CONSUMERS : Designing Wizards : From the Doable to the Fantastic, Students Look to the Future

Dennis Schroeder, 26, looks at the future and sees a computerized cookbook that calls up whatever recipe one wants and displays it on a screen, alongside an ingredient-weighing scale.

“It would be like having ‘The Joy of Cooking’ right at your fingertips,” he says.

Peter Arnold, 28, looks at the future and sees a lightweight scooter that can be folded up and tucked into a backpack.

“Some college students have to park so far away from campus that they really have a dual commute,” he says. “I see this scooter as an alternative to a bicycle.”

Darren Saravis, 27, looks ahead and envisions a laptop computer for composing music, one that would use existing software but be packaged into a new sculptural form as compelling as Cubist art. In much the same way that architecture inspires people, Saravis thinks “the products around us can inspire us and make us feel better.”

These are not mere philosophical musings. These industrial design students are pondering the future because they will be shaping it and, in fact, have already started. Their work is on display this month at the Pacific Design Center.

“These are the people who will be shaping our world in the next decade--making an impact on our daily lives in a thousand ways,” said Ron Pierce of the Industrial Design Society of America, Los Angeles chapter, which assembled the show. “They are really visualizing what life will be like 20 years from now. They will be deciding what your cars, your appliances, your houses look like.”

The 25-project student exhibit is part of a show titled “On the Edge: Industrial Design in Southern California,” which spotlights state-of-the-art work being done here. It was assembled this month for WestWeek, a design conference that brought more than 30,000 national and international visitors to the Pacific Design Center’s 210 showrooms.

“We wanted to demonstrate what designers are doing right now and what design students are thinking about the future,” Pierce said. The works were chosen from three area design schools: the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge.

The student exhibit represents a testing ground for future concepts.

“These products are models only and will not be manufactured,” Pierce said, “although major manufacturers like Sony often sponsor the college research projects to get ideas for their own future work.

“We tried to select a good cross-section of what’s being done. A number of the products are doable right now, some are on the cutting edge of doable, and some are pushing the technology to its fantasy limits.”

The show seems eclectic, its prototypes touching on work-to-play aspects of daily life, from a graceful array of woodworking tools through a sculpted faucet and sink to such lighthearted toys as Andy Huang’s Vid Pet (a video camera housed in a remote control mobile toy).

Yet the exhibit presents an overall theme in its use of form and color, a theme Pierce describes as a growing sensitivity to the user’s emotional needs.

“Along with our rapid advancement in technology, with the development of computer chips and microprocessors, there is a kind of counter-reaction in trying to humanize these products,” he said. (It’s a phenomenon “Megatrends” author John Naisbitt has described as “high tech/high touch.”)

In place of the hard-edged black boxes associated with electronics, student designers are bringing “some spirit, some warmth and playfulness into these products,” Pierce said. “This can be as appropriate for a kitchen appliance as a child’s toy.”

Pierce also notes that designers today are trying to make products more expressive of what their actual function is. This has been made possible partly by technology that has shrunk computers from bulky clusters of motors, tubes and gears to compressed electronic boards, he added.

“The exciting part of student work is that they are constantly testing our preconceptions,” he said. “They have the freedom to push the boundaries.”

“On the Edge” suggests to the viewer that the consumer future holds not only new computer forms and user-friendly work tools for the household, but also an emphasis on new looks in transportation.

The Art Center’s Brian Coleman’s team designed a bright pink Surround Cycle, which crosses a child’s Big Wheel tricycle with the old-fashioned appeal of rolling down the hill in a tire’s inner tube. He is an engineer and environmentalist who expects to tackle serious transportation projects. He is working on a “clutchless transmission with a direct linkage between each gear.”

“I think people are getting too excited about new technology when the old ideas haven’t been fully explored,” he said. “The automotive industry talks about new technologies, but basically you still have this gasoline power plant that is polluting the atmosphere and gobbling up fossil fuels.”

At the other end of the technology spectrum, “On the Edge” features a superconductive magnet levitation bike designed by Art Center students Hiroshi Tsuzaki and Makoto Makita.

The prototype, based on emerging transportation technologies being explored in Europe and Japan, is described as a “statement of the promise of the future,” with its sculpted look and its technology reduced to bare essentials, says the Art Center’s Martin Smith, who was the instructor on the project.

Tsuzaki describes the technology, which allows the wheels to turn without friction, as “not for bicycles yet,” but with great potential.

“I am interested in transportation design,” he said, “and I am not just thinking about cars. In the future we may not use the word car. It may be more like a robot. The technology can be used so many ways.”