Bachelor in Transportation Design – Car Design – a.y. 2008/09

The Aston Martin of 2025

The students of the Istituto Europeo di Design of Turin dream the Aston Martin of the future

A brand, Aston Martin, that is synonymous of elegance and sporting style. A team of young car designers. A brief looking head towards the near future. These are the ingredients of the project which has seen the involvement of the III year students of the Ied Turin Three year post-diploma Transportation Design – car design course (a.y. 2008-2009). As end of course thesis the class students have tested their acquired competence on the values of the Aston Martin brand, which has always stood out for its excellence and elegance; the students have been working on a car tailored for the 2025 car market, a car capable of providing an interpretation of the needs of the near future while remaining consistent with the brand and its mix of passion and elegance. The students were not constrained to any form of limitation with regards to the car’s packaging or architecture. One condition however had to be met: the technology involved in the car’s design had to be feasibly developed within the next 5 years.

The project saw a first stage of conceptual research during which the students, taking the brand’s values as their starting point, worked on various facets of the concept of exclusivity, a corner stone element that has always featured in Aston Martin cars. The research continued with an analysis of the 2025 scenario from which the class obtained further useful elements for the subsequent development of the project. The conceptual research carried out by the various teams were summed up in a video which provided an indication of the extreme visual power of the key concepts that were at the basis of the project: exclusivity, elegance, sporting style matched with the idea of sharing and emotion.

During the second stage the young designers had to exploit the design elements and the formal language they had developed during the earlier step, in order to come up with both the interiors and the exterior design of an actual car, ideally suited to fulfil the requirements of a hypothetical 2025 market, and capable of generating emotion and  being identified as possessing the character of the Aston Martin brand.

The 43 students were divided up into 17 teams coordinated by Fulvio Fantolino, Transportation Design – Car Design Course Coordinator and head of the F&F Design Studio. On the 6th of May last the class visited the Aston Martin site in Gaydon (Great Britain) where the team headed by Marek Reichman provided the students with useful indications for the final development of the project. The proposals put forward by each team were subsequently narrowed down and the 13 chosen projects were developed either as an alias or in clay. A further selection led to the short listing of 8  project that were then produced in 1:4 scale models thanks to the collaboration with Cecomp, while the remaining 5 were developed as virtual models. The project ended with the presentation of the various project by the teams and the assigning of thesis votes: great importance at this stage was given to the feedback provided by Aston Martin’s Julian Wiltshire, Design Manager of the British car manufacturer.