The 7th auto® automotive design conference was again held during the Zagreb design week. The man behind the whole event is Daniel Tomičić, his inspiration being a passion for cars and desire to raise awareness of design and inspire young designers in Croatia. His enthusiasm and commitment is infectious and has encouraged a wide range experts from the automotive industry to attend the event and impart their knowledge and experiences.
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This year he persuaded Peter Stevens, Thomas Tjaarda, Fabio Filippini, Patrick Le Quément, Nyko de Peyer and Eric Gallina to invest their time, and everyone who attended their presentations came away richer from the experience.
Patrick Le Quément and Thomas Tjaarda both shared their lifetimes of involvement in the car industry, my impression of both can be read about here in ‘Two Lucky Men’.
Fabio Filippini covered the 85 years of Pininfarina, concentrating on the cars presented during the last 5 years in which he has been CCO. It was a visually rich presentation reflecting the Pininfarina values – Elegance, Purity and Innovation.
Peter Stevens, a regular contributor to the event, once again was generous in his time and gave two very different presentations – a selection of projects from his portfolio and a history and the influence of ‘Punk’ Aesthetic.
I was presenting the story of the Zenos E10, giving insight into the design process and challenges that a brand new company faces when trying to establish an identity at the same time create their first product. read about it here
Perhaps the two presentation that had the most impact were from Eric Gallina of Form Trends, and Local Motors’ Nyko de Peyer. Eric’s presentation on the development car segments naturally progressed through history to the question ‘what’s next?’. A driverless society perhaps wasn’t the most uplifting ending to the presentation, but certainly led to a lot of discussion on the future of car ownership and enthusiasts.
Nyko’s showed the potentially game changing fullsize 3d printing / cnc milling techniques that Local Motors have invested heavily in, and publically demonstrated. Every designer there was evaluating how and where they could use the knowledge to take design and production of cars forward.
I was fortunate enough to share some time with all those mentioned over the weekend, I learned alot and enjoyed every moment.
