DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

I had a chance to head over to Siemens’ office in Solihull earlier today to meet with the Solid Edge guys and the team from Local Motors about their plans for the Solid Edge Design1 - a post will be forthcoming next week once I’ve had a chance to type it up. But on my way back, I took the chance to pop into the National Motorcycle Museum, just outside Birmingham International Airport.

Those that follow me on twitter might be aware that I have something of a perchant for motorcycle design in its many forms, but nothing gets me going (yup. going) than classic British motorcycles.

I’ve lived in Wolverhampton since I was four and the town itself is steeped in the development of the motorcycle industry. In fact, its even mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of the classic but incongruously entitled (first edition in the 40s, last updated in the 70s) workshop manual, Modern Motorcycle Mechanics.

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Made North, a design conference ran by Culture North and the Design Council, is taking place at Liverpool’s excellent Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (or FACT) on 22 February.

We’re great advocates of the design industry across the UK getting some recognition - the further away from the Capital the better - so it’s nice to see a new conference for designers in the north of England.

It’s set to celebrate today’s innovators and provides a creative platform for presenting and debating ideas, processes and technology to inspire the future talent emerging from the north as well as new and established businesses.

Speakers include Daniel Charney, curator of the Power of Making exhibition at the V&A London; Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, co-founder of Tinker London and Designswarm, and Gareth Williams, senior tutor for the School of Design at London’s Royal College of Art.

You can find more details here, or if you can’t make it DEVELOP3D will be covering the event on the blog and via Twitter.

This is the ECOMove QBEAK, a Danish company that has been looking into producing a car that was cheaper to run than a standard car – not only by being electric powered, but through sustainable materials and methods.

Despite being ‘visually challenging’ its heart is very much in the right place, creating a versatile, sustainable platform for small electric vehicles, and lets face it, the Model T Ford was hardly a Lamborghini Miura was it?

More importantly, tart it up a bit and it can look like this – the ECOMove Essence concept car, designed in partnership with Coventry University MA graduate Simon Sneftrup.

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Volkswagen leads the way with blue thinking

As a bonafide Red it pains me to have noticed that the future of electric cars and the automotive industry is decidedly Evertonian.

Our recent swagger around the halls of the North American International Automotive Show confirmed this, with Volkswagen leading the way with the continuation of its Blue Motion eco theme through its electric offerings. The latest Toyota Prius was bathed in sapphire; the Honda stand - traditionally blood red - was the colour of the sky, and BMW’s electric concept i8 was a mixture of Germanic silver and slices of electric blue.

It’s not often we cover something as base as colours on DEVELOP3D, but we’d like to know when green stopped being the colour of Green, and blue took up the mantle of all that is futuristically favourable to the environment?