Seems that car makers are having a lot of fun right now. For all the doom-mongering from disruptionistas around an imminent collapse of the mainstream manufacturers, there sure is a press-storm of news about their plans for our future. From stalking the edges of SXSW for the last few years to this year’s floor shows […]

A conversation yesterday around the Picking up the pace post flicked a lightbulb (LED?) on about the current debate around what ‘drives’ cars; and if, perhaps, our cars are potentially this Century’s ‘difference engine’? A word of warning, though. I’m not at all certain where this is going, or even if there’s a point to […]

A fair few articles last year were based around imaging future shapes for car dealerships, and the consequent changes these adjustments might bring to the experience the real estate might provide. All the posts (I think) were predicated on keeping the cars. But what might happen to the places we’re building should the current usage […]

First-off, happy New Year of the Rooster to our readers. Secondly, how about we kick-off the first post for 2017 with an idea spotted on designboom of the Masters Thesis of Eric Wong – entitled ‘Cohesion’ – calling for a new idea of what it means to be united (as opposed to what could be a […]

Prompted by an article forwarded to me today, in Autocar, where BMW were reported as speculating (as always) on the future shape (and even future of) the car dealership, I remembered the day before news about Shanghai studio Neri&Hu’s project, converting an old missile factory in Beijing into an office… …and car repair garage. The Garage […]

Spotted on FastCo’s design magazine, here’s the thing: how do you design packaging to protect its contents without spending more money on expensive protective materials? The answer is… you don’t. You make use of an ingenious camouflage: No matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through […]

A broadside from Phil Adams, regarding one agency’s contention that (c)ontent marketing is a young person’s game, according to JWT Singapore and so they’ve decided that the average age of the team will be 25. The notion that this type of activity needs people of a certain age was what enraged Phil, and rightly so, […]

This is a simple re-post from the Bank of England Bank Underground blog, but well worth a read, especially given the recent reports about the UK economic prognosis for the next year. Question is, is a predominantly finance-driven new car sales culture going to sustain the dealership business model? If not, what are the alternatives? […]

and apologies in advance if you’re lunching… Thomas Nagel wrote (in “Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life,”) a short thought experiment The Spider in the Urinal. Apparently he was inspired(?) by a episode in his life on visits to the bathroom at the institute where he was teaching and “noticed a sad little spider […]

Was browsing and this caught my eye – mission accomplished for a piece of online advertising – and how could I resist? It wasn’t the meh headline, but the subhead, an invitation to explore a Mercedes via Amazon? Clicking through landed me on what appears to be Amazon’s site heading up a one-pager for the […]