Auto(r) 2012 Design Conference

The 2012 edition of the Auto(r) conference took place in Zagreb, Croatia, on 4-6 May 2012, featured various happenings and saw the participation of top designers like Peter Stevens, designer of the McLaren F1, and Carlo Gaino, creator of the Lancia ECV 2.

The panel discussion was centered around the question of how to define supercars today, when their performance is often matched by ordinary cars.

“Can EV be supercars” was questioned in lectures by Chris Longmore, designer of the Lightning GT and Adriano Mudri, designer of Rimac Concept_One.

Alessio Minchella from IED gave an inside glimpse on car designers perspective of world and sources of their inspiration.

Elena Ristancevska spoke on future trends in colour and trim. Volvo organized a design workshop for V40 exterior stickers that should underline the brand’s values.

The event also included the projects exhibition and results announcement for the 2012 Design Challenge, as well as the prize giving ceremony for the first edition of the “The Best Designed Car Award”.

Visitors could get their hands dirty in the clay modeling workshop organized by Custom Creations under the guidance of Dario Dropucic, who chose three projects among the entries of the contest and created 1:8 scale clay models.

Auto(r) 2012 Design Challenge

The challenge for the 2012 edition was to design a desirable urban electric micro vehicle (EµV).

Winners have been chosen by conference speakers and Prof. Gordon Murray among the 119 submitted projects.

The winners are Stoycho Dobrev (BG) in the Young Designers category and Mathew Rogers (UK) in the Professionals category.

Runners up among Young Designers were Cobus Marx (ZA) with the X Bike and Acatrinei Lucian Nicolae (RO) for the ePack.

Acatrinei Lucian Nicolae already won the 2nd place at the past edition of the contest.

Among professionals the second place was won by Serge Totsky (RU) with his Urban City Concept and Michal Kukucka (CZ) with the Urban Cruiser.

The Auto(r) 2012 Design Challenge was organized in cooperation with CarDesign.ru, CarDesignCommunity and GrabCad.

The jury, as usual, was made of Auto(r) conference speakers (Peter Stevens, Alessio Minchella, Dario Dropucic and Elena Ristancevska), and – for the first time – Prof Gordon Murray.

The Best Designed Car In 2011 Award

The Winners of the first edition of this new contest were chosen by the public and by an expert car design jury consisting of 39 members, including Patrick Le Quément, Lowie Vermeersch, Luigi Colani, Daniel Simon, Michele Leonello – as well as Car Body Design’s founder Marco Traverso.

The overall design was valued in two categories – concept and production cars.

In the Concept Cars category the jury chose the Peugeot HX1, the Renault Captur and the Audi Urban Concept, while the public voted voted for the Cadillac Ciel, the Citroën Tubik and the Jaguar B99 Bertone.

In the Production Cars category, the jury and the public selected the same cars as first and second winners – the new Porsche 911 and the Citroën DS5. For the third place the jury voted for the VW up!, while the audience selected the Opel Astra GTC.

(Source: Auto(r) Conference)