WHAT COMES NEXT?
Make your mark on the car of tomorrow
The Awards have launched. New this year; an Award for Best School
Registration for the 10th Car Design News-Interior Motives Student Design Awards is open. This is a chance to take part in one of the most important competitions in the design calendar, and to display your talent and fresh thinking to the world's top vehicle designers and the automotive media.
The Awards are open to anyone studying full time at a design school or college in any discipline (not just automotive or transportation). You will create a design in response to one of the competition briefs, and upload it on this site. A distinguished panel of judges will assess all the entries, create a shortlist, reduce that to a small number of finalists, and select the winners in the eight Awards categories.
As well as being publicised on this site and on Car Design News, the students creating the shortlisted and finalist entries will be invited to the Awards presentation ceremony, held in Paris at the time of the auto show. At a glamorous evening party, with the work of all the finalists on display and in the presence of design directors and senior designers from across the globe, the winners will be announced. The work of just one of those winners will be chosen as Student Design of the Year.
Chris Bangle announced the winners at the Awards ceremony in Frankfurt in 2011
Making a mark; the briefs this year
The theme of this year's competition, What Comes Next?, has been devised in collaboration with Peugeot and Volkswagen, and four thought-provoking briefs have been set (click for the full versions). Register to show your interest in participating and to be kept up to date, then download the briefs and start considering your entry. Good luck!
The 2012 briefs are:
| 1. The Next Icon Cars like the 2CV, VW Beetle and Porsche 911 were conceived by designers who possessed genuine social insight – who were able to imagine a vehicle with cultural relevance and enduring physical charm. They became icons. Now consider how recent breakthroughs in active safety are bringing us closer to the '100% safe car' – which will free designers from the passive safety legislation that defines the look and packaging of today's cars. With this in mind, create a truly 21st century vehicle with the potential to achieve the elusive status of 'icon'. | |  |
2. A Day in the Life People in different countries lead different kinds of lives. And they need different things from their cars. Choose a country and examine the specific lifestyles, needs and behaviours that make the inhabitants of that nation different to any other in the world, and then create a kind of ‘personal transportation manifesto’ specific to that group. Use this manifesto to design a bespoke vehicle interior that truly satisfies the needs and desires of that nation.
3. Mechanical Fascination Electric cars cost significantly more than conventional ones, yet almost all – the VW Golf E is an example – look the same, inside and out. So they are bought almost from a sense of social responsibility. Give potential customers a new reason to pay this price premium by creating a brand-new interior aesthetic that truly celebrates the electric powertrain. Design an interior that showcases the beauty of electrical power, that presents the storage, generation and flow of electricity as a physical mechanism which is every bit as exciting as the transmission of power from a traditional V8 or V12.
4. Head of State Pick a head of state – a president, a king, a prime minister, a religious figurehead – and design a vehicle that communicates their unique attributes to the world around them. Design the vehicle around this leader’s political ethos as well as his/her logistical needs. What kind of functions must it have? What kind of terrain must it cross? What must this vehicle say about the person inside it and the country they rule?
School success gets an Award, and is recorded in new CDN league table
Car Design News acknowledges that great teaching, as well as raw talent, is needed to shape the work of students on their path to being the next generation of car designers. So along with the student finalists to the 2012 competition will come finalist schools, as measured by the success of their students in getting to the shortlist stage, becoming category finalists, winning an award or becoming overall winner.
One of these schools will also be a winner this year, and receive a special Award in Paris and be publicised in the media.
To back up this new annual Award, CDN has created a global league table of success among design schools. In it we assess their teaching performance by recording the results achieved by their students across the past 5 years of this competition. See the league table here.
Images from the 2011 Awards ceremony
Awards categories and prizes
Prizes for students will be awarded in the following categories:
- Best eco interior
- Best use of technology
- Best innovative interior
- Best ergonomics
- Best conceptual interior
- Best production interior
- Best conceptual exterior
- Best artistic visualisation
One of these winners will be the overall 2012 Student Design of the Year.
Each winner receives $500, and the overall winner a prize of $5000.
Hundreds of entries from dozens of schools: the competition process explained
Selecting the shortlist From hundreds of entries from dozens of design schools across the globe, the shortlist will be made up of all the designs which received at least one vote from one judge. The judges will work individually in the quiet of their own studios in their locations in different parts of the world. The identity of the works they are reviewing is hidden behind an ID number, so that images and, often crucially, the explanation provided with them, are all that is assessed.
Down to sets of three In each of the Awards categories, the three shortlisted entries with the most votes become the finalists.. The all-star judging panel will then all gather at RCA, London in summer to debate out the winners through an intense round-table judging session. In a night which will mix the cream of the professional design community with the excitement of the students, the work of the finalists will be displayed on boards and on screen.
The winner is... Each of the student finalists, and a friend, will be invited to attend the Awards Ceremony in Paris on 26 September 2012. There the winners in each category will be announced, and a trophy and cash prize awarded. And then, as the ultimate accolade, after all of the have been re-assessed by the judges, one will be rated as outstanding. That is the Interior Motives Student Design of the Year. See the previous winning designs here.
Judges are present and engage with students at the Awards ceremony