Audi City Lab comes back to Milan, after its experience in December last year. To talk about cars and everything that is going on in the automotive world. To talk with Milan through the Design Week and Expo Milano 2015. Audi’s laboratory of ideas and designs will remain open until 10 May, thus joining the World Exhibition.
Audi Mind Movers is a series of meetings on cars, mobility, future technologies, but also sustainability, smart cities, light and music. The first conference dealt with “Engine Design and Humanism. A Near Frontier”, with the participation of Walter de Silva, Head of Volkswagen Group design, and Philippe Daverio, art critic.
Design is not a science, rather a discipline, while engine design is not a discipline but a science. Science is based on observation, experiments, calculations; a discipline, according to its Medieval meaning, is art. The issue is: how does technology applied to cars become design?
In order to become design, technology must add aesthetic appeal to a form. A designer can make good design, select excellent materials, but you must “feel” a car when you design it. It is a matter of feeling. The same applies to the customer for whom the car was designed. When he sees it, he touches it and decides to choose it.
In Audi, technology cannot do without design. Today industrial design means Italy, it is something that has to do with the bright mind and the inclination to beauty of Italy. Beauty as harmony and grace. These talents are intrinsic to Italian design, which in Audi is combined with universally known German technology. These two cultures meet, exchange, enrich each other. And among their many commonalities, there is a desire to always go beyond the impossible.
Design is not stylism, a temporary trend dictated by some fashion. Design is utopia. A design object is always new and never ages, even when it is 50, 60, 70 years old. There are many examples of this. Audi represents this utopia with its cars, because it has decided to combine high technology (in terms of safety, performance, aerodynamics and mechanics) with the poetry of design.
Text by Danilo Signorello – photo by Efrem Raimondi
