Is it possible to build a truly harmless car?
Award-winning designer Thomas Thwaites talks about sustainable mobility and introduces his ambitious new project
Our conversation with Thomas Thwaites is part of The Road Ahead, a new frog report exploring the future of mobility, featuring insights from automotive, transportation and customer experience experts. We want to thank Thomas for sharing his experience designing a “harmless car” and speculating on where mobility might take us next.
What is it about the mobility space that inspires you?
I’m drawn to impossible design challenges. Cars are probably the most harmful object ever designed — they are implicated in more violent deaths and injury than guns, war and terrorism, and are the leading global killer of children. Making a harmless car seemed like a suitably impossible challenge.
A key draw of mobility is that, the amount of innovation in the space — the fundamentals of mobility are being reconsidered. It’s all very intriguing from a design perspective. Take lithium batteries as an example. We’re seeing incredible improvements in their capacity, but potential systemic problems are looming: environmental degradation stemming from the huge demand for lithium, demands placed on electricity grids and so on. Of course, the idea is the invisible hand of the market will swoop in with some new non-lithium battery technology. But I’m interested in the current inflection point in the never-ending cycle: problems leading to solutions which lead to new problems… and so on forever. And each time, who gets to benefit from the solution, and who gets saddled with the problem?
We’d love to hear about your harmless car design challenge
The technique which I use to push my design work into interesting and unexplored territory is to set an extreme/absurd goal and then actually try to do it, roping in various experts along the way. My current project is the creation of a car that causes no harm, that I can drive the length of the M1 — the UK’s first motorway, and arguably the most iconic. The Harmless Car starts from a kind of design Hippocratic Oath: ‘first do no harm.’ A seemingly modest goal for a designer, right? Not striving to make something ‘better’ even, just ‘neutral.’ Merely harmless…
In spring 2022, the research group Machine Wilderness invited me to Amsterdam to work on my harmless car concept. I decided my first challenge would be the chassis. For this, I collaborated with Professor Jun Wu, from the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. Using generative design Wu created a digital space frame chassis. I then wove the design using coppiced willow (the most harmless material I could conceive of) with the help of a Dutch basket weaver. But there was one major problem. It’s impossible to be completely harmless; to everyone, everything, everywhere, in perpetuity. Especially when you consider the full lifecycle of use, creation and eventual disposal. And while my woven willow chassis is all well and good, in order to drive the length of the M1 motorway, my car still needed an engine.
Industrial design has enabled many of the objects on which modern life depends: generating value through the creation of objects. But, given the climate future barreling toward us, to say there have been ‘unintended consequences’ to industrial activity is rather an understatement. With the Harmless Car, I’m exploring another way of conceiving design: as a way of transferring harm from one place to another through object creation. In attempting to make a harmless car, not only do I want to explore new biomaterials and new combinations of historic and cutting-edge techniques, but also to seek to answer the question: if harming someone or something to make your design is inevitable, then who or what should be harmed? This question makes clear that every design and manufacturing decision is actually rather political, which — given the highly charged politics of the moment — seems a salient thing for designers to explore.
What do you think it is about concept cars that ignites such interest in the popular imagination?
A concept car isn’t just a statement about cars, it’s also a statement about how society could be operating in the future: will the wheels be driving on well-maintained public roads, or will they need to cope with something more rugged? Is the car primarily protecting its internal private passengers, or is it ‘smarter,’ more integrated and aware of its duties to the public realm? Hydrogen or lithium?
Cars, love them or hate them, have been so absolutely transformative; they’re ubiquitous, they’re highly complex and so they’re hugely ‘entangled’ in society. It’s this combination of familiarity and ubiquity, and that they’re loaded with inferences for global and local physical infrastructure, for fundamental worldview — that’s what makes them interesting for the popular imagination I think. The fact that they’re design concepts produced by familiar and powerful brands, and that they can also be cool, objects of desire, even if you don’t drive, also helps…
Where do you see the future of mobility heading?
I’d love to be able to imagine a future where cars are fundamentally focused on being as harmless as possible. A car designed to prize harmlessness over performance would be a super interesting concept to see from a big manufacturer.
Realistically, one can only hope that the fragmentation and disruption underway in the mobility space will continue. Even now the object that I use to take my family to Cornwall is the same one I use in London to go to the big supermarket or whatever.
Car sharing is great, but somehow streets are still lined with cars going unused most of the time. Maybe having a share in a whole host of specialized vehicles — a cool car, a pedal van, something that flies, a family car, whatever — will be the thing that finally attracts people away from private ownership, to something less resource intensive, but also fun and affordable?
To learn more about the future of mobility, download frog’s latest report, The Road Ahead.
This interview was conducted and lightly edited by Camilla Brown, Senior Copyeditor, frog.
Thomas Thwaites is an award-winning British designer and writer. Known for speculative design projects such as The Toaster Project and GoatMan, he makes objects that explore the psychological and social impacts of technology. Taking his inspiration from sci-fi novels, neuroscientists and shamans, Thomas weaves his research and making process into a story, told through live performance-lectures, published books, moving image and in exhibitions.
Thomas’s work and practice have been featured in design and general press, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Architect’s Newspaper and WIRED. He has appeared on the Colbert Report, BBC Radio 4’s The Today Program, NPR and Freakonomics Radio. Thomas presented his own four-part television series about materials and making for Discovery Channel.
