1 Comment Written by Anders on June 11, 2008 – 6:55 am

Transportation design is a concept that covers the design of all means of transportation, traffic networks, routes, and the services connected to them. The term is most often used in context with vehicle design, and sometimes in the English-speaking world it is used as an alternative to automobile design.

There is a recognizable trend toward increasing the role of design in all forms of modern-day popular means of transportation, from the plane to the boat, from the automobile to the truck and the train, from the bicycle to the motorcycle.

Individual components are assembled under a skin made of metal or plastic that offers functional and technical advantages, and that becomes another arena for design advantage and differentiation (Coating, Styling). Technology that relies on electronics has produced new functions and opportunities for comfort that have in turn been integrated into the design.

At the same time, manufacturing using modular constructions has gained acceptance and this now permits manufacturers of streetcars, for example, to distribute their products worldwide while making regional adaptations for local markets. The process of integration, electronic control, and modularization in the construction of vehicles make them more complex. Transportation design today is expected to integrate a vehicle’s exterior and interior design as completely as possible while simultaneously contributing to brand identity. Transportation design has had to meet higher physical demands, such as rapid acceleration and abrupt braking.

Quickly changing temperatures and weather conditions place additional limitations on the use of materials and their design, as do the many safety requirements (Safety Design) that have led to a dramatic decrease in the number of fatal accidents despite a considerable increase in automobile use.

Budgets for developing various means of transportation can vary considerably. The introduction of industrial automobile manufacturing has resulted in different sets of rules for infrastructure and marketing and hence the attention paid to design quality and execution has varied considerably. The attention devoted to the automobile as a means of individual transport in developed industrial nations has increased constantly since the mid-1950s. Indeed, it could be claimed that the individual customization of innumerable industrial products started with the automobile. Public transportation such as trains and buses, on the other hand, have been neglected for a long time, including from the design perspective.

Nevertheless, a renaissance of train design and manufacture occurred in France, Spain, and Germany in the mid-1980s, beginning with the construction of new high-speed railway links that soon expanded to include trains, stations, waiting rooms, and signs. Initially, there was no attempt to call on the experience of other nations, such as Japan, for example. Railway companies were thinking very much in national terms and largely renounced such transfer of proficiency. One of the aims was to make trains desirable as a premium means of transportation for business travelers and to develop an attractive alternative to the airplane for midrange journeys.

Correspondingly, aspects of airplane design influenced the design of trains. This process of renewal is very instructive when considering transportation design. In the Netherlands, for example, new railway lines are developed in collaboration with designers, while in Germany high-speed routes correspond to the design ideals of the railroad engineers who devised them. The design of the German high-speed train ICE (Inter City Express) was a political issue from the outset, in which the contractor (Deutsche Bahn German Railways) struggled with the manufacturing companies as well as various design offices for supremacy.

The comfort of the passengers could be markedly improved by using new materials and production methods. However, the integrated design approach found in automobile design, that results in a consistently improved experience for the user and that affects every detail, still remains the exception rather than the rule. As the airplane evolved from an elite means of transportation for special occasions (as it was in the 1950s) to the relatively inexpensive mass transport machines of today, it was not just the technology and construction of airplanes that changed, but also and importantly for passengers the formal design of the cabins.

Their modular standard equipment and furnishings can, according to the airline and the class, correspond to the very simplest or the most luxurious design standards. Whereas the tubular steel furniture of the 1920s was first used on airships, today’s reclining armchairs and beds in first-class transatlantic airplanes look like cheap, tired copies of styles of domestic furniture. The situation is much the same in the design of passenger ships whose interior details often seem to be taken from a stylebook of international mainstream hotel design. Individual means of transportation have certainly established something akin to design standards (as questionable as this may seem in practice), yet the links between transportation design and transportation architecture appear quite tentative.

For example, intelligent design is rarely found when automobiles have to be integrated with airports or railway stations, or even when passengers have to transfer from one flight to another. At a time of increasing concern about the reality of climate change, strategic transportation design also has to develop ways to avoid excess traffic while maintaining mobility. Nevertheless, the concrete tasks of transportation design remain seriously fragmented. It remains rare to find realistic and robust links between different transportation systems, despite intense creative efforts in the field of transportation design and attention to detail.