What if Audi made public transport? This Movin’On Challenge Design concept blurs the lines between luxury and utility

Posted on 23/01/2023 by Sarang Sheth

Have you ever looked around while stuck in a traffic jam, only to see yourself surrounded by large cars with just one, maybe two people inside them? Personal ownership of transport is great for society, but not so much for the actual environment our society exists in. However, it’s difficult to shake the notion that bigger, more expensive cars make you look like you belong to a certain stratum of society. For Marko Petrovic, designer and founder of MarkDesignStudio, the answer was simple – to make luxury environment-friendly, just blur the line between luxury and utility. People will love to use public transport if it looked great and was branded with the insignia of Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, or any other brand. If the only barrier to the mass adoption of public transport was just that private cars looked better and felt more premium, the solution was obvious. Make public utilities look and feel amazing!

The Concept NTU (NewTransportationUtility) is an entry to this year’s Movin’On Challenge Design (previously the Michelin Challenge Design), building on its theme “Balancing Sustainability”. The concept focuses on the three recognized pillars of Sustainability: PEOPLE, PROFIT, and PLANET. While transportation exists on three mediums – land, air, and water, Petrovic’s concept focuses predominantly on land, but can easily be carried forward to other areas of transport. The people and planet stand to benefit simply through the combination of creating an efficient public utility service that the public would love to use. The Concept NTU seats six in a transparent pod that’s transported around on an electric platform powered by solar energy. This pod concept efficiently utilizes space by ensuring that it never travels empty, and uses fixed routes, almost like a tram or railway system, creating a powerful centralized utility service that runs on clean energy. How does Profit factor in? Well, these transportation pods are directly created by brands, which focus not on personal ownership but on public service. Brands can further expand their offerings by providing personalization packages for the car’s experience and the UI.

Designer: Marko Petrovic

Click Here to visit the Movin’On Challenge Design website to know more about the 2023 challenge.
Click Here to see all the winners from the 2022 challenge.

The Concept NTU can be split into its three separate parts – the frame, polycarbonate cabin, and engine arms. The frame itself is a lightweight yet robust structure that houses the entire car within it. “the main inspiration and idea is recycling plastic waste and combining it with reinforced nanotech and carbon fiber creating a strong and lightwave chassis for future models”, says Petrovic.

The Concept can take on the avatar of popular cars using graphics, bridging the connect between brand and the vehicle.

The polycarbonate cabin is its own unique entity, existing as a separate unit that waits at locations across the city and docks into any empty NTU frame that comes along. It also boasts of transparent displays laser-integrated into the polycarbonate that come alive to form “one giant computer inside glass/polycarbonate”. This, in turn, serves the dual purpose of being not just the user interface for in-car passengers but also projecting holograms of the car brands visible to the people outside.

The engine arm is where all of Concept NTU’s futuristic magic lies, relying on Tesla’s wireless energy transmission systems instead of traditional fuel tanks or lithium-ion batteries. “Inside the arms/pillars is also located a powerful computer with an electric engine and caterpillar system instead of the classic circular tire”, Petrovic elaborates. The engine arms wirelessly pull energy from nearby electric power stations, but it goes even further by sharing non-used energy with other power stations and NTU vehicles in the vicinity to create an efficient distributed wireless energy network.

Currently in its 23rd edition, the Movin’On Challenge Design (which is free to participate in) is now open for entries up until the contest deadline of February 28, 2023. Entries will be judged by a prestigious international jury panel comprising heads of advanced design for major mobility organizations. The winners of the 23rd Movin’On Challenge Design will be revealed at the Movin’On Summit in June 2023. This year, three entries will stand to win the Gold, Silver, and Bronze positions and as an addition to its existing format, the top 3 winners will receive an opportunity to meet with the Movin’On Challenge Design team and juror representatives to review their entries, portfolio, and career plans. To read more about this year’s edition of the Movin’On Challenge Design, click here.

The Michelin Challenge Design was established in 2001, and was rebranded to the Movin’On Challenge Design in 2020, reflecting its integration as a featured program of the Movin’On Summit, the world’s foremost gathering for sustainable mobility. Inspired by Michelin, the Summit brings together large companies, startups, public and academic authorities, NGOs, and international organizations, as well as a community of experts and professionals to move from ambition to action. “We are encouraged by the continued growth of global participation in the Challenge Design program, and are especially excited this year to see the entries place an emphasis on the sustainable aspects of their mobility solutions,” said Kimbrelly Kegler, chairperson of Movin’On Challenge Design.

Click Here to visit the Movin’On Challenge Design website to know more about the 2023 challenge.
Click Here to see all the winners from the 2022 challenge.

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The winners of the Movin’On Challenge Design 2022 are creating an inclusive, physically connected world

Posted on 19/06/2022 by Sarang Sheth

For the year 2022, the Movin’On Challenge Design extended beyond mere transportation. The brief was made open to artists, designers, engineers, architects, city planners, creatives, or anyone with a strong vision to build a more equitable, sustainable future by considering mankind’s need for and relation to mobility. With the challenge coming to a close on the 1st of March followed by an intense jury phase, the Movin’on Challenge Design unveiled its 3 winners for the year 2022.

Click here to see all the Winning Designs of the 2022 Movin’On Challenge Design

First Prize – AGORA by Damián Mora, Pau Verdú, Fabiana Pando, Víctor Fernández, María Mora

Aligned with UN Sustainability Goals, AGORA is a moving cultural center that helps energize and activate communities with cultural activities. ” In a future where more and more people work from home, the access to activities related to culture, leisure and entertainment need to be diversified,” say the designers behind AGORA. “Although the trend towards digitization promotes access to culture from homes, digital media should not replace next the unique experience in face-to-face spaces of culture and entertainment.” Embellished with LED panels on the outside to inform and attract, and a dynamic surface on the inside that seems a lot like a museum or experience center on wheels, AGORA helps bring connectivity, diversity, and inclusivity to areas where they’re needed the most.

Second Prize – GAC FORMA, Sharon Ramalingam Radhakrishnan

“Being one of the highly populated places in the world, Sao Paulo, Brazil, faces the congestion problem”, explains designer Sharon Ramalingam Radhakrishnan. “This developing metropolis doesn’t have the adequate public transport because of spatial social inequality.” To combat this, GAC FORMA is a unique-looking subscription-based automobile that allows everyone to own a car without necessarily spending large sums of money on them. The car bridges financial and social inequality while also solving the city’s congestion problem. Moreover, designed as a cultural hat-tip to Brazil’s history, the car’s design is inspired by a hammock, which was used by Brazilians as early as the 16th century to elevate and protect them from animals in the forest.

Third Prize – R.R:ALPHA, Sheik Imthiyas Ahamed

As of 2020, an estimated 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas, with nearly hundreds of millions migrating to the city because of a staggering lack of essential goods and services for necessities, education, and treatment. RR Alpha is a vision to bridge between rural and urban to fulfil the rural requirements. Designed as a large vehicle with a built-in gyroscope and a zorb-inspired driver cabin, the RR Alpha provides the perfect level of stability required to commute between urban and rural setups while comfortably dealing with uneven roads, mud, terrain, and mountainous precipices. “This solution can deliver a large number of goods of different terrain simultaneously”, says designer Sheik Imthiyas Ahamed. “Many Indian rural face flood situations in periodic time RR. Alpha being amphibious, will help to deliver supplies in flood condition as well.”

Judge’s Award – SpaceX Bernard by Akkash Kohli, Niko Pekkarinnen, Hyeon Jeong

Designed for fire fighting and rescue missions, the SpaceX Bernard (named after the St. Bernard dog that does rescue missions too) is a multi-part vehicle that was purpose-built to save lives by ‘delivering’ safety services to people in a format that’s smaller and more compact than a fire truck. The vehicle comes with a ‘Fire Side’ that sports a coiled firehose for firefighting, a ‘Port Side’ for entry and exit, and a central cabin for as many as 4 refugees at any given point in time.

Judge’s Award – OWL by Chao-Lung Cheng

Designed to work entirely on solar power, the OWL drone helps with deliveries in rural parts of the world. Envisioned initially as a way to help distribute education and learning supplies, the OWL actually provides a great autonomous, energy-efficient delivery system that can work across industries, bridging the logistical gap between rural and urban parts of a region. The OWL comes with a carbon fiber construction and three propellers, and sports a large solar panel on its top that helps prolong its flight times during the day by keeping it recharged via solar energy. While it’s unclear if the OWL works entirely off solar power, it can use a strategy similar to the Lucid EV, using solar energy to dramatically increase its range.

Click here to see all the Winning Designs of the 2022 Movin’On Challenge Design

The post The winners of the Movin’On Challenge Design 2022 are creating an inclusive, physically connected world first appeared on Yanko Design.

Formerly known as the Michelin Challenge, the “Movin’On Challenge Design” is now accepting entries for 2022!

Posted on 16/01/2022 by Sarang Sheth

With its new brand name and its newly unveiled theme for the 2022 leg of the competition, the Movin’On Challenge Design is all set to revolutionize the world of transport and make it sustainable, equitable, and beneficial to everyone.

Formerly known as the Michelin Challenge Design, the international competition has a rich 21-year history when it comes to fostering and encouraging innovation from the brightest minds in the design industry. Over the last two decades, the challenge issued a broad brief to designers, asking them to create concept electric vehicles, conceptual Le Mans race cars, and even its 2021 brief — “Respect”, a call to end the mobility divide between people from different communities, walks of life, and with different abilities. Michelin Challenge Design became Movin’On Challenge Design in 2020, reflecting its integration as a featured program of the Movin’On Summit, the world’s foremost gathering for sustainable mobility. Created and inspired by Michelin, the Summit brings together large companies, startups, public and academic authorities, NGOs, and international organizations, as well as a community of experts and professionals to move from ambition to action.

The Movin’On Challenge Design now enters its 2022 edition with its competition theme: DELIVERED. The brief of the theme is to invite designers to focus on logistical equality and equitability, or being able to get goods and services to the people who need them. Nearly 30 percent of the world’s population lives outside urban centers and an equal number reside in economically depressed urban areas with sub-standard infrastructure. The 2022 Movin’On Challenge invites participants to design a mobility solution to provide essential services to all people in a safe, efficient, and sustainable way. The challenge isn’t even a transportation-focused one anymore. It’s open to artists, designers, engineers, architects, city planners, creatives, or anyone with a strong vision to build a more equitable, sustainable future by considering mankind’s need for and relation to mobility. Participants are encouraged to:

Identify the people or communities that your solution would serve, by including related research, and how it will improve their quality of life.
Explain how your idea is built on the foundation of inclusive design to enhance the human experience, and not simply to make services more convenient for those who already have access.
Illustrate how your innovative solution will deliver services to people.

The 2022 Movin’On Challenge Design is now accepting entries up until its submission deadline of March 1st, 2022. The Challenge’s top three winners will be announced at a Movin’On global event in June and concurrently through Movin’On social media channels. Through its first 21 challenges, the competition has received more than 14,700 entries from 136 countries. Scroll down to see a few of our favorites from the 2021 challenge, with its theme: RESPECT.

Click Here to participate in the Movin’On Challenge Design 2022. Deadline for entries: March 1st, 2022.

Crosswing by Drew Spahn

The Crosswing’s clever design turns a prosthetic leg into a skateboard that the prosthetic-wearer can use to skateboard – either for recreation or transportation. The prosthetic leg features a fold-out skateboard that when closed, provides the same walking experience as a prosthetic leg but when opened out, offers a riding experience that compares to a skateboard or pair of skates! The multipurpose artificial limb “turns a disadvantage into an advantage”, mentions Spahn, a fourth-year industrial design student at Kean University.

T.Flex by Siavash Jafari Jozani

T.Flex is an Adaptive Extreme Sports Wheelchair that aims to redefine the pleasure of having an active lifestyle with an enjoyable machine for individuals with limited lower-body mobility. Traditional wheelchairs are designed to be steady and balanced, a feature that becomes a problem for people who want their mobility solutions to be flexible, freeing, and frankly, thrilling. The T.Flex incorporates an innovative steering and a flexible structure to realize this freedom. Moreover, the riding position is highly customizable to meet the needs of individuals with diverse body characteristics, including paraplegics, above-knee amputees, below-knee amputees, and a host of other disabilities. While incredibly unconventional as a design solution, the T.Flex does justice to the 2021 challenge’s theme, giving respect to its user and allowing even the disabled to enjoy the thrills of racing and extreme sports!

Orbit by Seongha Lee, Byunghyun Bae, Byungyoon Jung and Minsun Lee

A modern solution for a modern problem, the Orbit is a mass-transit system designed to provide public transport for people with agoraphobia. The pandemic has drawn major attention to the need to socially distance, although people with agoraphobia find it difficult to be around other people, to begin with. Orbit aims to hit two birds with one stone, providing a public transport system that’s accommodating for all, while still creating a private, personalized travel experience. The larger vehicle acts as a ‘movable nest’ for smaller pods that can independently dislodge from the main body of the Orbit and complete last-mile pickups and drop-offs for people. The main vehicle covers fixed frequent routes while the individual pods provide access in remote areas, picking them up from their locations and taking them to the main vehicle, which transports everyone in their own enclosed bubble!

Tramo by Stefan Perriard

Tramo imagines transportation in a world without cars. Designed for the futuristic car-free city, Tramo offers an equitable mode of transport that’s safe, human-centric, and truly for everyone. The design adopts the shape of a pod-like platform that traverses across the city’s roadways. Its unique design makes space for people who want to stand or sit, as well as for wheelchairs and baby strollers. Designer Stefan Perriard describes Tramo as “a flexible solution with no need for stations — like a moving sidewalk” that you can hop onto or hop off from.

Concept Holosafe by Kiran Babu

The Indian Railways is among one of the world’s largest rail networks, although 41% of its accidents and 63% of its fatalities happen OUTSIDE the train, on railway crossings. Kiran Babu’s Concept Holosafe aims at making the railway crossing not only safer but much more informative too. There’s a sense of complacency when you see the barricade descend at a railway crossing, and most people simply assume that they’ve got a reasonable window of time to cross before the train ACTUALLY arrives because the barricade doesn’t tell you how long you have to wait. This attitude is so prevalent at unmanned crossings in India that the government has decided to completely close off all unmanned crossings in the interest of public safety. Kiran Babu’s solution is a novel one that promotes safety by eliminating complacency and replacing it with actionable information. While it isn’t entirely possible to prevent people from crossing over at unmanned railway crossings, Babu’s solution implements a holographic counter that acts as a ‘traffic light’ of sorts. The holographic barricade creates a virtual ‘red zone’ with a countdown clock to let people know how long they’ll be waiting at the crossing, and when the train passes by, it turns into a green zone with a countdown clock too, giving people a realistic idea of the time they’ve got before the zone turns red again. Sounds a lot like a certain Squid Game event, but hey… this one’s actually designed to SAVE lives!

Click Here to participate in the Movin’On Challenge Design 2022. Deadline for entries: March 1st, 2022.

The post Formerly known as the Michelin Challenge, the “Movin’On Challenge Design” is now accepting entries for 2022! first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Michelin Challenge Design returns for its 22nd edition as the “Movin’On Challenge Design”

Posted on 17/10/2021 by Sarang Sheth

The rebranded design challenge focuses on Movin’On to the next frontier of transportation design — Sustainable Mobility.

Ever since its first-ever design competition in 2001, Michelin Challenge Design has focused on welcoming a new generation of designers, thinkers, and transport enthusiasts into the automotive industry. Over the last two decades, the challenge issued a broad brief to designers, asking them to create concept electric vehicles, conceptual Le Mans race cars, and even its most recent brief — “Respect”, a call to end the mobility divide between people from different communities, walks of life, and with different abilities.

Michelin Challenge Design became Movin’On Challenge Design in 2020, reflecting its integration as a featured program of the Movin’On Summit, the world’s foremost gathering for sustainable mobility. Created and inspired by Michelin, the Summit brings together large companies, startups, public and academic authorities, NGOs, and international organizations, as well as a community of experts and professionals to move from ambition to action. “We are excited that Challenge Design has become an official pillar of the Movin’On ecosystem that engages the global design community through the development of sustainable mobility solutions,” said Mike Marchand, Michelin North America Director of Sustainable Development and Mobility.

In its fresh new avatar, the Movin’On Challenge Design retains certain aspects of its predecessor, but provides a unified vision towards a better future, through a more inclusive and sustainable approach to mobility. The challenge isn’t even a transportation-focused one anymore. It’s open to artists, designers, engineers, architects, city planners, creatives, or anyone with a strong vision to build a more equitable, sustainable future by considering mankind’s need for and relation to mobility.

The theme for 2020—2021’s edition of the challenge was RESPECT: Ending Isolation and Conquering the Mobility Divide, and saw 170 entries that sought to create inclusive mobility for those who are often overlooked when mobility solutions are being designed. “Age and disability can limit access to safe and affordable mobility for one of every four people in the world today, reducing joy and the ability to fully participate in, benefit from, and contribute to society—both socially and economically,” said Nick Mailhiot, chairman of the 2021 Movin’On Challenge Design competition. The top three winners brought a unique set of perspectives to the challenge, from individual mobility to mobility as a society. Scroll below for a detailed look at each of the 2021 Challenge’s winning designs that were announced in June this year.

Click Here to visit the Movin’On Challenge Design website to know more about the upcoming 2022 challenge.

Click Here to see all the winners from the 2021 challenge.

Winners of the 2021 Movin’On Challenge Design

1st Place: Crosswing by Drew Spahn (Industrial Designer, Kean University)

2nd Place: Tramo by Stefan Perriard (Industrial and Mobility Designer, Royal Danish Academy)

3rd Place: Nomada! by Elkin Alejandro Cruz Castro (Architect, Universidad Nacional de Colombia)

The Nomada! revisits the design of the city entirely. Instead of conventional buildings, Nomada! introduces nomadic spaces that can move around the city, benefiting everyone and making public utilities accessible to all the citizens. The Nomada! is a massive purpose-built vehicle that’s best described as architecture on wheels. Designed with two semi-spherical carriages that rotate and pivot, and a corridor in between, the Nomada! acts as a building in motion, providing space on the inside for various public utilities like libraries, coworking spaces, medical care centers, commercial units, etc. The idea is to have the Nomada! transport to an area where it’s needed and stay stationed there for a set amount of time (almost like a fair or circus that’s coming to visit, and departs after it’s done). By doing this, Nomada! aims at creating fragments of the ‘megacity’ and making aspects of those fragments nomadic, so every neighborhood gets access to them whenever needed.