OPEL BREAKTHROUGH
Define the brand's design language for the year 2049
What would the future behold for the society? What do people feel, need, or want? How will that inform Opel to shape its own slef to respond to the desires of the future customer?
RCA OPEL Collaboration Project 2009
+ Highly Commended Award
+ GM Europe Headquarter presentation and Internship offered
Research we performed as a group showed in the year 2049 people would enjoy a bandwidth of technology that they could never imagine existed. All the necessities of a day were done in such convenience that people don't have to go anywhere anymore. With the introduction of highly developed mobile technology and RFID people would enjoy the ubiquitous lifestyle without actually being there. Even now 10 years after the project, we are seeing many of the predicted technology having emerged deep into our everyday life. What I pointed out though was, "are these technical advancements really giving us the freedom we desired? or is it somehow making us even less free? "
Regardless of what's happening out there, though it looks like the world is becoming more convenient, more connected and therefore more like a community, there will be people feeling more enslaved, more depressed and more lonely. As if something unseen is pressing down on us - whether we call it stresses of life or what, people in a developed society seem to feel it more.
And these are the people Opel brand provide the service with. In an effort to understand the brand and its perceived value by the customers we performed a short street interview type research with young Londoners and found that it was perceived as a mediocre brand that comes later to their minds than most other German brands.
"Could Opel break free this type of perception as well as help people break through the issues of freedom both physically and metaphorically and rise above?"
Close inspection in the society where people feel anxiety related depression reveals a coinciding fact of family breakdown. It is in a strong and healthy family an individual grow feeling loved and secure. Psychological studies reveal childhood trauma affect the life of an individual throughout the life unless healed, and the way family is being broken down in the society is worsening the situation. But in a wholesome family or a family-like community people get restored, people share what they go through and in their likeness they can feel sympathy. In this environement the compassion and intimacy bring in the door of hope and they experience healing.
When you look inside a family, to speak a designer-language, the aesthetics are similar, and that is a literal expression of being a family, and an enabler for making you feel instantly comfortable and that you belong. In other words, if you look like one of us, we automatically feel more comfortable. If you behave like us, even more so. So, to catch the mind of people Opel should look like one of us and act like one of us. If it grows in the family and learns peculiar expressions of them thus becoming more customisable, all the better. Rather than being a metal piece with crease lines here and there, it should look like us. It should move us around like maybe a father would his daughter in places. Lifting up, piggy backing, for instance, or like a husband. Rather than being started by pressing a button, maybe it should start with a touch or a voice that awakens. And the way it looks should just mimic how we look, naked in the forest of wonders and harms, hiding a beautiful form underneath a sheet of some sort that temporarily covers us or presses us down, creating a beautiful tension. And it longs for compassion in intimacy reflecting our own needs.
