The barriers against moving too fast
A few months ago I visited Coventry Transport Museum with my brother and father (Dad’s a petrolhead). It’s been redesigned in recent years to honour the long history of transport innovation and industry in the Midlands area.
The museum experience starts with the evolution of the humble bicycle, progresses into early cars, and then follows on to mass-market cars, so many of them designed and built around Coventry and Birmingham. It’s a good example of museums as time-travel. The history of the design of the car is very clearly illustrated via the simple act of walking: you don’t need to read anything to understand how things progressed.
In the early cars, you can see how the features of horse drawn carriages made their way into the designs, seating being the most obvious feature. It took literally decades for these features to be bred out of the designs. As I watched the designs progress, I wondered about the production constraints; the way metal-work was done, or the way craftsmen were trained meant that only certain ‘kinds of thing’ were produced. Adjacent innovations make incremental improvements, like the inflatable tire. To make anything outside of the contemporary constraints was likely very difficult. Switching production methods around is a herculean task (which remains true today; atoms are harder than bits).
But what really struck me seeing the later cars of the 60s and 70s, (now seemingly old-fashioned to me) was just how outlandish they might have seemed to someone of the Victorian era.
So even as a designer, if you could have of imagined a much better, more practical exterior for a car (and built it), it’s likely the public wouldn’t have accepted it. A design would have felt like a silly anachronism, much like those seemingly ridiculous ‘futuristic’ concept designs that car companies still produce today.
What I’m getting at is that designs are sometimes constrained from moving too far into the future. Most of the technological progress we do accept is often sold to us by analogy or existing, familiar concept.
An ‘iPhone’ is not a phone (it has software on it that acts like one).
‘Facebook’ is nothing like an actual facebook (although it did have your school friends on it).
Hindsight is a beautiful thing: it’s all too easy to see this in retrospect. Timing can mean everything, no matter how brilliant the idea is. My father, for example, came up with the concept of Formula E years before anyone was ready for it.
Here’s to those ahead of their time, lost in the mists of it.
