Autopost
We've come a long way since the early Horseless Car-riages and the horrible futuristic dream cars of the 60's, the titanic "lanchones" of the 80's, etc. It's a fact that cars have an enormous charge of semiotics, emotional desing, PR, or whatever you'll like to call their "character". In other words, since Edward Bernays, automobiles became the best example of emotional design, they were not utility vehicles (need objects) anymore, they became "objects of desire" (more about that later).
Car design is charged of emotional and social meanings. It's not a secret, although some are naive enough to believe that automobiles are just utilitarian, and there's no manipulation or meaning at all. Like I said, those are just being naive! If common people can tell there's a specific car aesthetic for "nacos / rednecks", "narcos / mobsters" it means that the aesthetic for those styles are quite obvious and the encoding of those meanings is not "highly encrypted".
In some other cases, the encryption of the "desire effect" comes in other levels. For example the more recent boom of eco-friendly vehicles which are anything but eco-friendly. It's like Bernays' publicity stunt to persuade women to smoke, hiring rich debutants to smoke during the easter parade in New York, and simultaneously telling the press that those women were protesting by lightning "torches of freedom". Just the same way that women
felt empowered by smoking and they were not aware of the serious health damage... eco-car buyers feel they are helping the environment and reducing global warming by using bio-fuel... never mind that sumatran tigers and many other species could be wiped off from the hundreds of acres being destroyed to make room for bio-fuel crops plantations... the publicity stunts by green pis and others, are certainly embedding our minds with encoded messages of eco-friendly nonsense. Car races are similar encoding tools, from F1 races, to the eco-race challenge they provide with emotions which can be encoded into aesthetic, semiotic or simple emotional advertising elements.
Of course during the 50's and 60's the oil (petroleum) corporations in the USA used the usual brain washing propaganda of those times: "Hi, I'm try McClure, you may remember me from such educational films such as : "Fuzzy Bunny's Guide To You-Know-What", "Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory" or corporate business ventures such as "So Sue me Sashimi and Sushi, Have Some Raw Fish While We Talk to You About Your Raw Deal!".
Anyway, now that Elektra introduced Chinese cars into the mexican market and they are expecting to build a "coche azteca" some day soon,
let's look at some other mexican cars, like the Mastretta MXT. In terms of aesthetics, it doesn't bring any mexican style. I mean, the fact that the only traditional car manufacturing in Mexico has been buses and trucks only, means that there are no explored elements which can be used for a sports car. I can imagine a Mexican car evolving from the popular aesthetic of city taxis, buses, people riding on an open pick-up. In fact some of the cars recently developed in China or India have very strong encoding that looks like a Taxi, Tanga , Tuk Tuk, Rickshaw, or moto-rickshaw / bajaj, etc, etc.
Car design is charged of emotional and social meanings. It's not a secret, although some are naive enough to believe that automobiles are just utilitarian, and there's no manipulation or meaning at all. Like I said, those are just being naive! If common people can tell there's a specific car aesthetic for "nacos / rednecks", "narcos / mobsters" it means that the aesthetic for those styles are quite obvious and the encoding of those meanings is not "highly encrypted".In some other cases, the encryption of the "desire effect" comes in other levels. For example the more recent boom of eco-friendly vehicles which are anything but eco-friendly. It's like Bernays' publicity stunt to persuade women to smoke, hiring rich debutants to smoke during the easter parade in New York, and simultaneously telling the press that those women were protesting by lightning "torches of freedom". Just the same way that women
felt empowered by smoking and they were not aware of the serious health damage... eco-car buyers feel they are helping the environment and reducing global warming by using bio-fuel... never mind that sumatran tigers and many other species could be wiped off from the hundreds of acres being destroyed to make room for bio-fuel crops plantations... the publicity stunts by green pis and others, are certainly embedding our minds with encoded messages of eco-friendly nonsense. Car races are similar encoding tools, from F1 races, to the eco-race challenge they provide with emotions which can be encoded into aesthetic, semiotic or simple emotional advertising elements.Of course during the 50's and 60's the oil (petroleum) corporations in the USA used the usual brain washing propaganda of those times: "Hi, I'm try McClure, you may remember me from such educational films such as : "Fuzzy Bunny's Guide To You-Know-What", "Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory" or corporate business ventures such as "So Sue me Sashimi and Sushi, Have Some Raw Fish While We Talk to You About Your Raw Deal!".
Anyway, now that Elektra introduced Chinese cars into the mexican market and they are expecting to build a "coche azteca" some day soon,
let's look at some other mexican cars, like the Mastretta MXT. In terms of aesthetics, it doesn't bring any mexican style. I mean, the fact that the only traditional car manufacturing in Mexico has been buses and trucks only, means that there are no explored elements which can be used for a sports car. I can imagine a Mexican car evolving from the popular aesthetic of city taxis, buses, people riding on an open pick-up. In fact some of the cars recently developed in China or India have very strong encoding that looks like a Taxi, Tanga , Tuk Tuk, Rickshaw, or moto-rickshaw / bajaj, etc, etc.
El mas barato del mundorldiseno.com - domingo, 13 de enero de 2008
El fabricante indio de automóviles Tata Motors, perteneciente al conglomerado industrial Tata Group, ha presentado, en el Salón del Automóvil de Delhi, el automóvil más barato del mundo, que se lanzará al mercado indio a finales de este año con un precio cercano a los 1.700 euros (2.500 dólares).
2008 © rldiseno.com
The Spirit of Berlin is actually a German car, but the development team leader is Prof. Raúl Rojas from Freie Universität Berlin. The system is a self driving automobile robot but it can also be turned off for normal driving. GM is developing a similar system which they expect to be commercially available in less than 10 years. Well, if a baby can drive a robot... or better said, the chauffeur robot just drives us around... the redneck ingenuity solution could be actually a trunk monkey "chauffeur /auto-pilot edition"... Those have been available for public transport buses since ages ago!
ciao
posted by Fernando Vallejo at 2:08 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home