who a car works for

The key problem with cars today is that the whole experience is tailored to give the driver the best experience possible. This is ok in multi-million pound sports cars where normally it will only be one person in them but in every day cars like a hot hatch or people carriers, the experience should been enjoyable for everyone in the vehicle. This thought process took hold of me whilst listening to the Astheimer lecture. He brought to my attention the concept of making a car part of the home and having the car be something more than getting you from a to b, for a car to also be an environment to socialise in. Astheimer then went on to talk about how caravans generally are extremely boring and have almost no thought put into their design, as the people who are buying them are normally between 45 and 65 years old so the design is kept simple to interest the relevant market. This made me think about how the target audience has to be at the front of your mind when designing. If the target audience doesn’t like your design then that design is a failure; so to me a caravan is a white box with no character but to the target audience they don’t care what it looks like. They care about how easy it is to live in and the fact that soft browns are used for the interior-which are easy on the eye. The point I’m trying to get across is the Astheimer lecture had a huge impact on the way I think about designing and made me understand the importance of target audience; even if the design doesn’t work for me but it works for the target audience, the design is solid. After thinking about this further it occurred to me that yes the target audience is very important, but surely where that product is used should have some kind of impact on its design. In addition to this a caravan is mainly towed behind a car which will have had a large amount of exterior designing, surely the thing which that car is towing should have an equal amount of effort driven into its design. If more attention was put into the design of a caravan maybe the target audience would also attract people who before were put off of the exterior design. The design changes wouldn’t need to affect the experience, only how the caravan was seen. I think making some simple design changes would really help the look, such as maybe adding a waste line to them to break up the shape and giving the wheels a small wheel arch to increase its presence on the road, even potentially reducing the amount of white. It doesn’t even matter what colour really, just not that damn plain white. This exploration into the design of caravans has helped me to understand the importance of the target audience but also remember that the product must fit into the world in which it lives. Slight compromises should be made to give pleasure to everyone involved with it. Imagine a world with this new generation of caravans in it and driving past one and thinking dam that caravan looks good, I want one of those. Seems like a hard thought now but who knows what the future holds for these white boxes.