Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Photo: Daimler

You may talk to your car, and some in cases it may even talk back. And you’ve probably thrown a few choice words at other drivers in a impromptu bout of rage. But cars are silently communicating with each other and with transportation infrastructure in two field trials that kicked off this month near Frankfurt, Germany, and in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler is spearheading what it’s calling the “first ‘social network’ for automobiles.” But instead of sharing lolcat pics and mundane musings, the 120 vehicles in the project will be communicating with one another as well as with infrastructure to avoid accidents and traffic jams, along with a range of other applications. Daimler claims it’s the largest ever field trial of vehicle-to-X communication (V2X) – a combination of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication – to show how the technology can be used to decrease accidents and increase driving efficiency. But in sheer number of vehicles it pales in comparison to a similar V2V field trial that the National Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) is conducting in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The European trial is part of the sim^TD (Safe Intelligent Mobility – test field Germany) research project spearheaded by Daimler Research and Advance Development and sponsored by the German government. Other participants include automakers Opel, Audi, BMW/Mini, Ford and Volkswagen, along with automotive suppliers Bosch and Continental, Deutsche Telekom and several research institutes. The trial consists of 120 vehicles that will be hitting the roads of the Frankfurt Rhine-Main region until the end of the year. According to Car and Driver, the fleet includes specially equipped Audi A4s, BMW X1s, Ford S-Maxes, Mercedes-Benz C-Classes, Opel Insignias and Volkswagen Passats.

Vehicles will be connected to each other and to infrastructure via a form of Wi-Fi that has a range of just over 300 yards, according to Mike Shulman who is directing Ford’s participation in both trials and is the automaker’s technical leader of Active Safety Research and Innovation. The vehicles in the European trial will constantly keep each other posted on road hazards and traffic, much the same way an annoying acquaintance keeps you updated on his status by posting to Facebook every few seconds.

One beneficial scenario provided by Daimler: If there’s a traffic jam on the autobahn and it’s concealed behind the crest of a hill, vehicles barreling down the road at 100 mph-plus would be alerted to avoid rear-ending the last car. The company also points to possible environmental and convenience benefits of V2X systems, such as coordinating traffic lights according to traffic density to make driving more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly, and even being able to seek out and suggest routes to the nearest available parking spots.

By comparison, the NHTSA Ann Arbor trial will last an entire year and include 3,000 vehicles driven by ordinary people, but equipped with Wi-Fi communications and other technology such as radar and cameras. The reason the U.S. trial requires a lot more vehicles and a lot more time is to gauge how a large pool of vehicles interact with each other over a longer period to gather enough data to determine the effectiveness of V2V communication to reduce accidents, says Ford’s Shulman.

One group will drive the cars for the first six months and then a second group will drive the vehicles for the last six months of the trial. “They’ll drive them to work, go shopping and wherever they want to go,” Shulman told Wired. “The drivers were carefully selected so that they work in the same area, drop their kids off at school in the same area and have the same shift time. The idea is that, over this year-long period, we could see how well these cars really perform. Are they getting the timely warnings? Are they getting a lot of false warnings? What’s really happening that we haven’t seen on a track but under real-world conditions?”

In addition to the number of cars and duration, the big difference between the two trials is that the U.S. version is solely focused on reducing accidents. “NHTSA has done a study that says that more than 80 percent of the crashes could be impacted by V2V technology,” Shulman says. He adds that the federal agency is conducting the trial to determine whether V2V technology can be deployed to effectively prevent injuries and fatalities – and whether to mandate it on new cars. “They’re going to look at whether to apply this to new vehicles and other modes of transportation like trucks, buses and motorcycle, and even pedestrians and in aftermarket devices,” he adds.

“The Europeans are not looking at regulation; they’re looking at this as a voluntary deployment, at least for now,” Shulman says. “They’re looking at it more as a mobility application, using vehicles as a probe to show travel history and congestion over routes and determine the best routes to take based on real-time congestion. It can warn of traffic and construction up ahead, but it’s not for that last second before a crash. It’s more for information to the driver or information from the vehicle back to the traffic management center.”

Shulman says that the European trials should be thought of as, “not the first step, but a long-term step, and there’s other benefits that driver could enjoy as we get this technology deployed. We’re trying to learn from both and bringing harmonization where we can, and move toward the concept on the connected vehicle. How we’re approaching it is it will go on different paths to different places.”

A few days before I grabbed a beef chilli lunch in London with Sunghan Kim at Samsung Design Europe’s office, the South Korean giant had posted some stellar financial results. As well as chalking up 81 percent growth in net income for the first quarter of 2012, it also overtook Nokia as the world’s top supplier of mobile phones. Its margins now rival those of Apple’s (between them they accounted for 99 percent of the mobile phone industry’s profits in the same period). Still Sunghan underplays Samsung’s triumphs, focusing instead on the challenges ahead.

He is approaching the end of a five-year term as chief of Samsung’s European satellite office and will return to the Seoul mothership in August. Sunghan has held the reins during a transformational period. It has become the biggest technology company by sales, as its traditional rivals, Sony and Nokia, have faded. The rules of the game have also changed: As well as competing with Apple in hardware, it now competes with a new set of competitors such as Google and Facebook in software and services. To help retool for new these challenges, Sunghan has recently completed an MBA specializing in service innovation. His strategy: capturing the value in what he calls the “platform economy.”

These current projects are more akin to building new businesses.

Sunghan makes a broad distinction between OS platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Windows, and service platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and iTunes. Not so long ago, Samsung controlled the whole product experience around their phones and TVs. The headache now is that, while it has its own fledgling mobile OS platform called Bada, most of its products and services now slot into ecosystems of interdependent partners owned by others. At one level, this all sounds rather familiar to the corporate-strategy MBA types who have been excited about business-model innovation since the dotcom boom. But what credible role can designers play in this next push?

Sunghan gives a glimpse of the complexity Samsung now faces in this new competitive landscape. Each ecosystem partner is jostling to maximize the value it can capture along the customer journey. Not only are many of their platform stakeholders also competitors, some that don’t pose threats today might become forces to be reckoned with tomorrow. Even platform owners have to walk a fine line: They have to open their product enough to attract partners and profit while ensuring that they retain control. This multisided market of buyers and sellers of hardware, software, service, distribution, and advertising then needs to be re-created for new areas for innovation. Samsung’s growing scope of operations–it recently announced a move into generic pharmaceuticals for example–means that the combinations of potential stakeholders are immense, and developing new offerings often entails building brand new ecosystems. Sunghan likens the projects he now works on to building new businesses rather than developing the products he was designing not so long ago.

As well as buffing up on ecosystem economics, there are also new craft skills to master.

The big design leadership challenge is the familiar one of managing design’s input and role in large cross-functional teams. “Design is more of a community-based activity now,” he reflects. For designers to succeed, they need to be able to collaborate with team members from different disciplines. We mull over to what extent product and service designers need to become with familiar with business modeling, or merely work effectively alongside business analysts. For Sunghan, it’s both. Just as in the Noughties, many product, UX, and service designers taught themselves how to code, in his view, designers in the coming decade will need to have a working knowledge of business modeling, especially at the concept stage, and learn multidisciplinary collaboration for the development phase.

As well as buffing up on ecosystem economics, there are also new craft skills to master. Designers have long played a pivotal role in mocking up or prototyping new ideas. This talent for making intangible ideas and discussions more concrete for multidisciplinary teams is even more valuable when talking about complex platform systems. However, Sunghan notes, the design communication tools he uses for current projects do not look like the prototypes of yesterday. He prefers to call early manifestations of concepts “boundary objects”–a term he borrows from sociology to mean a common body of information that separate disciplines understand but use in different ways.

In his modest but ambitious way, Han has set himself and Samsung’s designers a challenge that will define the company’s future success.

Namsa Leuba is a young photographer who grew up in Switzerland with a European father and a Guinean mother. As a student, she studied the rituals and cosmology of her mother’s native country, and received a grant to visit Guinea-Conakry in her final year at the University of Art and Design Lausanne. In early 2011, Leuba spent three months living and working in a village that had been founded by her great-grandfather. Ya Kala Ben is the award-winning thesis Leuba shot during those months.

Leuba says that her fieldwork was a chance for her to discover her origins, and she knew she wanted to explore the traditional spirituality of Guinean tribes. In Guinea, Islam is the majority religion followed by Christianity. But like many cultures where mass conversion has taken place, devotion to an earlier religion is still common, and 7% of the population practices the traditional Guinean animist faith.

In Guinean cosmology, says Leuba, ritual statuettes are used symbolically to represent “modesty, luck, fecundity or a channel for exorcism.” The statuettes are typically used in ceremonies to represent the yearnings of the worshippers–they are “not the gods of this community,” she writes, “but their prayers.”

Working with members of her mother’s community, Leuba staged portraits where humans play the parts of the traditional statuettes. She asked her subjects to dress in complicated garments representing the ritual tools. According to Leuba, this was interpreted as a fairly sacrilegious act: “I had to deal with sometimes violent reactions… While some were afraid and were struck with astonishment.”

There’s (obviously) a complicated colonial subtext to Ya Kala Ben. European depictions of African identity have ranged from the British exploitation of Sara Baartman to artist Phyllis Galembo’s recent tribal portraiture. As a Westerner photographing tribal community members dressed in garb based on ritual tools, Leuba plays a game of cultural telephone. “When we look at my pictures,” Leuba recently told Andrea Diaz, “it makes us think of statuettes and we look at the statuettes, we think of a human figure.” In this way, Leuba’s photos are a visual ethnography. By reimagining the ritual artifacts and capturing them in images, she’s documenting her own biases.

“I brought them in a framework meant for Western aesthetic choices and tastes,” says Leuba. “The photographic eye makes them speak differently.”

We couldn’t know that Ferdinand Porsche, the 911′s designer, would pass away even as we were getting entries in our call for designs inspired by 911. But perhaps it was a fitting tribute that we got over 400 entries, picking out details of the 911 that you’d have to be a true fan to notice. His designs inspired a fervor that few designers ever have. As the AP reported when the latest 911 was introduced: “The new version was mobbed and groped when it was unveiled in September at the Frankfurt auto show. Showgoers left the doors and roof smeared with fingerprints as they scrambled for a chance to sit behind the wheel.” All that, while remaining true to the lines and spirit that Porsche originally laid out. Ferdinand Porsche created a true design classic.

R.I.P. Ferdinand Porsche, 1935-2012. At work in 1968.

So I’ll admit that I was a bit terrified by the entire prospect of our Porsche Next Design Challenge. Initially, the plan was to have an invitational design competition: We’d invite only a few top designers whose work we trusted, and have them riff on products inspired by the 911. But that didn’t seem right. We figured: Who’d want to see a bunch of design hot shots get even more attention? It seemed a far better idea to engage you, our readers, and invite you to do the designing.

The only problem was that we had no idea what we’d get. Would the entries be embarrassing? Would there be anything good? It was a bit of a gamble. And one that I’m happy to say paid off, because the entries you guys submitted were superb. These ranged from a razor that looks like a Porsche’s gas pedal to a ski helmet inspired by the orange 911 pictured in our first post about the contest.

So here they are: The first 12 of the Top 25. We’ll announce the rest next week, and as I type this, our panel of judges–Dror Benshetrit, Jens Martin Skibsted, and Grant Larson, Porsche’s current chief exterior designer–is combing over those entries, to determine a Top 7, which we will announce soon. (The slides you see above are presented in no particular order.) After that, entrants will get a chance to refine their designs and then we’ll announce a winner. (The Top 7 will each receive $1,500. The winner will get a one-year lease on a 911 or $20,000.) Thank you to everyone who entered, and thank you for reading! Enjoy the work above.

Image of F.A. Porsche: Porsche via European Pressphoto Agency