the sound of a wind-farm. Which would be funny because it would annoy the people who didn’t want a wind-farm in their back-yards because of the noise they make. Now look at them… they’ve got tofu-types in the back yard instead, LOL.

8) Personally I’d go for some sort of 70s sci-fi noise – the car noise of Logan’s run for example – from back in the day when all English actors/actresses were posh and gorgeous

9) But you never know what people are going to do – I mean someone has taken a little bit of film of a Logan’s Run Robot, looped it, and put it up on youtube… and it’s been seen about 30,000 times. Probably by the same person. That’s a bit odd if you ask me.

10) Speaking of which – back in about 81, there was this kid who had made a tape of the video game below and used to wander round town with it playing on a MASSIVE ghetto-blaster… and it did seem quite cool, weirdly enough.

Maori kids were geniuses at this game. The could get up to like the thousandth level – I could never get past 3 or 4. The kid who wandered around with the ghetto blaster was a Maori kid. It was like a ring-tone for walking and being cool etc.

(from : via)

From Japan, and street-legal apparently. A step towards my Bamboo Aptera concept… which is what I’m going to spend my lottery money on when I win it on Thursday. If I don’t win it, then I’m going to hide under the bed until 2010.

In the meantime… this is pretty cool…

Basically because it didn’t cost a billion dollars to develop.

See… if a load of… “enthusiasts” get together to design a car, the last thing they come up with is a teapot. What they produce instead is something specifically designed to fight other cars… and they call it The Rally Fighter.

(via)

Local Motors, who crowd-source (to an extent) the designs of their output have put together something… and for about $2 million dollars (which is peanuts apparently) made a machine that people will actually want… although by “people” they mean the American Off-Road Rally Market… who can afford $50,000.

I’ve gone on about Local Motors before… once raving uncontrollably about what a great idea it is, once raving uncontrollably about what a terrible idea it is.

These days… undecided… but it’s probably a good thing, because I’m gradually coming to the very definite conclusion that the biggest problem that humanity has is top-down control… and while 2 million/50,000 still looks pretty expensive to me, it does mean that you don’t need to be a corporation the size of GM to do it… and it’s companies like GM and their deliberate sabotage of renewables that have created a large number of the problems we face today – whether they be wars in oily countries, or a sky gone so oily that the ice-caps are melting

Someone pointed out recently that the only types of electric vehicles that seem to get designed are teapots, or supercars. I wonder… if cars are evolving into two different sexes? Not that women necessarily only like teapot cars mind… but… I have noticed that they quite like cars that look like bugs or little (big) animals.

Anyway. The car above is definitely a bloke car… a 15 year-old bloke car – which is to say, it’s designed to impress other boys, rather than women.

Phoooaaar

Now we’re talking:

(via)

Something I’m definitely going to do when the finances improve is make a camper-van especially designed for tele-computer/digital-nomads like me. We need wifi, electricity, a view, and… surroundings that look a bit designery. Camper-van design at the moment is all itty bitty and not really the sort of thing you’d want to spend weeks on end slobbing about the place in, eating pizza and playing on the internets.

But this is getting closer.

I haven’t the slightest idea what any of it actually says of course. What is that? Portuguese? The original designer is from Belgium I think… which is where they make chocolate, and… Belgians, mainly, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And chips. And beer. Belgians, chocolates, chips, beer and caravans that look like the Sydney Opera House. Utter genius.

Is the Wheego Whip the “Cadillac of neighborhood electric vehicles? enthuses the headline at Wired.

No, because it looks like a fucking teapot.

Leaving aside the general principle, “If a headline ends with a question-mark, the answer is always ‘No’”, it’s kindof an irrelevant question anyway. It’s about as relevant as asking “Is the Model-T the Brewster of Cars”.

No… because the (demographic) market for carriages was rendered irrelevant by the market for cars… and the same thing will apply (I suspect) in turn, for the horseless-carriages we now know and love.

It isn’t about Western consumers. Western consumers are irrelevant… it’s about the massively growing middle class of countries like India, China and possibly various parts of South America. If you’re still designing vehicles for people who can afford $40,000 then you belong to the past.

As an aside, when I was looking for names of famous carriage-makers, I came across this:

Studebaker, who started out making carriages, actually made an electric car slightly over 100 years ago… and while it is a bit teapotty, it isn’t that much more teapotty than the timid offerings that are turning up today.

So. Main-stream car-designers have lost it. Do any of them even drive?

Here are a couple of fundamental truths that they all seem to miss with a studious vengeance:

1) Cars don’t (just) solve a transport problem, they solve a privacy problem.

2) Cars also solve an identity problem – generally where sex meets territoriality.

A car is a piece of territory… and (similarly to the way single people in the west all now sleep in double beds) it is a piece of territory that says “I am big and strong enough to share with a mate”. To sleep in a single bed is infantalising… to drive in a one-seater car? People aren’t going to do it… and that is why the new offering from VW probably isn’t going to catch on:

Not just because it looks like a death-trap which has considerately been designed to double as a coffin, but because your imaginary girlfriend will have to sit behind you (carrying a pot on her head). They hate that. I know.

Go stand at the side of a motorway… preferably one of those ones where there’s a special lane for people who have more than one person in the car… how many of those cars look like teapots? How many cars aren’t using the fast lane because there is only one person in the car?

Think that’s an accident?

It’s not… it’s a deliberate behaviour. Being in the car is the only time an awful lot of people get to be themselves… get to be on their own. They can sing, they can talk to themselves… and so on. Go sit on a London tube in the commute-time (assuming you can sit, which you can’t). What’s the worst thing about being there? It’s being too close to too many other people… and it’s etched into the lines of every single face you see.

So anyway… this is how I see this going. This:

Crossed with this:

ie: favela-chic meets 21st Century design, with echos of the 1920s… but with a radically different business-model because Americans are no longer the market.

Something that says “Sex”. Something that says “21st Century”.

It needs to be

1) Car as Platform. It’s not a finished product, it’s a set of techniques, materials, designs, philosophies that people can adapt to local conditions, using local materials. For this to happen…

2) The individual subsystems need to be de-coupled. It needs to be electric-capable. Pedal-capable. “burning stuff” capable. Increased efficiency means the ability to eliminate entire subsystems… and the ability to do so without rebuilding every single part of the machine is crucial

3) Detachable brain. ie: Your iPhone is the dashboard.

Or your netbook, or whatever. The point is to create a possibility for turning as many problems as possible into software problems… because we’re pretty good at software, and the barriers to entry are very low.

4) It will probably need to be a 3 wheeler to get around laws that favour big corporations.

5) Easily sourceable, swappable parts. I’m talking bicycle wheels. Crap is better. The line of fastest propagation… a bit like the reprap approach – minimum vitamin parts.

And so on.

See also The Maker’s Bill of Rights

–

There have been some tantalizingly close passes at this… nearly. Almost. We’re gradually inching towards it, but no one that I’m aware of has approached this with anything like direct-intent. Here are a bunch of random examples etc.

C,mm,n

Pros: Open-Source
Cons: Looks like a teapot. Lacks phonetic-transparency so you’re going to spend the rest of your life spelling it to people

ManGo

Australian Student variant.

Pros: Complete elimination of various subsystems, eg: gears, brakes, axels
Cons: looks like a teapot. Also bigger than the doors of the building that it was built inside. Engineering students as well. Bless. I imagine they’ll probably teach that in the second year.

Dutch Recumbent bicycle with electric assist variant.

Pros: Looks pretty cool. Made of bike parts. Electric capable, pedalable
Cons: Single-seater so there’s no room for your imaginary girlfriend, Big invisible sign saying “EAT ME” to trucks etc.

Closer though. The company website has all the hallmarks of a company that’s like, died though. Notices saying “coming soon” from last year don’t bode well.

So there you go. I’ve got to cut this short now because someone’s shouting at me… there are various other examples in varying states of repair. I’m going on about Bamboo Apteras again though, because it’s getting quite close to Lottery Winning Day etc… so I think I’ll take the proceeds of that, and put it into this.. Someone’s got to.

This is cool

From Zambikes via Afrigadget,

In fact, I think it’s more than cool… I think it’s the future, of a kind.

If web-designers designed cars…

…and we do know a bit about design do we web-designers. We live in a vicariously-Darwinian, fast-breeder hot-house. Evolution is really sped up in the crucible of the market. We share. We recombine. We move on.

Video-recorder controls aren’t designed by web-designers; iPhone interfaces are – and it’s not to say that the real genius of design isn’t happening somewhere else, or that we’re not still cocking it up a lot but… there are sets of principles that we design to, like:

1) separate style from content/function

2) manual-free simplicity

3) de-couple systems so different parts can be swapped in an out easily

4) design for resilience, flexibility, robustness, speed, scalability, under-the-hood clarity

5) platforms rather than control-systems

etc etc.

Traditional product design doesn’t do these – in fact it often does the opposite, and profits from doing the opposite – creating fake scarcities, and micro-monopolies. There is (for example) a special part of hell where designers of laptops are strangled forever with the non-standardised power cables. Every 5 years (or whatever it is) the average Westerner spends about a year’s worth of wages buying a ton of steel and glass, that is used to carry around a single person… who doesn’t (in spite of their best efforts to the contrary) weigh a ton.

But that’s shite, it’s dying and it deserves to. The symbol (and often reality) of 20th century freedom and independence has turned into a millstone, and it belongs in a museum (and in a genre of K-for-cool movies like Two Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point) That spirit is gone. A car is now a series of monthly payments.

So anyway, if web-designers designed cars, the chassis, engine, body, control-systems, electronics etc etc would all be discrete and swappable sub-systems. You could reskin your car, rather than having to buy a new one every 5 years… only you probably WOULD buy a new one every 5 years anyway, because as I say, we operate in a fast-breeder evolutionary hot-house. We don’t do what the car-industry does – which is produce basically the same car, but with minor (diminishing-return-on-R&D) enhancements… since the 70s.

I mean take a look at this:

Now that, My Learned Colleagues, is a poster-child for an industry that has run out of ideas. The preposterousness of monument-building always peaks just before the fall of an empire. I think it’s over. I think they’re finished.

The Zambikes and Zambulances on the other hand, are just beginning – and I think they’re the mammals that will survive where the dinosaurs can’t… and I think this because they’re the beginnings of a design that is modular, decoupled… the Early Vehicular HTML under the hood etc etc. When open-source cars start kicking in big-time (and they will) this is how they will start. They won’t come from the big car manufacturers

If you turn that around the other way, put a little engine on it, give it the aerodynamics of a plane, then you’ve got a home-made Aptera.

A long shot you reckon? Remember, legally, an Aptera is a type of bike… and that’s another reason why innovation is probably going to happen around 3-wheelers, rather than 4. Less Industrial-Giant-Friendly regulation.

Admittedly, an Aptera is an answer to a particularly Western set of needs… but that’s ok, because if you’re starting with a design where the sub-systems are decoupled, then you can adapt it to do whatever suits the local conditions.

From NZ, apparently – though I’ve never seen one:

how the… blinkerty… blue-blazes… god-damnitt…

via

It’s got lights and indicators and whatnot in the handlebars… which are at seat level… those are a pretty neat innovation. It folds up etc, goes 7-8km on a 30 min charge and has a 20km inbuilt-electronic-emasculation.

There are a couple of videos in the gallery part of the site… there’s one on the front page as well… which is basically an advert, and adverts are facile, manipulative. I’m not interested in advertising.

So there you go. Neat little motor etc. Unfortunately it costs $5k which means it will be about as relevent as the… err… those things with wheels that you stand on… can’t remember the name.

Oh. Yea. I can. Whatever.

The thing with any transport innovation… unless it’s a disruptive innovation, it’s basically just more of the same, and the thing about disruptive innovations is that they pull the carpet from under the incremental-innovations of the status quo…

… by radically changing the economics.

Longbows changed the economics of warfare. This ain’t a longbow. We need a longbow.

What I love about this, is that these people look like… hipsters

from photographer Tod Seelie, who’s website is truly great. (via). These photos are from Indonesia.

This is Favela Chic done right – this is the future, because as Cameron Sinclair points out in this TED talk, the future isn’t high-rise buildings

I think this is cool because – with a bit of empowerment, we have powerhouses of innovation waiting to happen. What we see with traditional established industries is the milking of “incremental innovation”. The Drag-Coefficient Syndrome – where minor changes are milked forever, for money. We heard recently that efficiency in American cars since the Model T Ford have improved by… all of 3mpg.

That’s what happens when corporations innovate.

There was a buzz of breathless excitement when a sneak-peak of BMW’s new “concept car” was snapped recently

That’s what passes for innovation in the established, for-market car industry. Sorry, I drive a late 80s Honda that looks a lot like that. That isn’t innovation, that’s playing it safe. That’s an industry bringing out the same product as before, but altered slightly so people with last year’s model will feel dissatisfied with it.

But back to the hipsters… the favela chick…

It’s bothered me slightly for quite a while… all this breathless excitement about a DIY explosion brought about by cheap fabbing machines… doesn’t quite ring true, because, I come from a generation (and country) when most of the clothes that kids wore, were hand-made. By their mothers.

See… that’s me:

I used to be blonde.

Anyway… kids these days? (bah)… Well, I’ve managed to get the impression that they wouldn’t be seen dead in anything other than “labels”.

There are already cheap machines for crowd-sourced innovation available, and people aren’t using them. They’d rather be wandering round with someone else’s name on their shirts.

This needs to change. It’s boring. It’s 80s. The 80s was when things started turning ugly. The 80s was when the cunts took over the world, and really that’s doing a real disservice to cunts. A can’t believe they named an aircraft carrier after Ronald Reagan. The guy was a fucking torturer. The 80s was when Derivative Colonialism really started to turn the screws – and abominations like making it illegal for impoverished Bolivians to collect their own rainwater, so they’d buy it off foreign corporations started to come into force.

One of the major themes of the 21st Century will be recovering from the 20th Century…

…and the 80s was when the real socio-psychological damage (payed for by the likes of scum like Scaife et al) was embarked upon as a real, serious, well-funded project.

I hated the 80s, and not just for that.

Anyway, back to the 00s (3.5 months away from becoming the 10s) : these tall bikes seem to be popping up all over the place.

Here are some from Vilnius up in the Baltics

and the ones from Indonesia, where we started

Marvelous.

Ok, I know I go on about how much I hate electric cars that look like teapots AND speculative stuff, which is all could/may/might… and go on about it and on and on etc, so obviously I’ve got some sort of issue…

… but I actually quite like this, even though it’s speculative, AND it’s an electric car that looks like a teapot, because it’s kindof way out on the edge.

It’s a car concept that has 360 degree immersive, augmented reality, so when you drive through traffic, it can look like you’re underwater surrounded by sharks, or on the planes surrounded by wilderbeast etc. Not only does it look like a pod from The Matrix, but it kindof behaves like one as well.

(from Jeongche Yoon via)

Like a surround-sound/sensory-deprivation version of the personal-cars from Wall-E.

I know it’s only concept, that’s highly unlikely to actually happen etc – but it’s not yet another incremental innovation. It’s transformative. It’s like De-Bono’s Square wheel concept where thinking of something impossible opens doors and makes connections that you wouldn’t normally consider.

The genius of this I think… is that while everybody (yea, well. Kindof) is thinking about making cars that are skinnable the way that wordpress is skinnable, this thing turns that idea inside out, and skins the whole of external reality. Brilliant.

From Italy, viaboing boing

Anything inflatable is automatically great. This one’s also quite cool because you can use the bike to pump up the pontoon things. The propeller doesn’t look terribly… optimised though.

I wonder if instead of having a bike, you could use a rowing-machine. Nah. That would be silly.